Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/424

390 they are, ostracized from political life, cast out from Southern society, persecuted by murderous malignity even to their very firesides; many of them driven away by bloodthirsty rebel mobs, exiles again from their homes, because they stood by their country.

Can it be that in the great struggle for the Union the tried and self-sacrificing Unionists of the South are the worst-defeated party? Shameful, incredible as it may seem, yet so it is. Under the heels of the rebellion when the rebellion broke out, they are still more under the heels of the rebels since the rebellion is vanquished; for then they looked up with hope, and now they look down almost with despair. Here they are, taking refuge under the shield of the loyal North, to enjoy the poor privilege of giving expression to their grief.

And there is the South: those who but recently fought against us, again wielding the powers of government in their States; flaunting before our eyes the declaration that in rising to destroy the Union they did no wrong; boasting of the rebellion as the pride and glory of their history; insolently defying and sneering at those who conquered them; making complicity in treason a test for political distinction; spitting upon tried loyalty to the National cause as a mark of disgrace; seeking to legislate and whip into servitude and misery those whom we have emancipated; persecuting as intruders those of us who have gone to live with them; tolerating no opinion which is not their own; driving away and murdering like outlaws the most faithful friends of the Union and of liberty; repeating the horrors of Fort Pillow on the streets of Memphis and New Orleans, and all this in the name of Southern rights and Andrew Johnson! Not only “the South for Southerners” is the cry, for the Southern Union men are Southerners also, but “the South for rebels.” Such are the fruits of the reaction sprung from the