Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/413

Rh to the war, and nothing else, it would have forthwith invested the very people who had been in rebellion against the Government with the power in a great measure to control the very results which had been won, and against which they had struggled; and this would have been a surrender of the consequences of our victory to the discretion of the defeated.

Here was a difficulty which struck the mind of every candid man at first sight. The immediate and unconditional restoration of the rebel States to the absolute control of their home affairs and to power in the General Government, was so obviously incompatible with the best interests and sacred obligations of the Republic, so manifestly against all common-sense, that when one of the greatest heroes of the war, led astray by a too generous error of judgment, admitted it as one of the stipulations of an armistice, the people, startled out of their equanimity by the mistake, raised a general outcry against him all over the loyal States; the President himself repudiated the proposition with the utmost promptness and decision, and some of the journals which now advocate a similar policy were among the loudest in their expressions of indignant denunciation, calling it either madness or treason. The hero I speak of undoubtedly soon saw his error, and the country remembers nothing but the gratitude it owes him.

In fact, all those who had been faithful to the National cause during the war substantially agreed, at its close, on two points with almost unbroken unanimity: First, that as speedily as possible all the attributes of our democratic system of government should be restored; but, second, that the rebel States could not be reinstated in the full control of their local affairs, in their full participation in the government of the Republic, until, by the imposition of irreversible stipulations, it should have been rendered