Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/458

424 construes his rise from the position of alderman at Greenville, Tennessee, to the Presidency, as a Divine commission, unmistakably commanding him to assume the special direction of the universe—a man whose belief in his own powers and wisdom is so intense that he candidly thinks if the universe does not commit itself to the opinions he proclaims as his, that universe will make itself most egregiously ridiculous, and ought to be held to account for its indecent exposure. I mean Andrew Johnson. And from his hands the proposition went boldly into the Democratic platform.

When that piece of boastful inconsistency, which he called his “policy,” had been for some time in operation, Mr. Johnson said in one of his messages, that the people of the South (meaning the Southern whites) had, on the whole, done as well as could be expected. I candidly declared I was then, and am now, of the same opinion—yes, “the Southern States have done as well as could be expected.” Let us now see what we had a right to expect of them. Look back with me to the close of the war. The present generation of Southern whites had, from early childhood, been taught that slavery was not only right, but necessary. They had, on their own ground, never seen any other system of labor in operation. It was the only one they understood. With it all their doings and hopes of success were inseparably connected. All their ways of thinking, their social habits, their political theories and aspirations, and even their religious doctrines, revolved around slavery as the great central axis. They believed in it—they idolized it—they clung to it with a sort of religious superstition—they shut out from their minds all progressive ideas hostile to it, and their imagination was utterly incapable of realizing a condition of things in the South without it. The Presidential election of 1860 at last dealt a fatal blow to that political