Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/441

Rh to ratify the Constitutional amendment prohibiting slavery and to repudiate the rebel debt, expressly telling them that they would not be readmitted until they should have done so? And if he can do that why not Congress? Has the alderman of Greenville grown so big as to absorb in himself all the powers of the Government, leaving nothing to the representatives of the people?

But he did not stop even there. He appointed governors and ordered them to call State conventions. He kept the governors of his appointment still in office after the people of the rebel States had elected their own. Nay, when their elected governors were already in office, and the legislatures working, he set aside laws passed by those legislatures and approved by those governors, on his own authority, by mere executive order; and after all this, he still dares to speak of those States as being entitled to just the same rights as New York or Massachusetts. Would he have dared to attempt similar things in Pennsylvania? I apprehend the sturdy yeomanry of the Keystone State would have shown him the difference between their State and conquered Mississippi in the twinkling of an eye. Nay, if his theory were correct, if the conquered communities of the South were really entitled to the same rights and privileges as the loyal States of the Union, he would, by his very acts of flagrant interference with the legitimate rights of the States, have committed a high crime against the Constitution of the United States, and Jack Rogers of New Jersey ought to have moved his impeachment long ago to give Senator Cowan of Pennsylvania an opportunity to pronounce him guilty.

Here I will leave Mr. Johnson and his friends to their self-imposed task of proving that the great men who made the Constitution were such consummate fools as to render the Government of the United States Constitutionally