Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/361

Rh drawn away the veil that has concealed it. I suspect that gentlemen on the Democratic side of the House, whom they would consider their political friends, would be filled with dismay at the mere thought of their reappearance among them. If there is anything that could prevent them from voting for universal amnesty, it might be the fear, if they entertained it at all, of seeing Jefferson Davis once more a Senator of the United States.

But more than that: you relieve that class of persons, those old misleaders, of their exclusion, and they will soon discover that the people whom they once plunged into disaster and ruin have in the meantime grown, if not as wise as they ought to be, certainly too wise to put their destinies in the hands of the same men again. I hope, therefore, you will not strip this measure of the merit of being a general amnesty to spare the original plotters this most salutary experience.

So much for the first exception. Now to the second. It excludes from the benefit of this act all those who were officers of the Army or of the Navy and then joined the rebellion. Why exclude that class of persons? I have heard the reason very frequently stated upon the floor of the Senate; it is because those men had been educated at the public expense, and their turning against the Government was therefore an act of peculiar faithlessness and black ingratitude. That might appear a very strong argument at first sight. But I ask you was it not one of the very first acts of this Administration to appoint one of the most prominent and conspicuous of that class to a very lucrative and respectable public office? I mean General Longstreet. He had obtained his military education at the expense of the American people. He was one of the wards, one of the pets of the American Republic, and then he turned against it as a rebel. Whatever of faithlessness, whatever of black ingratitude there