Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/446

412 as firm an advocate of impartial suffrage to-day as he was of emancipation, had he lived to see how necessary the one is to secure and complete the other. True, he never ranted about the hanging and impoverishing of traitors, but in his soul slept the sublime ideal of merciful justice and just mercy. He would not have thought of taking bloody revenge on the Union's enemies, but he would never have ceased to think of being just to the Union's friends. Abraham Lincoln and this “policy”! He would rather have suffered himself to be burnt at the stake than to break or endanger the pledge he had given to the Southern Union man when he called upon him for assistance, and to the negro soldier, when he summoned him to the field of battle; and if he could rise from the dead and walk among us to-day, we would see him imploring mercy upon the accursed souls of his assassins. But even his large heart, with its inexhaustible mine of human kindness, would have no prayer for those who strive to undo, or culpably suffer to be undone, the great work which was the crowning glory of his life.

Let Andrew Johnson's friends look for arguments wherever they choose, but let the grave of the great martyr of liberty be safe against their defiling touch. In the name of the National heart I protest against the infamous trick of associating Abraham Lincoln with a policy which drove into exile the truest men of the South, and culminated in the butchery of New Orleans. If Andrew Johnson has chosen his pillory, let him stand there alone, enveloped in the incense of bought flattery, adored by every villain in the land, and loaded down with the maledictions of the down-trodden and degraded.

Americans, the lines are drawn, and the issues of the contests are clearly made up.

You want the Union fully restored. We offer it to you—a Union based upon universal liberty, impartial