A Sketch of Carl Schurz's Political Career 1869-1906. Frederic Bancroft
qualities of Schurz's senatorial oratory were especially manifest in his speeches on Reconstruction, and on the attempted annexation of Santo Domingo.
| CHARLES SUMNER | CHARLES SUMNER |
In the spring of 1869, eight of the eleven secessionist States were in normal relations with the general government, and were politically in the hands of the Republicans, to whom, by enfranchising the freedmen and disfranchising many whites, Congress had given control. The remaining three States, Virginia, Mississippi and Texas, completed the steps necessary to readmission, and came up for formal acceptance by Congress in the winter of 1869–70. By this time social and political conditions throughout the South were revealing the difficulties of the new dispensation. Against the rule of Northern men and negroes, extravagant, inefficient and corrupt, the Southern whites reacted through secret organizations, terror and violence. The Ku Klux and their deeds made a gruesome record in many localities, and the inability of the State governments to suppress the disorders exposed the frailty of the new political régime.
In Congress, Republican sentiment was seriously divided as to the method of dealing with the Southern situation. All factions agreed in requiring the three States yet to be admitted to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment; and the same requirement was imposed upon Georgia, whose Conservative legislature, by the exclusion of negro members from their seats, had brought the State into a process of re-reconstruction. But when the radicals in Congress undertook to press through a barefaced project for prolonging the term of the Republican governor and legislature in Georgia, regardless of the State law, the moderate Republican Senators joined the Democrats and thwarted the scheme.
Schurz gave hearty aid to the moderates. Abating nothing of his confidence that reconstruction through negro suffrage had been the least objectionable policy, he declined to recognize that the maintenance of Republican party supremacy in the restored States was a sufficient ground for continued interference by the central government. The widespread political and social disorders in the South were regarded by hot partisans like Senators Morton, Drake and Wilson as expressions of the old rebellious spirit in the whites and of a malignant purpose to thwart by violence the building up of the Republican party in the reconstructed States. Louisiana and Georgia had been lost by the Republicans in the presidential elections in 1868; Tennessee and Virginia had chosen Conservative or Democratic State governments in 1869. The tendency thus manifested was held by the extremists to justify any degree of rigor in maintaining Republican ascendancy in the other States.
Schurz regarded such a spirit as in the highest degree mischievous. In the long debates on the Georgia question and on the Enforcement Act during the spring of 1870, he set forth his general views on the Southern situation. Like every other rebellion in history, ours must have its epilogue, he said; and the unrest and disorder in the South were incidents of this. They had a far deeper source than mere party politics; they were evidences of that "process of second fermentation" through which he anticipated that all the Southern States would have to pass. The proper treatment of this condition must be like that of a fever: watchfulness and care in guiding its course, but no radical or drastic action till time should have done its work. The "inveterate habits, opinions and ways of thinking of Southern society" must be transformed, and such a change can be of but slow growth. The greatest obstacle to a restoration of sound conditions would be legislative and executive action of purely partisan and extra-constitutional character. This would confirm the influence of the worst elements in the South and would provoke a disastrous Democratic reaction. The great need of the time, he believed, was that the Southern question should be wholly detached from partisan politics, and that the national government should leave the reconstructed States to work out their own problems. The most important positive action that Congress should take was the removal of the disabilities that still excluded many of the ablest Southerners from political life.
There was discernible in Mr. Schurz's attitude on the Southern question a profound discontent with the practical working of negro suffrage and of Republican party machinery in general as well as in the reconstructed States. By the end of the year 1870 this feeling became a matter of national notoriety by the sensational course of politics in Missouri. The factional division of the Republicans in this State, manifested in the contest that put Schurz into the Senate, came to a decisive issue in 1870 on the question of repealing the extremely rigorous laws by which Confederate sympathizers were disfranchised. The original justification for these laws had long ceased to have force, and their chief function was to furnish unscrupulous Republican politicians with the means to maintain party supremacy in State and local affairs. The liberal element of the party took up the demand for an immediate abolition of the whole system. The radicals, who controlled the party machinery, opposed the demand, and, by shrewd and unscrupulous manipulation of the mass of negro voters just created by the Fifteenth Amendment, secured control of the State convention.
To Schurz the procedure of the radical politicians was objectionable from every point of view. It promoted among the whites a policy of exasperation and proscription where he believed conciliation and concord were needful; it identified the newly enfranchised negroes with a cause that must bar them from all cordial relations with the better class of whites and leave them the dependents of mere political schemers; and it exhibited, in the methods through which the convention had been packed by the radicals, the particular kind of party trickery that he most abhorred. Accordingly he went into the convention with a fixed purpose to sever, if necessary, his connection with the regular organization. There he lashed the radicals without mercy, but, not unnaturally, with slight effect on the well-organized majority. The proposition of the liberals to incorporate in the platform a plank favoring the immediate removal of disabilities was lost. Thereupon the liberals, headed by Schurz and Gratz Brown, organized a new convention, adopted a platform calling for the immediate removal of all disabilities, nominated Brown for Governor, and, with the aid of the Democrats, who coalesced with the bolters, triumphantly carried the State.
In this Missouri campaign, the radicals had the unqualified support of the administration. The federal office-holders in the State were constrained by the most drastic methods of pressure then in vogue to contribute money and labor to the cause; and President Grant, in a letter to the collector of internal revenue at St. Louis, expressed the conviction that Schurz and Brown were merely aiming to put the Democrats in power, and urged his correspondent to stand by the regular party ticket. Though read out of the Republican party by this high authority, Mr. Schurz did not cease to maintain that he stood true to the principles of Republicanism and that it was the radicals who had deserted those principles. In a speech delivered in the Senate, December 15, 1870, with the laurels of the Missouri victory fresh upon him, be told with great effectiveness the story of the liberal movement. Referring to the plank for which he himself was responsible in the national platform of 1868, favoring the removal of disabilities, he argued that the liberals were wholly in the spirit of Republican policy, and that the President had been misled into his belief to the contrary. This argument was followed in the speech, however, by a very philosophical and eloquent analysis of existing political conditions, with a conclusion that indicated how lightly the speaker regarded any party tie that involved fidelity to a name or tradition or organization rather than to a living practical principle. Both old parties, he thought, had done their specific work, and the Republicans, if they wished to retain their cohesion, must assume the task of progressive reform, though the new issues were not yet clear and well-defined.
Such lax and speculative allegiance only confirmed the distrust with which Schurz was regarded by spoils-loving, domineering partisans. A number of causes had by the end of 1870 brought the President much under the influence of the men of this kind. Schurz's chivalrous and independent course in Missouri politics was not the only occasion of his being out of favor with Grant. Not a little had been contributed to this result by the Senator's course in connection with the President's famous attempt to annex Santo Domingo.
A protocol providing for the annexation of this petty republic was negotiated by the President's private secretary, General Babcock, when in Santo Domingo on other business in the summer of 1869. Babcock's proceedings were of a grossly irregular character. The Cabinet,