Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/153

Rh step and warned you of its inevitable consequences. I know full well that Southern society has been, and in a measure is, disturbed by violent tendencies and by deplorable, sometimes bloody disorders. I have never denied it, and nobody has more earnestly condemned and denounced those disorders than I. Time and again have I appealed to all patriotic men in the South to use their utmost efforts to secure peace, order and public safety among their people. Those disorders I would be the last man to palliate or excuse; but I also believe that they were in a great measure the offspring of circumstances and to be expected.

When the war closed a great revolution had suddenly transformed, among general distress and confusion, the whole organism of Southern society. Not only was that system of labor uprooted with which the Southern people had for centuries considered their whole productive wealth and prosperity identified, but by the enfranchisement of the colored people, that class of society which had just emerged from slavery, with all its ignorance, (and let me say for that ignorance they were by no means themselves responsible,) was suddenly clothed with political power, and in some States with overruling political power. That power was called into play at a time when, after the sweeping destruction and desolation of the war, the South was most in need of a wise coöperation of all its social forces to heal its wounds and to lift it up from its terrible prostration.

Surely, sir, the justice of the Constitutional amendments, designed to secure to the slave his freedom and to enable the colored people to maintain their rights through active participation in the functions of self-government, I shall be the last man to question, for I aided in passing them. Neither is that the legitimate subject of this debate. But as all these tremendous transformations came at a time