Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/57

Rh plan of compromise calculated to preserve slavery, when after Mr. Lincoln's election the rebellion first raised its head, and a large number of Northern people, even anti-slavery men, frightened by the threatening prospect of civil war, cast blindly about for a plan of adjustment, while really no adjustment was possible.

Such was, early in the war, and during its most doubtful hours, his declaration, laid before the Senate in a series of resolutions, that the States in rebellion had destroyed themselves as such by the very act of rebellion; that slavery, as a creation of State law, had perished with the States, and that general emancipation must immediately follow, thus putting the program of emancipation boldly in the foreground, at a time when many thought that the cry of union alone, union with or without slavery, could hold together the Union forces.

Such was his declaration, demanding negro suffrage even before the close of the war, while the public opinion at the North, whose aid the Government needed, still recoiled from such a measure.

Thus he was apt to go rough-shod over the considerations of management deemed important by his co-workers. I believe he never consulted with his friends around him, before doing those things, and when they afterwards remonstrated with him, he ingenuously asked: “Is it not right and true, what I have said? And if it is right and true, must I not say it?” And yet, although he had no organizing mind and despised management, he was a leader. He was a leader as the embodiment of the moral idea, with all its uncompromising firmness, its unflagging faith, its daring devotion. And in this sense he could be a leader only because he was no politician. He forced others to follow, because he was himself impracticable. Simply obeying his moral impulse, he dared to say things which in the highest