Mr. JOHNSON. I have but a word to say, sir. I am very sorry that I have touched the feelings of the honorable member from Wisconsin, who is a great deal more sensitive than I had supposed he was from his general exhibition. He has charged me with having assailed the humanity of the Government during the war. Why, sir, that is a charge which exists for its foundation exclusively in his own very fruitful fancy. I said no such thing. What I alleged to be in my judgment hard and inhu man was the keeping in prison a man for 2 years without trial. During the war, permit me to say to the honorable member, the government had no more zealous supporter, not as able as he was of course, than it found in my humble self. From the beginning to the close of iIt stood by the Government and aided it in every way that I could; I do not know that the honorable member did more; of course what he did he did more effectually because he is the member from Wisconsin, ana I am only a member from Maryland, a southern State. Now, the honorable member tells us, or rather intimates, that I may have forgotten the acts of one John Brown, which he supposed may not be fresh in the memory of the Senate. have not forgotten John Brown; never can forget him; nor can I forget I do not know that the honorable member was a member of that convention that at the convention which met at Chicago in 1860, and nominated for the Presidency Mr. Lincoln, the proceedings of John Brown and all such proceedings were in the strongest terms denounced. That convention declared in its resolutions: “That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own.exclusively, is essential to that balance of powerson which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depends; and we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.” Nor have I forgotten the fact that John Brown was executed. I wish it had occurred to me when I was reciting the instances to show the impolicy of harsh measures. I would have instanced that; and permit me to say to the honorable member do. Virginia never committed a greater, fault against true policy, to say nothing of the mercy with which a brave man should have been treated, than she committed when she executed him and one or 2 of his associates. If she had spared them perhaps the war would not have occurred. It was because she pursued the inexorable course of visiting upon them what she supposed to be the judgment which the law pronounced that she?.the hold which she had upon the hu manity of her sister States; and I might therefore have very well appealed to that instance for the purpose of. that mercy, pardon, as J.;from mere power, is the true policy of men as of nations.