Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/65

 CHAPTER II

JOURNEY to the West in 1854 was not the comfortable sleeping-car affair on fast through trains that it is now, and travelers did not seem to be so nervously anxious to make the quickest possible time. I leisurely visited Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Chicago. All these cities were then in that period of youthful development which is confidently anticipating a great future. Society still felt itself on a footing of substantial equality—not, indeed, equality in point of fortune, but equality in point of opportunity and expectation. There seemed to be a buoyant, joyous spirit animating all classes, and between those classes—if, indeed, classes they could be called—an easy, unrestrained intercourse and co-operation. Of all the places I visited I found this least, perhaps, in St. Louis, where slave-holders—“old families” with aristocratic pretensions of social and political superiority—lived. There the existence of slavery, with its subtle influence, cast its shadow over the industrial and commercial developments of the city, as well as over the relations between the different groups of citizens. But St. Louis had, after all, much more of the elasticity of Western life than any of the larger towns in the slave-holding States, and had among its population a strong anti-slavery element. The political leader of that element was Mr. Frank P. Blair, a man of much ability and an energetic spirit. But the constituency of the anti-slavery movement, in St. Louis and in Missouri generally, was furnished mainly by the population of German birth or descent.

The bulk of that German population consisted, of course,