Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/61

Rh But had the Government of the United States distinctly professed that it was waging war against slavery, and for freedom? Had it not been officially declared that the war for the Union would not alter the condition of a single human being in America? Why then not arrest the useless effusion of blood; why not, by intervention, stop a destructive war, in which, confessedly, slavery and freedom were not at stake? Such were the arguments of our enemies in Europe; and they were not without color.

It was obvious that nothing but a measure impressing beyond dispute upon our war a decided anti-slavery character, making it in profession what it was inevitably destined to be in fact, a war of emancipation, could enlist on our side the enlightened public opinion of the old world so strongly as to restrain the hostile spirit of foreign governments. No European Government could well venture to interfere against those who had convinced the world that they were fighting to give freedom to the slaves of North America.

Thus the moral instinct did not err. The emancipation policy was not only the policy of principle, but also the policy of safety. Mr. Sumner urged it with impetuous and unflagging zeal. In the Senate he found but little encouragement. The resolutions he introduced in February, 1862, declaring State suicide as the consequence of rebellion, and the extinction of slavery in the insurrectionary States as the consequence of State suicide, were looked upon as an ill-timed and hazardous demonstration, disturbing all ideas of management.

To the President, then, he devoted his efforts. Nothing could be more interesting, nay, touching, than the peculiar relations that sprang up between Abraham Lincoln and Charles Sumner. No two men could be more alike as to their moral impulses and ultimate aims; no two men more