Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/415

 Southern question a profound discontent with the practical working of negro suffrage and of Republican party machinery in general as well as in the reconstructed States. By the end of the year 1870 this feeling became a matter of national notoriety by the sensational course of politics in Missouri. The factional division of the Republicans in this State, manifested in the contest that put Schurz into the Senate, came to a decisive issue in 1870 on the question of repealing the extremely rigorous laws by which Confederate sympathizers were disfranchised. The original justification for these laws had long ceased to have force, and their chief function was to furnish unscrupulous Republican politicians with the means to maintain party supremacy in State and local affairs. The liberal element of the party took up the demand for an immediate abolition of the whole system. The radicals, who controlled the party machinery, opposed the demand, and, by shrewd and unscrupulous manipulation of the mass of negro voters just created by the Fifteenth Amendment, secured control of the State convention.

To Schurz the procedure of the radical politicians was objectionable from every point of view. It promoted among the whites a policy of exasperation and proscription where he believed conciliation and concord were needful; it identified the newly enfranchised negroes with a cause that must bar them from all cordial relations with the better class of whites and leave them the dependents of mere political schemers; and it exhibited, in the methods through which the convention had been packed by the radicals, the particular kind of party trickery that he most abhorred. Accordingly he went into the convention with a fixed purpose to sever, if necessary, his connection with the regular organization. There he lashed the radicals without mercy, but, not unnaturally, with slight effect on the