Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/264

 exercise upon the opinion and attitude of foreign nations, so he may have been forgetful of the national duty of honor to secure the rights of the freedmen and the safety of the Southern Union men in his impatient desire to “restore the Union” in point of form. It is not at all improbable that both the influences named combined in determining the course of Mr. Johnson.

I went to work at my general report with the utmost care. My statements of fact were regularly escorted by my witnesses whose testimony was produced in their own language. I scrupulously avoided exaggeration and cultivated sober and moderate forms of expression. It gives me some satisfaction now to say that none of those statements of fact has ever been effectually controverted. I cannot speak with the same assurance of my conclusions and recommendations; for they were matters, not of knowledge, but of judgment. And we stood at that time face to face with a situation bristling with problems so complicated and puzzling that every proposed solution, based upon assumptions apparently ever so just and supported by reasoning apparently ever so logical, was liable to turn out in practice apparently more mischievous than any other. In a great measure this has actually come to pass. There was an almost universal argument among the loyal people that the “States lately in rebellion” should as soon as possible be restored to their constitutional functions. But as to the conditions of that possibility opinions gravely differed. Would it not have been foolish as well as dishonorable to emancipate the negro slaves and even to use them as soldiers of the Republic to-day and then, to-morrow, to turn them over without protection to those who had held them enslaved and who wished to hold them to enforced labor? But how to protect them and to make that protection permanent? It was seriously proposed by