CARL SCHURZ'S POLITICAL CAREER
to annexation. But Grant, realizing at last that public opinion was not with him, despaired of his undertaking. As we shall see, he was more ready than his critics to let the matter rest.
Meantime the discussion had sharpened the line of division between the friends and the enemies of the administration among the Republicans in Congress, and had furnished the President's critics with ample material for the forthcoming contest.
At the opening of the Forty-second Congress, March, 1871, the Republican senatorial caucus substituted Cameron for Sumner as chairman of the committee on foreign relations. This action—the removal of an important chairman without his consent—was a very unusual one, and was regarded by Sumner as revenge, dictated by the administration, for the Senator's activity in thwarting the President in his Santo Domingo policy. In reality other factors entered into the matter, though their influence was not fully understood at the time. Schurz and other Senators, even some who acted regularly with the administration group, protested with much warmth against Sumner's deposition, but in vain.
At this same session Grant, urged by Morton and others of his special supporters, committed himself to the application of the national war power to the suppression of the Ku Klux disorders. To this policy Sumner gave his full support, for to him it seemed to be only a new phase of the old anti-slavery movement, which so long had the first place in this thoughts. Schurz, while not less a philanthropist, was a philosophical public man, and since 1865 he had closely studied the Southern question, kept an open mind, and had become a resident of the South. His actual experience of negro suffrage in Missouri, and his clear insight into the purely partisan influences that so powerfully operated in promoting the administration's Ku
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