Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/433

Rh men and rivers of blood and tears, which they do not involve?

But I hear it said that the people of the rebel States do not at all contemplate such things. Have they not shown the insincerity of their repentance and the meekness of their disposition at the Philadelphia Convention? “Oh,” exclaims Senator Doolittle, in a fine burst of tearful sentimentality, “Oh, if the whole American people could have seen, as we saw, South Carolina and Massachusetts walking arm-in-arm!” Let me tell that ecstatic Senator that the whole American people have seen the performance and have seen right through it too. A meeting called for consultation; a consultation in which the managers did not dare to permit anybody to express an honest opinion for fear of bursting up the whole concern; a frank exchange of views, where everybody acted as a special policeman to keep everybody else still. And by a jugglery so contemptible, by a dumb puppet-show so clumsy, these gentlemen think they can deceive a people so wide-awake as the Yankees. Nay, the humbug was even too transparent for Southern eyes. Look over the Southern press and you will see that they either scornfully repudiate the whole performance as an act of barefaced hypocrisy, or, on the supposition that there are people in the North who absolutely insist on being bamboozled, accept and approve it as a trap in which fools can be caught by Copperheads.

But I am told that, in a Congress organized upon the Johnson plan, the representatives of the rebel States will at all events constitute only a minority, and that, if they carry the reactionary movement too far, the Northern Johnson men will resist them. Ah, their virtue has already shown most wonderful powers of resistance! Look at their representative men. Here is Mr. Doolittle. When the civil-rights bill was passed in the Senate, Mr.