Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/150

124 threatening trouble in a State, derives its power to invade the legislative body of the State by armed force, and to drag out persons seated there as members, that others may take their places? Where is that law, I ask? You will search the Constitution, you will search the statutes in vain.

I cannot, therefore, escape from the deliberate conviction, a conviction conscientiously formed, that the deed done on the 4th January in the statehouse of the State of Louisiana by the military forces of the United States constitutes a gross and manifest violation of the Constitution and the laws of this Republic. We have an act before us indicating a spirit in our Government which either ignores the Constitution and the laws or so interprets them that they cease to be the safeguard of the independence of legislation and of the rights and liberties of our people. And that spirit shows itself in a shape more alarming still in the instrument the Executive has chosen to execute his behests.

Sir, no American citizen can have read without profound regret and equally profound apprehension the recent despatch of General Sheridan to the Secretary of War, in which he suggests that a numerous class of citizens should by the wholesale be outlawed as banditti by a mere proclamation of the President, to be turned over to him as a military chief, to meet at his hands swift justice by the verdict of a military commission. Nobody respects General Sheridan more than I do for the brilliancy of his deeds on the field of battle; the nation has delighted to honor his name. But the same nation would sincerely deplore to see the hero of the ride to Winchester and of the charge at the Five Forks stain that name by an attempt to ride over the laws and the Constitution of the country, and to charge upon the liberties of his fellow-citizens. The policy he has proposed is so