Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/67

Rh tion did not appear perplexing at all. Believing, as he always did, that the democratic idea, as he found it defined in the Declaration of Independence, “Human rights in their utmost expansion,” contained an ultimately certain solution of all difficulties, he saw the principal aim to be reached by any reconstruction policy, in the investment of the emancipated slaves with all the rights and privileges of American citizenship. The complexity of the problem, the hazardous character of the experiment, never troubled him. And as, early in the war, he had for himself laid down the theory that, by the very act of rebellion, the insurrectionary States had destroyed themselves as such, so he argued now, with assured consistency, that those States had relapsed into a territorial condition; that the National Government had to fill the void by creations of its own, and that in doing so the establishment of universal suffrage there was an unavoidable necessity. Thus he marched forward to the realization of his ideal, on the straightest line, and with the firmness of profound conviction.

In the discussions which followed, he had the advantage of a man who knows exactly what he wants, and who is imperturbably, religiously convinced that he is right. But his Constitutional theory, as well as the measures he proposed, found little favor in Congress. The public mind struggled long against the results he had pointed out as inevitable. The whole power of President Johnson's Administration was employed to lead the development of things in another direction. But through all the vacillations of public opinion, through all the perplexities in which Congress entangled itself, the very necessity of things seemed to press toward the ends which Sumner and those who thought like him had advocated from the beginning.

At last, Mr. Sumner saw the fondest dreams of his life