Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/416

382 bond to bind men together. One rebel soldier could hardly be expected to say that another rebel soldier was unworthy of public trust because of his service in the rebel army, for he would thus have disqualified himself. Nor was there necessarily any disloyalty in this—not even a remnant of it; for a rebel soldier who after the war had “accepted the situation” in perfectly good faith and sincerely resolved to accommodate himself to the new order of things, might naturally prefer as his representative another rebel soldier who had “accepted the situation” with equal sincerity, for the representation would then be more honest and, probably, more efficient.

A peculiarly terrific figure in partisan harangue is the “Rebel Brigadier.” From the descriptions made of him the “Rebel Brigadier” might be supposed to be an incurably black-hearted traitor, still carrying the rebel flag under his coat to bring it out at an opportune moment, still secretly drilling his old hosts on dark nights, and getting himself elected to Congress for the purpose of crippling the Government by artfully contrived schemes to accomplish the destruction of the Union as soon as his party is well settled in power. Now, what kind of man is the “Rebel Brigadier” in reality? He belonged in the South, originally, to the same class to which the Union brigadiers belonged in the North. After the close of the war he found himself as poor as the rest of his people. At first he moped and growled a little, and then went to work to make a living—as a farmer, or a lawyer, or a railroad employee, or an insurance man, or a book agent. Being a man of intelligence, he was among the first to open his eyes to the fact that the war had been—perhaps a very foolish venture for the South, because it was undertaken against overwhelming odds—and certainly a very disastrous one, because it left nothing but wreck and ruin behind it; one of those