Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/405

Rh pro-slavery reaction in the South. He irritated the majority in Congress by defiant demonstrations, and thus he caused the most intricate problem of the time to become the subject of a passionate party broil, which seemed to render men heedless as to the consequences of their doings. The Republican majority in Congress, thinking itself betrayed by the President, went faster and farther in their measures to protect the rights of the freedmen, and to procure loyal majorities in the Southern States, than they might have thought necessary to do had they not distrusted the executive. And, on the other hand, Mr. Johnson, by intemperate utterances, stirred up opposition in the South to the measures enacted by Congress. Negro suffrage was introduced, instantaneous and general, thus thrusting a mass of ignorance as an active element into the body politic, while at the same time a large number of those who had taken a more or less prominent part in the rebellion, constituting the bulk of the property and intelligence of the South, were disfranchised and debarred from active participation in public affairs.

I do not say this to criticise the reconstruction measures in general. I have always believed that they were adopted from good motives and for good purposes; that in the light of history some of them appear ill-judged, but that reconstruction was one of those tangled problems in solving which any policy that may be adopted will in some way bring forth unsatisfactory consequences, and in some respects look like a mistake. Here were a number of insurgent communities just reconquered by force of arms; in them four millions of negroes liberated from slavery by the Government against the will of their former masters; that former master class exasperated by defeat and material distress, and face to face with the former slaves; these elements, with a fierce and apparently irreconcilable antagonism between them, to be brought