Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/165

Rh But there was intimidation of another kind.

I cannot forget the spectacle of Marshal Packard, with the dragoons of the United States at the disposition of the chairman of the Kellogg campaign committee at the late election in Louisiana, riding through the State with a full assortment of warrants in his hands arresting whomsoever he listed. I cannot forget that as to the discharge of laborers from employment for political cause a most seductive and demoralizing example is set by the very highest authority in the land. While we have a law on our statute-book declaring the intimidation of voters by threatened or actual discharge from employment a punishable offense, it is the notorious practice of the Government of the United States to discharge every one of its employés who dares to vote against the Administration party; and that is done North and South, East and West, as far as the arm of that Government reaches. I have always condemned the intimidation of voters in every shape, and therefore I have been in favor of a genuine civil service reform. But while your National Government is the chief intimidator in the land, you must not be surprised if partisans on both sides profit a little from its example.

Nor do I think that the intimidation which deters a colored man from voting with the opposition against the Republican party is less detestable or less harmful to the colored men themselves than that which threatens him as a Republican. I declare I shall hail the day as a most auspicious one for the colored race in the South, when they cease to stand as a solid mass under the control and discipline of one political organization, thus being arrayed as a race against another race; when they throw off the scandalous leadership of those adventurers who, taking advantage of their ignorance, make them the tools of their rapacity, and thus throw upon them the odium for their