Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/52

32 out; then we adopted a platform which did justice to the feelings of honest men and faithful Republicans, and upon that platform we nominated Hon. B. Gratz Brown, one of the oldest and most consistent anti-slavery men of Missouri, as our candidate for the governorship. And I affirm that in leaving that body we carried the honor, the good faith, the true principles and the true banner of the Republican party with us.

This, sir, is the history of the party division in Missouri; and it is for this that those who acted as I did have been denounced as traitors to the Republican cause.

Here I desire to notice an impression, which was spread abroad by public speakers and newspapers advocating a high protective tariff, that the so-called “bolt” in Missouri was nothing but the upshot of a conspiracy formed at Washington last winter by advocates of revenue reform. I had as much to do with the division in Missouri and the movements which preceded it as any man. I know every detail of its history. Whatever meetings of revenue reformers may have taken place at Washington, I not only did not participate in them, but no plan that could possibly have been formed there had the least influence upon my action in the Missouri convention. My colleague, in the speech he has distributed among Senators, arraigns me as the leader of the “bolt.” I take my full share of the responsibility for it—the whole, if you please—and I pronounce the statement, that the “bolt” had anything to do with any such conspiracy of revenue reformers formed at Washington or anywhere else, unqualifiedly and absolutely false. While my convictions, conscientiously formed, lead me to oppose the protective system, I know that the tariff question was not the one which produced the division of the Republican party in my State. While it is unquestionably true that the Republicans with whom I