Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/370

 one. His notions of right and wrong were absolute. When someone asked him whether he had ever looked at the other side of the slavery question, he answered: “There is no other side.”  No answer could have been more characteristic. Not that he was merely unwilling to see the other side of a question of that nature—he was unable to see it. The peremptoriness of his convictions was so strong, so absolute, I might say, that it was difficult for him to understand how anyone could seriously consider “the other side” without being led astray by some moral obliquity. Of a very old and tried friend who favored a temporizing course toward the South after the election of Mr. Lincoln, he said, after a severe denunciation of that course, “However, I believe he is honest”—but said it in a way indicating that it had cost him a very great effort to reach such a conclusion. I know an instance in which his bluntly ingenuous manner of saying such things gave great offense to a family consisting of high-minded persons with whom he had been on terms of intimate friendship for many years.

Mr. Lincoln was a constant puzzle to him. He frequently told me of profound and wise things Mr. Lincoln had said, and then again of other sayings which were unintelligible to him and seemed to him inconsistent with a serious appreciation of the tasks before us. Being entirely devoid of the sense of humor himself, Mr. Sumner frequently—I might say almost always—failed to see the point of the quaint anecdotes or illustrations with which Lincoln was fond of elucidating his argument, as with a flashlight. Mr. Sumner not seldom quoted such Lincolnisms to me, and asked me with an air of innocent bewilderment, whether I could guess what the President could possibly have meant. To Sumner's mind the paramount object of the war was the abolition of slavery. He had all his life been a peace man in the widest sense. His great oration, delivered