THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
and advice while he was “waiting and seeing” was the object of my mission. Had not this been the understanding, I should not have undertaken the wearisome and ungrateful journey. But now he did not “wait and see.” On the contrary, he rushed forward the political reconstruction of the Southern States in hot haste—apparently without regard to consequences.
Every good citizen most cordially desired the earliest practicable re-establishment of the constitutional relations of the late “rebel States” to the National Government. But before restoring those States to all the functions of self-government within the Union, the National Government was in conscience bound to keep in mind certain debts of honor. One was due to the Union men of the South who had stood true to the Republic in the days of trial and danger. They might well claim that they should not be delivered up to the tender mercies of the overwhelming majority of their countrymen without any protection—at least not so long as the vindictive passions left behind it by the Civil War were still hot. And the other was due to the colored people, who had furnished 200,000 soldiers to our army at the time when enlistments were running slack and to whom we had given the solemn promise of freedom at a time when that promise gave a distinct moral character to our war for the Union, fatally discouraging the inclination of foreign governments to interfere in our civil conflict against us. Not only imperative reasons of statesmanship, but the very honor of the Republic seemed to forbid that the fate of the emancipated slaves be turned over to State governments ruled by the former master class without the amplest possible guaranty insuring the genuineness of their freedom. But, as every fair-minded observer would admit, nothing could have been more certain than that the political restoration of the “late rebel
[ 186 ]
