THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
gone?” But his eyes glowed from under his bushy brows with the old keen sparkle and his mind was as alert as ever. It may be that his age—he was then seventy-four—and his physical infirmities, admonishing him that at best he would have only a few years more to live, served to inspire him with an impatient craving and a fierce determination to make the best of his time, and thus to intensify the activity of his mental energies. To compass the abolition of slavery had been the passion of his life. He had hailed the Civil War as the great opportunity. He had never been quite satisfied with Lincoln, whose policy seemed to him too dilatory. He demanded quick, sharp and decisive blows.
Now that the abolition of slavery was actually decreed, he saw President Johnson follow a policy which in his view threatened substantially to undo the great work. His scornful anger at Andrew Johnson was equaled only by his contempt for the Republicans who sided with the President. He was bound to defeat this reactionary attempt and to see slavery thoroughly killed beyond the possibility of resurrection, at any cost. As to the means to he employed he scrupled little. He wanted the largest possible Republican majority in Congress, and to this end he would have expelled any number of Democrats from their seats, by hook or by crook. When my old friend and quondam law partner, General Halbert E. Paine, who was chairman of the Committee on Elections in the House, told him that in a certain contested election case to be voted upon both contestants were rascals, Stevens simply asked: “Well, which is our rascal?” He said this not in jest, but with perfect seriousness. He would have seated Beelzebub in preference to the angel Gabriel, had he believed Beelzebub to be more certain than Gabriel to aid him in beating the President's reconstruction policy. His leadership in the House was peculiar. His
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