Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/260

 in the front rank of the compromisers. I was one of the many anti-slavery men who were greatly puzzled by Mr. Seward's mysterious attitude, and much alarmed as to what might come of it. What we feared was not merely that the principles of our anti-slavery party might be surrendered, and the fruits of our anti-slavery victory be frittered away, but that, under the influence of a momentary panic, a step might be taken that would—to use a term current at that time—“Mexicanize” our government—that is, destroy in it that element of stability which consists in the absolute assurance that when the officers of the government are legally elected, their election is unconditionally accepted and submitted to by the minority. When that rule is broken—when the possibility is admitted that, after an election, the minority may prescribe conditions upon the fulfillment of which its acceptance of the results of the election is to depend, the stability of republican government is gone. So long as such a possibility exists, the republic will be in a state of intermittent revolution. And this rule would have been broken. We would, in order to avoid by a post-election bargain one civil conflict, have opened the way forever to many other civil conflicts. We would, in one word, have destroyed the most indispensable guarantee of stability and good order in the Republic, had we after the legal election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency, purchased the submission of the slave-holding States to the result of that election by any compromise whatever. It was, therefore, not merely this or that concession to the slave-holding interest that was to be opposed, but it was the compromise as such, however little it might have conceded.

The profound anxiety I felt on this subject found voice in a series of letters I wrote during that winter to my intimate friend in the House of Representatives, Mr. Potter of