THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
results of the war,” he was in point of principle not far apart from Mr. Stevens. The difference between them was rather one of temperamental treatment of the problem, a difference of view as to the means to be used for the accomplishment of a common end. In fact, concerning this common end there was hardly any divergence of opinion among Republicans, save the very few who had openly taken the part of President Johnson and stood unflinchingly by him. There were in those days wonderful displays of acuteness in discussing constitutional metaphysics touching the true status in the Union of the “States lately in rebellion.” The question whether those States had, by the rebellion, committed suicide, leaving behind them only so much territory to be governed or disposed of by the general government at pleasure; or whether in spite of their revolutionary attempt to separate themselves from the Union, they had preserved their essential being and identity as States with all the rights and privileges inherent in States of the Union; or whether they had by their revolutionary attempt acquired a character intermediate between those two conditions—was debated with infinite ingenuity in logic-chopping, and sometimes with a good deal of heat.
It must be admitted that, if we accept his premises, Mr. Johnson made, in point of logic, a pretty plausible case. His proposition was that a State, in the view of the Federal Constitution, is indestructible; that an ordinance of secession adopted by its inhabitants, or its political organs, did not take it out of the Union; that by declaring and treating those ordinances of secession as “null and void” of no force, virtually non-existent, the Federal government itself had accepted and sanctioned that theory; that during the rebellion the constitutional rights and functions of those States were merely suspended, and that when the rebellion ceased they were ipso
[ 219 ]
