Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/229

 flower of youthful manhood. As he stood there in that convention, towering over the vast multitude, his beautiful face radiant with resolute fervor, his singularly melodious voice thrilling with impassioned anxiety of purpose, one might have seen in him an ideal, poetic embodiment of the best of that moral impulse and that lofty enthusiasm which aroused the people of the North to the decisive struggle against slavery. We became friends then and there, and we remained friends to the day of his death.

After the close of the Convention, Mr. Evarts is reported to have said in a tone of mournful irony: “We New Yorkers have lost our candidate, but we have at least saved the Declaration of Independence.” I have often thought, in the light of later events, that what they saved was worth much more than what they lost. As the Convention progressed it became more and more evident every hour that Seward, whose support came mainly from New York, New England, and the Northwest, was not only not gaining, but rather losing, in strength. This was owing to two causes. The argument that his supposed ultra-radicalism—which really consisted more in phrase than in purpose—would greatly imperil the success of the Republican party in the “doubtful” States of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, and New Jersey, had its effect. I do not myself think that the danger was nearly as great as the managing politicians of those States and the personal enemies of Seward, led by Horace Greeley, represented it to be. I believed then, and I believe now, that the moral impetus of the campaign, aided by the internecine war in the Democratic party, would have carried Seward through triumphantly. But many earnest anti-slavery men who otherwise would have been glad to make Seward their candidate, thought it would be reckless as well as unnecessary to take what many others considered a serious risk. Such men