Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/38

18 resolution was framed and introduced by the bitterest and most openly avowed enemy of the enfranchising amendment, who, while subsequently advocating the minority report, bluntly proclaimed his hostility to the measure and his intention to defeat it. In addressing the convention he boastingly pledged three-fourths of the people of his Congressional district to vote against it. His principal supporter, a colored man, spoke in the same vein, and so one after another, the advocates of the minority resolution, with few exceptions, while arguing in favor of it, professed their hostility to enfranchisement.

The operations which had preceded the convention, as well as the known character and proclivities and open and emphatic expressions of the movers and advocates of that resolution, left no possible doubt, therefore, of the fact that the apparent declaration of neutrality on the subject was nothing but a thin disguise, if a disguise at all, of determined hostility to enfranchisement, and that the adoption of that resolution would be an unmistakable victory for the enemies of enfranchisement. The question was therefore perfectly plain. All that had happened had made it plain before the debate on the resolutions began. What course was left to those who were determined to stand by the solemn pledges of the National Republican platform?

It fell to my lot to play a somewhat prominent part in those proceedings, and my convictions of duty were clear. In opening the debate I used, among others, the following expressions, and I select the strongest:

We are resolved, and I think I may declare it in the name of a considerable portion of this convention, we are resolved to maintain the plighted faith of the Republican party. We are resolved to have that which is declared in this platform and nothing less. We are resolved not to equivocate about it.