THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
and crafty alertness to turn his defense into attack, so that, even when overwhelmed with adverse argument, he would issue from the fray with the air of the conqueror. He was utterly unsparing of the feelings of his opponents. He would nag and nettle them with disdainful words of challenge, and insult them with such names as “dastards” and “traitors.” Nothing could equal the contemptuous scorn, the insolent curl of his lip with which, in the debates to which I listened, he denounced the anti-slavery men in Congress as “the Abolition confederates,” and at a subsequent time, after the formation of the Republican party, as “Black Republicans.” But worse than that: he would, with utter unscrupulousness, malign his opponents' motives, distort their sayings, and attribute to them all sorts of iniquitous deeds or purposes of which he must have known them to be guiltless. Indeed, Douglas's style of attack was sometimes so exasperatingly offensive, that it required, on the part of the anti-slavery men in the Senate, a very high degree of self-control to abstain from retaliating. But so far as I can remember, only Mr. Sumner yielded to the temptation to repay him in kind.
While for these reasons I should be very far from calling Douglas an ideal debater, it is certain that I have never seen a more formidable parliamentary pugilist. To call him so must not be thought unbecoming, since there was something in his manners which very strongly smacked of the bar-room. He was the idol of the rough element of his party, and his convivial association with that element left its unmistakable imprint upon his habits and his deportment. He would sometimes offend the dignity of the Senate by astonishing conduct. Once, at a night session of the Senate I saw him, after a boisterous speech, throw himself upon the lap of a brother senator and loll there, talking and laughing, for ten or fifteen minutes,
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