THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
tues and capabilities. His word would, therefore, go very far toward carrying conviction. But in this case the discredit which President Johnson had already incurred proved too heavy for even the military hero to carry.
It is more than probable that General Grant, who had no political experience whatever, had permitted himself to be used for the President's purpose without knowing it. His report was, no doubt, perfectly candid. In it he frankly stated that he had hurried through Virginia without conversing with anybody, and that he had stayed only one day in Raleigh, North Carolina, only two days in Charleston, South Carolina, and only one day each in Savannah and Augusta, Georgia. One of his conclusions was “that the mass of thinking men of the South accept the present situation of affairs in good faith.” That the mass of the thinking men who called upon him during his hurried visits at Raleigh, Charleston, Savannah and Augusta, told him so, and that they did their best to put things in the most favorable light in order to secure the earliest possible restoration of the Southern States to their self-governing functions, and that General Grant generously accepted that view, cannot fairly be questioned. But he frankly stated that he “did not meet anyone, either those holding places under the Government, or citizens of the Southern States, who thought it practicable to withdraw the military from the South at present, the white and the black mutually requiring the protection of the General Government.” He went even so far as to say that “in some form the Freedmen's Bureau is an absolute necessity until civil law is established and enforced, securing to the freedmen their rights and full protection” and “it cannot be expected that the opinions held by men at the South for years can be changed in a day, and therefore the freedmen require, for a few years, not only laws to protect them, but the
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