Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/425

Rh policy. Do you recognize them! It is slavery; slavery dead only in name, but its spirit revived by the treacherous policy of one who had sworn that it should never rise again. There it is, ambitious of power, impatient of restraint, overbearing in its ascendancy, brutal in its resentments, merciless with its murderous resentment, writing again its signature on the pages of American history in characters of blood.

I know the President's friends will say that I exaggerate. I wish I had exaggerated. But let them read the testimony of our military commanders whom a protracted residence in the South has enabled to form a judgment; let them scan the list of Southern State officers and inquire into their past career and their present doings; let them look over the records of Southern legislatures and study the character of their enactments; let them search the Southern press as an exponent of Southern sentiment; let them run their eyes over the lists of killed and wounded Union men, white as well as black, whom the reaction has already laid low; let them read General Sheridan's dispatches, which the President was so exceedingly slow in bringing to the knowledge of the people; let them listen to the words of those true men of the South who have laid the woful story of their sorrows before us; nay, let them for one moment be honest with themselves, and grant an audience to the misgivings of their own hearts, and within themselves they will hear a voice giving a lie to the whitewashing talk with which they strive to deceive the people.

Thus the reaction in the Southern States is almost complete. “Almost,” I say; not quite. Whatever encouragement the President may have given them, and however far they may have been urged on by it, still they labored under one restraint. There was something which operated as a check and prevented still wilder