Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/205

 I availed myself of the same lecturing tour, which kept me a week or two in New England, to deliver a political speech at Springfield, Massachusetts. I had been asked to do so by a number of anti-slavery men through Mr. Samuel Bowles, the editor of the Springfield Republican, whose acquaintance I had made during my anti-Know-nothing expedition the preceding year. Of this excellent man, one of the best representatives of independent journalism, I shall have more to say hereafter. The object of the speech was to pluck to pieces Senator Douglas's new sophistries—or rather his old sophistries revived and readjusted to his requirements as a presidential candidate facing both ways, North and South; to expose his historical distortions of the Declaration of Independence and the Ordinance of 1787, and to denounce his atrocious declaration that he “did not care whether slavery be voted up or voted down.” The speech received a large circulation through the newspapers and attracted some attention even in Washington. As some of my friends in Congress wrote me, Jefferson Davis was reported to have said that I was an execrable Abolitionist, but that I had at least silenced Douglas's charlatanry in logic forever. This was too much praise, for Douglas could never be silenced. He knew well that before a partisan public, audacious iteration and reiteration of a falsehood is often almost as good as proof.

My lecturing engagements left me time for a short visit at Washington. Congress was then in a state of excitement, the life of which we can now hardly imagine. The morning after my arrival I took breakfast with my friend, Mr. John F. Potter, the Representative of the First Congressional District of Wisconsin. He asked me to accompany him to the Capitol, where he promised to take me on the floor of the House of Representatives, if he could. Before we started I saw him buckle on a belt with a pistol and a bowie-knife, to be worn