Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/284

264 calm judgment. And they will as soon as they honestly try to understand each other. Let us endeavor to do it now.

To appreciate the merits of the reconstruction question, you must for a moment place yourselves in the situation of the victorious party immediately after the close of the war. You would, as they did, at once have recognized the duty of solving two great problems: First, to protect those in the South who during the war had been, and then were, friends of the Union, black as well as white; and secondly, to fix and secure the logical and legitimate results of the war, so that they should not be upset by reactionary movements and become the subjects of new and dangerous struggles again. The people of the North felt that duty. I felt it, and I ask any candid man among you, had he been in our places, would he not have felt it?

Consider now in the face of what circumstances those duties were to be performed. You certainly remember them well. The Unionists living in the South were to be protected. The disasters of the war, the terrible disappointments, the dreadful losses and sufferings you had endured, the bewildering perplexities which were surrounding you, had still more embittered the feelings of many of your people against the conqueror. The new order of things, free labor with all its new relations of rights and duties, was to be established and developed in the South, while all the traditions of her people, all their accepted notions as to what could be done with the colored race, all their ways of thinking and working, were still those of the slavery system, and while the distressing necessity of providing for the pressing wants of to-day and to-morrow seemed to drive you, to force into your service as much as possible of the labor which had just been liberated. Was it not so? I speak of the things which I then saw in the South—for I traversed these