Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/422

388 hardly recommendatory of his policy. But I do not ask the President to believe me. He himself testifies to the truth of what I have said, by his own acts. All over the South his military officers, his agents acting under his orders and by his authority, have been busy for some time setting aside and overruling State laws and judicial proceedings, because they were too glaringly incompatible with the decree of emancipation. It appears the President must, after all, have had an inkling of what was going on. I bring to the President the President's own testimony. Will he condescend to believe himself? or does he, perhaps, know himself so well as to have no faith in his own character for truth and veracity?

And what does all this prove? It proves that the people lately in rebellion, as soon as they saw their State governments once more in their hands, saw also a chance to turn their power to account in a reactionary movement against emancipation. It shows that they were determined not to permit the emancipated slave to become a true freeman, nor a system of true free labor to supplant that of slavery. It shows that they used their power in that direction as far as the General Government suffered them to go; and Heaven knows, President Johnson, although anxious to keep up appearances, suffered them to go far enough.

But the reactionary movement did not confine itself to the blacks; the whites, too, came in for their share. No sooner did the people lately in rebellion see the road to political power reopened to them by the President's reconstruction policy than they malignantly turned upon those Southern men who had refused to espouse the cause of the rebellion, and those Northerners who, during and after the war, imported into the South their capital, intelligence, enterprise and civilization. You see the people lately in rebellion not only not permitting the loyalists of the South to control the powers of Government, but