Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/266

232 other hand, every man, whatever his previous opinions may have been, as soon as he throws his whole heart into the struggle for the Union, throws at the same time his whole heart into the struggle against slavery.

Look at some of the brightest names which the history of this period will hand down to posterity; your own Daniel S. Dickinson, Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts, the venerable Breckenridge of Kentucky, the brave An drew Johnson of Tennessee and many thousands of brave spirits of less note. You cannot say that they were abolitionists; but they are honestly for the death of slavery, because they are honestly for the life of the Nation.

Emancipation would have been declared in this war, even if there had not been a single abolitionist in America before the war. The measure followed as naturally, as necessarily, upon the first threatening successes of the rebellion, as a clap of thunder follows upon a flash of lightning. Nay, if there had been a lifelong pro-slavery man in the Presidential chair, but a Union man of a true heart and a clear head—such a man as will lay his hand to the plow without looking back—he would, after the first year of the rebellion, have stretched out his hand to William Lloyd Garrison, and would have said to him, “Thou art my man.” Listening to the voice of reason, duty, conscience, he would have torn the inveterate prejudice from his heart, and with an eager hand he would have signed the death-warrant of the treacherous idol.

And you speak of diverting the war from its legitimate object! As in the war of the Revolution no true patriot shrank back from the conclusion that colonial rights and liberties could not be permanently secured, but by the abolition of British dominion, so in our times no true Union man can shrink back from the equally imperative conclusion that the permanency of the Union cannot be secured, but by the abolition of its arch-enemy—which