Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/499

 such threatening circumstances will not despair of the Republic.”

In the State and Congressional campaigns of 1878 the Republicans, especially in Ohio and Massachusetts, urgently appealed to Schurz for assistance. In these States the greenback movement, blending at this time with the rising silver issue, was seriously alarming the Republican leaders. Schurz was counted as a veteran champion of sound money, and he now repeated in Cincinnati his oratorical triumph there in 1875. His speech attracted an extraordinary degree of attention, and competent judges called it the decisive influence in holding the State in the Republican column. Boston, also, whose staid respectability was shuddering at the audacious financial heresies with which Benjamin F. Butler was infecting the people, gave Schurz a most cordial reception. In both cities he confined himself to questions of currency and finance and frankly proclaimed, as of old, his disregard of party bonds. The party, right or wrong,’ has never been my battle cry and it never will be,” he told the Bostonians. But he assured them, as “the conviction of an independent man,” that at the present time and on the momentous issue of resumption and sound money, the Republican party was the nation's better hope.

In the spring of 1879 the plan to nominate Grant the next year came into the open by the action of the Republican State convention in Missouri. The movement grew steadily, especially under the stimulus of Grant's return in September from his spectacular tour around the world. In every Southern State old-time carpet-baggers enthusiastically rallied to the cause of their former protector. In three of the greatest Northern States Conkling, Cameron and Logan, by ruthless control of the party organization, insured a compact and formidable mass of Grant delegates to the national convention.