THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
At the same time the spectacle presented by the other half of the restored Union was perplexing in the extreme. The Southern armies, too, had been dissolved, and the officers and men had “gone home”—no doubt with the honest intention of conducting themselves as peaceable citizens, in spite of the bitterness of their disappointment. But their situation was bewildering in its embarrassments—a disastrous defeat behind them, ruin and desolation around them, the most perplexing problems of existence before them, and fierce conflicts of opinion as to how this problem could and should be solved.
And alas! Abraham Lincoln was dead. He had been taken off at the moment when he had risen highest in the esteem, the affection, and the confidence of his countrymen; when almost all of those that, at the time of his accession to the presidency, had seen in him only an insignificant country lawyer, or that had lampooned him even as a mere boorish buffoon, or that, during the war, had accused him of weakness, aimless hesitancy, and blundering vacillation—when almost all of them had finally concluded that his policy of patience, sympathetic magnanimity, and just appreciation of public sentiment, although liable to criticism in detail, was on the whole the best to hold all the Union forces together, and thus to save the Republic; and when, whatever differences there may have been between his practical views of reconstruction and the theories of others, the South trusted him that he would treat those “lately in rebellion” with “malice toward none and charity for all,” and the North trusted him that he would permit nothing to be done to imperil the liberty of the emancipated slave—he thus being the natural moderator between the victors and the vanquished in the efforts to solve the portentous puzzle left by the war. Alas! he was dead, and the initiator measures for that solution were confided by fate to
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