Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/416

390 cannot, consistently with the public interest, be effected by the offer of some specific material benefit, would it not seem worthy of consideration whether the appointment to a place in your Cabinet of some man of Confederate antecedents and enjoying the confidence of that class, would not secure to your Southern policies great facilities? I see the difficulties of such a step at once, but the more I think of it, the more I am also impressed with its advantages. As a positive proof of the sincerity of the intentions you mean to express in your inaugural, it would at once give you the confidence of the best class of those people. And if the right man can be found, he would be a living link between them and your Administration. He might be able to point out to you, better probably than anybody else could, the exact things to be done in the South, and also the persons to be employed for the furtherance of your policy. To find a man of that class who has the right kind of standing in the South, who possesses the necessary capacity, and who may be depended upon as entirely faithful and sincerely devoted to the other aims you have in view, appears indeed difficult—perhaps so much so that you may not be inclined to take so unusual a stroke of policy into consideration. At any rate, I felt encouraged by the tone of your last letter to submit my general impressions about this matter to your judgment.

As I speak to you of everything that goes through my mind concerning your prospective Administration, there is another thing I must mention. Some time ago a rumor was communicated to me by a friend in Chicago, “based upon pretty good authority,” as the letter states, that, “if Governor Hayes becomes President, Don Cameron is likely to be retained in the Cabinet as Secretary of War, in deference to Pennsylvania; that Bristow is not likely to be Secretary of the Treasury, in deference to Grant; that as a compromise between Bristow and his enemies,