CARL SCHURZ'S POLITICAL CAREER
“Dear Sir:
“I have just read your letter of the 6th. I think I can
fully enter into your feelings, since I expected to be called
upon to support Adams or Davis for President under
circumstances scarcely dissimilar from yours. I knew, and you can
easily assure yourself, that the sympathizers with our
movement in the South were nearly all for me, yet they were
represented at Cincinnati by delegates who nearly all opposed
me. They represented the money that brought them to
Cincinnati, not the people they left behind them. And the
‘Revenue Reformers’ from this quarter were not Republicans at
all, but frauds. They had not been near a Republican
meeting before for years, if ever. Still I expected to support a
ticket which I knew did not deal fairly with the people behind it.
“Of course the most of the Germans dislike me, not so much that I am a Protectionist as that I am a Total Abstinence man. They will not vote for me so generally as they would have voted for Adams or Trumbull. And still I believe that I shall receive 75,000 Republican votes in Illinois, and her electoral vote. Even should she go against me I hope we shall be able to do without her. We shall carry New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey and the South with hardly a break. I hope the Northwest will help us some; if she does not, we must endeavor to get on.
“From the first I peremptorily refused to have anything to do with bargains or arrangements of any kind. They were proposed from several quarters and rejected with scorn. Hence I did not see how my nomination could be effected with the South so shamefully misrepresented.
“I wish, in what we may have to say hereafter, the words
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