Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/457

Rh by instinct and temperament. Existing things had a prima facie claim upon his respect and support because they existed. He followed his party with fidelity, sometimes at the expense of his reason and logic, but without the narrow-mindedness of a proscriptive partisan spirit. In the excited discussions which preceded and accompanied the war of 1812 he took an active part as a public speaker and a pamphleteer. Something happened then, at the very beginning of his public career, that revealed in strong light the elements of strength as well as those of weakness in his nature. In a speech on the Fourth of July, 1812, at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, he set forth in vigorous language his opposition to the war policy of the Administration; but with equal emphasis he also declared that the remedy lay not in lawless resistance, but only in “the exercise of the constitutional right of suffrage”—a proposition then by no means popular with the extreme Federalists of New England. A few weeks later he was appointed by a local mass convention of Federalists to write an address on the same subject, which became widely known as the “Rockingham Memorial.” In it he set forth with signal force the complaints of his party, but, as to the remedy, he consented to give voice to the sense of the meeting by a thinly veiled threat of secession and a hint on the possibility of a dissolution of the Union. In the first case he expressed his own opinions as a statesman and a patriot; in the second he accepted the opinions of those around him as his own, and spoke with equal ability and vigor as the mouthpiece or attorney of others—a double character destined to reappear from time to time in his public life with puzzling effect.

New Hampshire sent him to Congress, where he took his seat in the House of Representatives in May, 1813. He soon won a place in the front rank of debaters, especially on questions of finance. But the two terms during