44
when the people of the South were undergoing a travail of soul in “bitterness, not far removed from death,” and when popular passion at the North, still more enraged by the foul assassination of President Lincoln, who would have been the South's best friend, [applause,] was sweeping pliant demagogues before it like leaves before the wind—even in that hour, this cool-headed, philosophic statesman, with his fine-fibered German brain, sought to learn the facts, to trace cause and effect, to measure the action and re-action of sectional and racial prejudice, and to put new forces into operation that seemed to him at the time to give promise of the best results.
What would have been the very best course for a wise and high-minded statesmanship to pursue in dealing with the terrible situation at the South, consequent upon the war and emancipation, will, perhaps, always remain a mooted question—certainly we will not attempt to settle it on this occasion. Suffice it now to say that Mr. Schurz did not shrink from the logical results of the war. He fully endorsed them to the extent of establishing and protecting a new system of free labor in lieu of the old system of slave labor. That much he boldly contended for. Yet he did not forget, but seemed willing and pleased to remember that the former masters were human as well as the new made freedmen. [Applause.] He held both classes entitled to fair consideration in any governmental scheme for the pacification and upbuilding of that devastated section of our common country.
One of the peculiar hardships of the reconstruction period in the South was that political disabilities were
