Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/299

 as a constitutional right; and for these seats men were presented who but yesterday had stood in arms against the National Government, or who had held high place in the insurrectionary confederacy. And the highest authority cited for all these denunciations and demands was Andrew Johnson, President of the United States.

The Southern people might well have been pitied for having been seduced into these ill-fated extravagancies. And their seducer might well have been called their worst enemy.

The impression made by these things upon the minds of the Northern people can easily be imagined. Men of sober ways of thinking, not accessible to sensational appeals, asked themselves quite seriously whether there was not real danger that the legitimate results of the war, for the achievement of which they had sacrificed uncounted thousands of lives and the fruits of many, many years of labor, were not in grave jeopardy again. Their alarm was not artificially produced by political agitation. It was sincere and profound, and began to grow angry.

The gradual softening of the passions and resentments of the war was checked. The feeling that the Union had to be saved once more from the rule of the “rebels with the President at their head” spread with fearful rapidity, and well-meaning people looking to Congress to come to the rescue, were becoming less and less squeamish as to the character of the means to be used to that end.

This popular temper could not fail to exercise its influence upon Congress and to stimulate radical tendencies among its members. Even men of a comparatively conservative and cautious disposition admitted that strong remedies were necessary to avert the threatening danger, and they soon turned to the most drastic as the best. Moreover, the partisan motive