THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
No doubt many of the respectable and patriotic men who attended that convention thought they had done very valuable work for the general pacification by getting their Southern friends publicly to affirm that slavery was dead never to be revived, and that the civil rights of the freedmen were entitled to equal protection and would have it. But the effect of such declarations upon the popular mind at the North was not as great as had been expected. Such declarations by respectable Southern gentlemen, who were perfectly sincere, had been heard before. In fact, almost everybody in the South was ready to declare himself likewise, and with equal sincerity, as to the abolition of the old form of chattel slavery. But a question of far superior importance was, what he would put in the place of the old form of chattel slavery. Scores of times I have myself heard such declaration, immediately followed by the assertion that the negroes would not work without physical compulsion. The “abolition of slavery forever” was readily assented to by the legislative and the municipal bodies which immediately after the declaration concerning the abolishment of slavery would proceed to enact laws, or ordinances, or police regulations under which the freedman was anything but a free man, and under which the promise of the equal protection of the laws was nothing but mockery. There was the rub, and this had come to be well understood at the North in the light of the reports from the South which the advocates of President Johnson's policy could not deny nor obscure. The moral effect of the “National Union Convention” was, therefore, very feeble. It was rather regarded as another deceptive contrivance to obtain the assent of the North to a method of reconstruction which would put the emancipated slave again at the mercy of the master class.
This judgment was doubtless too harsh as far as the
[ 241 ]
