Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/479

Rh they may be, but they would not have been stupid enough for that. No; following their irresistible instinct, they would have voted that the Union remain together and that slavery be abolished. And in voting thus they would have voted ten thousand times more wisely and patriotically than the wisest heads of the rebel aristocracy whom you might have seen assembled the other day in the Democratic Convention at New York. See what would have been the result of negro voting then. The Union would not have been disrupted; the five hundred thousand brave young men, whose blood has soaked the battlefields of the Union, would still be among us, and the country would not now groan under a National debt of twenty-five hundred millions of dollars. I appeal to any Democrat who may hear me, if he could recall those days of 1861, if he could avert from this Republic the calamities we have gone through, if he could thereby save the lives of half a million of our noblest sons, if he could spare the country the embarrassments springing from our burden of debt—if he could do that by permitting the negro to vote, would he not willingly cast aside all his haughty prejudice of race, his specious scruples about the negro's ignorance, and say to the black man: “Go, in the name of God, and vote.” He would be a monster in human shape, and would deserve to be spurned from human society, if he did not sink upon his knees and thank Heaven for the chance. For this, unfortunately, it is too late. But should not every good man eagerly grasp at a similar possibility as it presents itself to-day? What are the negroes of the South doing with their suffrage now? It is one of those false impressions which have for years been assiduously disseminated by the Democrats that we, the Republicans, have nothing in our heads but the negro; that all we have done we did for the exclusive benefit of the black man. Is this true? I for one am free to confess