Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/404

370 have stood between the North and the South, looked up to with equal confidence by both. His moderation and charity would not have aroused suspicion at the North, nor would his tenacity of purpose with regard to emancipation and the rights of the negro have appeared vindictive to the South. He could have prevented the passions of the war from disturbing the work of peace. While thus President Lincoln would have been the best man for the business of reconstruction, President Johnson was, perhaps, the worst imaginable. During and immediately after the war his uppermost thought was that treason must be made odious by punishing the traitors. But a few months after his accession to the Presidency he insisted with equal vehemence that the government of the late insurgent States, then in a state of dangerous confusion, must be virtually turned over to the same class of men whom but recently he had denounced as traitors fit to be hanged. His ill-balanced mind was incapable of seeing that what might be wisdom some time afterwards, was folly then. The passionate temper with which he plunged into a bitter quarrel with Congress and the Republican party about these questions produced two most unfortunate effects. The minds of Southern men were turned away from the only thing that could put them on the road of peace, order and new prosperity, namely, a prompt and sincere accommodation of their thoughts and endeavors to the new order of things. They were made to delude themselves instead with the false hope of reversing in some way the emancipation of the slaves, at least partially, by legislative contrivances—their false hopes begetting false efforts in many directions, and these efforts leading to bitter, futile and wasteful struggles, which the poor South might and should have been spared. And secondly, Mr. Johnson's proceedings made the Northern people seriously afraid of a disloyal