Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/51

Rh great legal attainments, a powerful eloquence, a strong and ardent nature; and all this he vowed to one service. With all this he was not a mere expounder of a policy; he was a worshipper, sincere and devout at the shrine of his ideal. In no public man had the moral idea of the anti-slavery movement more overruling strength. He made everything yield to it. He did not possess it; it possessed him. That was the secret of his peculiar power.

He introduced himself into the debates of the Senate, the slavery question having been silenced forever, as politicians then thought, by several speeches on other subjects,—the Reception of Kossuth, the Land Policy, Ocean Postage; but they were not remarkable, and attracted but little attention.

At last he availed himself of an appropriation bill to attack the fugitive-slave law, and at once a spirit broke forth in that first word on the great question which startled every listener.

Thus he opened the argument:

Painfully convinced of the unutterable wrong and woe of slavery,—profoundly believing that, according to the true spirit of the Constitution and the sentiments of the Fathers, it can find no place under our National Government, I could not allow this session to reach its close without making or seizing an opportunity to declare myself openly against the usurpation, injustice and cruelty of the late intolerant enactment for the recovery of fugitive slaves.

Then this significant declaration:

Whatever I am or may be, I freely offer to this cause. I have never been a politician. The slave of principles, I call no party master. By sentiment, education and conviction, a friend of Human Rights in their utmost expansion, I have ever most sincerely embraced the democratic idea—not,