CARL SCHURZ'S POLITICAL CAREER
nomination and re-election of Grant in 1872. The celebrated Ku Klux Act became law on the 20th of April, 1871. It not only gave the federal courts extensive jurisdiction for the punishment of the outrages, but also authorized the President to declare in rebellion regions infested by the Ku Klux, and to suspend the habeas corpus and suppress the disorders by military force. Substantially, this expressed the theory that the South was again, as it had been in 1861, in insurrection against the authority of the national government. The widespread Ku Klux organization was, the radicals asserted, a revival of the great rebellion, and the Republican party, under the man who had crushed the rebels in the open field, must see to it that they should not triumph by secret conspiracy.
Schurz vigorously opposed this legislation. His reasoning was the same as on the less drastic bills of a year earlier (above, p. 320). He believed the numbers of the Ku Klux to be grossly exaggerated and their purpose to be grossly distorted. The outrages ascribed to the mysterious order were, he said, no new thing, but merely expressions, less numerous and less shocking than just after the surrender in 1865, of the general unsettlement due to the social revolution in the South. The bad government of reconstruction had aggravated the evils and postponed their abolition; but time would bring the return of order. There was nothing in the situation to warrant the proposed legislation, with its excessive centralization, its ruthless overriding of the rights of the States and its “new doctrine of constructive rebellion—the first step toward a doctrine of constructive treason.”
To the sharp and insistent demand of those who pressed the measure, that it be a test of fealty to the Republican party, Mr. Schurz took pains to give an unmistakable reply:—“I stand in the Republican party as an independent man.” He
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