Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/264

230 bold enough to assert that this perversion was illegitimate? Let us return to the crisis in which we are engaged.

We went into the war for the purpose of maintaining the Union, and preserving our nationality. Although it was the slave-power which had attempted to break up the Union, we did, at first, not touch slavery in defending the Union. No, with a scrupulousness of very doubtful merit, slavery was protected by many of our leaders—especially one of them, who at that time held the highest military command, made it a particular object not to hurt slavery while fighting against the rebellious slaveholder, and he exhausted all the resources of his statesmanship for that purpose. It is true he exhausted, at the same time, the patience of the people.

That statesmanship threatened to exhaust all our military and financial resources; but if, indeed, it did threaten to exhaust the resources of the rebellion, the threat was very gentle. You remember the results of that period of kid-glove policy, which the South found so very gentlemanly: reverse after reverse; popular discontent rising to despondency; ruin staring us in the face. The war threatened, indeed, to become a failure; and if the resolution of the Chicago Convention, which declared the war a failure, had special reference to the period when the distinguished candidate of the Democratic party was general-in-chief, then, it must be confessed, the Chicago Convention showed a certain degree of judgment.

Gradually it became clear to every candid mind that slavery, untouched, constituted the strength of the rebellion; but that slavery, touched, would constitute its weakness. The negro tilled its fields, and fed its armies; the negro carried its baggage and dug its trenches; and the same negro was longing for the day when he would be permitted to fight for the Union, instead of being forced to work for the rebellion. To oblige him to work for the