Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/341

Rh precipitate course of President Johnson with regard to the reconstruction of the Southern State governments. During the civil war, and even immediately after his election to the Vice-Presidency, Mr. Johnson was one of the fiercest “Rebel-haters.” His loyalty to the Union was of the most unforgiving, most uncompromising and merciless kind. The burden of his daily talk was that “rebellion was treason and that treason was a crime which must be made odious,” that this was to be accomplished by meting out the severest punishment to the instigators and leaders of the rebellion, and that “hanging was not too good for them.” There seemed to be reason for apprehending that, if Mr. Johnson should come into power, the victory of the Union armies might be tarnished by relentless severity in the treatment of the vanquished. But no sooner had he actually been raised to power by the assassination of Lincoln, than he began to initiate a policy which, if carried through, would have subjected the “States lately in rebellion” almost instantly and absolutely to the control of the men whom but recently he had denounced as fit for the gallows.

In June, 1865, he issued a proclamation concerning the reorganization of the State government of North Carolina, some provisions of which were judged by many friends of the Administration as somewhat hasty. Letters expressing that opinion were received by the President, and similar criticism appeared in several of the most important newspapers. It was at that time that the President surprised me with the request that I should investigate the conditions prevailing in the Gulf States for him. In the conversations preceding my departure for the South he designated his North Carolina proclamation, not as the expression of a fixed plan definitely determined upon, but as an “experiment.” Before going further, he “would wait and see” how the proposed method of reconstruction