Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/417

Rh honest man. Alas, that our good President was dead! That at such a moment Abraham Lincoln's great heart, his true and tender sympathies with the lowly children of humanity, his pure and unerring instincts of right and liberty, his unselfish purpose to be equally just to all, should have been lost to us! If he had lived, whatever hesitations we might have had to pass through, no man who knew him will doubt that the peace of the country would have been safe and the triumph of liberty and justice certain. Alas, that the good President is dead! We have learned to measure the greatness of our loss by what he left behind him.

The first great opportunity was thrown away, and the man who cheated the Nation out of it has committed a crime against the glory and happiness of the American Republic which the flatteries of millions of sycophants will not be sufficient to gloss over, and which centuries of repentance cannot wash out. And how was the great opportunity thrown away?

President Johnson took the work of reconstruction into his own hands and began to develop a scheme of policy. He issued proclamations appointing provisional governors for the rebel States, and ordered them to call State conventions. Was not the work of reconstruction to be placed exclusively into the hands of loyal men? Of course is was; Andrew Johnson had said so! He had solemnly declared that if there were but five thousand men of tried loyalty in a State, theirs must be the government.

But political power in the States naturally belongs to those who have the right to vote and to be voted for. Andrew Johnson began by prescribing the qualifications of voters. The loyal blacks were at once excluded from the suffrage; the right of voting was to be confined to the loyal whites. But who were the loyal whites? The President issued a proclamation of amnesty and declared