Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/415

Rh of nothing but punishment, of wholesale hanging and confiscation; and the imposition of any sort of government that would permit them to live and to retain what they had saved from the disasters of the war, would have been welcomed by them as an act of grace and favor. Nothing appeared to them more natural than that the participants in the rebellion should be excluded from office, influence and power—nay, from the franchise even; and that the functions of government should be confined to the tried and faithful friends of the National cause. Even negro suffrage, universal, unrestricted, would then have been accepted as one of the bitter but irresistible consequences of the war.

Let it not be said that, in thus describing the condition of the Southern people at that time, I am gloating over the prostration of a defeated enemy, or that it would have been ungenerous to take advantage of their helplessness. Whatever the President's friends may think, I am one of those who still consider the rebellion one of the great crimes in history; and victorious Liberty, firmly planting her heel upon the neck of defeated crime, would have been no unwelcome sight to me.

Yes, how easy would it have been then at that moment to accomplish all that was needful. While the South was thus passive, in the North also all that insidious opposition which had dogged the Government during the war, vanished before the glory of our victory. When the Southern lion of treason was struck down, the Northern curs of treason took to their kennels. The Government stood unhampered. There was not a sensible man in the North who did not expect, nay, who did not desire, that the Government should and would assert the rights of victory and leave nothing undone to give the Republic the fullest measure of security for the future; and to all the hopeful germs of liberty, justice, equality and