Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/226

 of those distinctions came very near producing a comical effect. When Mr. Ashmun of Massachusetts had been elected permanent president of the Convention, the temporary chairman appointed United States Senator Preston King of New York and myself a “committee of two” to conduct Mr. Ashmun to the chair. Senator King was a man of rather low stature and conspicuously rotund form, while I was over six feet tall and very slender. When the Senator and I met in the aisle to walk together to Mr. Ashmun's seat, and thus to perform a function intended to be somewhat solemn, and the Senator looked up at me and I looked down on him, a broad smile overspread his jocund face, to which I could not help responding. The suggestion of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza was too striking for the assembled multitude to resist, and a titter ran over the convention which might have broken into a general guffaw had the induction of Mr. Ashmun into the chair not been over so quickly.

I was appointed a member of the Committee on Resolutions that had to draw up the Republican platform, and in that committee was permitted to write the paragraph concerning the naturalization laws so that the Republican party be washed clean of the taint of Know-nothingism. This was done in moderate but unequivocal terms, which produced an excellent effect in the campaign. I also took part in formulating the anti-slavery declarations of the platform, but there an unintentional omission occurred which led to a dramatic scene in the convention. While the platform severely denounced the policy of the Administration with regard to Kansas, repudiated all the theories upon which rested the right of the slave-holder to carry his slave property into the Territories, as well as Douglas's spurious “popular-sovereignty” doctrine, denied the authority of Congress of a Territorial Legislature, or of any