Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/147

 human dignity as the fugitive slave law would necessarily provoke in him an almost revolutionary indignation.

Although a young lawyer of limited practice and no fortune, he had volunteered his services without compensation to Mr. Booth when that gentleman was arrested for helping the fugitive slave, Glover, to escape. In his various arguments, which were praised by his very opponents as singularly logical, learned, and profound, and sometimes rising to a high order of eloquence, he took the strongest State's rights ground, and, as I have mentioned, he was sustained by the Supreme Court of Wisconsin. Letters of approval and congratulation from public men of note, one of whom was Charles Sumner, came pouring upon him—letters which might have made many ordinary mortals vain, but were received by him with modest diffidence. It was natural that in the campaign that was made for him as a candidate for the Supreme bench of his State, the principal issue should be, aside from his personal merits, the doctrines he had promulgated as an advocate in the legal proceedings that had made him conspicuous. And in that campaign I took a zealous part on his side. On the 23d of March, 1859, I delivered a speech in Milwaukee “for States' rights and Byron Paine,” in which I defended, to the best of my ability, his position, which no doubt was also the position of the bulk of the anti-slavery men of the time, although there were strong and distinguished dissenters.

This address I did not include in the collection of my speeches which was published six years later, because a more matured judgment had convinced me that—not indeed the fundamental theory of democracy, but the conclusions drawn from it as to the functions and necessary powers of government, were unsound. Here was a striking illustration of the proneness of the human mind to permit itself to be swayed