Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/445

Rh because they despised you, the people of the South ventured upon the rebellion. Do this, betray your friends into the hands of their enemies, and they will despise you more than ever before, and you will have to say to yourselves that you deserve it.

And yet a policy like this I have heard designated as the “Lincoln and Johnson policy.” In the name of common decency, in the name of the respect we owe to the memory of our martyred President, I solemnly protest against this insidious coupling of names. The Lincoln policy! I knew Abraham Lincoln well; and at times when many earnest and true men were dissatisfied with his ways, and when I myself could not resist an impulse of impatience, yet I never lost my faith in him, because I knew him well. The workings of his mind were slow; but the pure and noble sympathies of his heart, true as the magnet needle, always guided them to the polar star of universal justice. He was not one of those bold reformers who will go far ahead of the particular requirements of the hour; he laboriously endeavored to comprehend what the situation demanded, and when he once clearly understood it, at once he planted his foot, and no living man ever saw Abraham Lincoln make a step backward. His march was ahead, and each dawning day found him a warmer advocate of the progressive ideas of our great age.

I have heard it said, and it is one of the staple arguments of Mr. Johnson's friends, that Abraham Lincoln would never have imposed upon the rebel States a condition precedent to restoration because it was not in the Baltimore platform. If Mr. Lincoln had been assassinated in the year 1862, they might, with equal justice, have said, because emancipation was not in the Chicago platform of 1860, he would never have been in favor of emancipation. I undertake to say he would have been