Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/320

 the Southern people believe—and, I deeply regret to say, many of them actually do believe—that the introduction of negro suffrage was a device of some particularly malignant and vindictive radicals, to subject the South to the extreme of distress and humiliation. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Admitting that there were people in the North who, before the passions of the war had subsided, wished to see the rebels and their sympathizers and abettors in some way punished for what they had done, negro suffrage never was thought of as a punitive measure. I may say that in all my intercourse with various classes of people,—and my opportunities were large—I have never heard it mentioned or suggested, still less advocated, as a punitive measure. It never was in itself popular with the masses—reason enough for the ordinary politicians to be afraid of openly favoring it. There were only two classes of public men who at all thought of introducing it generally: those whom, without meaning any disparagement, I would for the sake of convenience call the doctrinaires,—men who, like Mr. Sumner, would insist as a general principle, that the negro, being a man, was as a matter of right as much entitled to the suffrage as the white man—and those who, after a faithful and somewhat perplexed wrestle with the complicated problem of reconstruction, finally landed—or, it might almost be said, were stranded—at the conclusion that to enable the negro to protect his own rights as a free man by the exercise of the ballot was after all the simplest way out of the tangle, and at the same time the most in accordance with our democratic principles of government.

This view of the matter grew rapidly in popular appreciation as the results of reconstruction on the Johnson plan became more and more unsatisfactory. It gained very much in strength when it appeared that the tremendous rebuke