THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
under his clothes. “You seem surprised,” he said. “This is my regular morning toilet when I go to the House. You know I am no ruffian, but a peaceable citizen. We do not know what may happen.” Then he explained to me that the Northern anti-slavery men might expect an attack at any time, not so much from the Southern Representatives themselves on the floor, as from a gang of Southern desperadoes gathered in the galleries. “They may open on us at any time,” said Mr. Potter. “But when they begin to shoot we mean to be prepared to shoot back. A number of our friends go armed just as I do.” I had already been told that Senator Wade from Ohio, having been threatened by Southern men, one day appeared in the Senate with a brace of large horse pistols, which he quietly put on the lid of his desk within sight of everybody; and when he was sure they had been noticed, he calmly shut them up in his drawer, ready to hand, and leaned back in his chair, looking around with a grim smile. Whether the story is true, I am not quite certain. But it was widely believed, for it looked very much like “old Ben Wade,” and, no doubt, it fitted the situation.
Mr. Potter did in some way get me on the floor of the House, and I had the satisfaction of listening to a debate which, whatever the question before the House might be, soon arrayed the representatives of the anti-slavery North and of the pro-slavery South against one another in angry altercation—the Northern men comparatively calm and argumentative, the Southern hotspurs defiant, overbearing, grandiloquent, taunting their antagonists with cowardice and all sorts of meanness, and flinging, with the utmost recklessness, the dissolution of the Union into the debate as a thing they rather desired than dreaded. I heard Mr. Keith, of South Carolina, a rather handsome and oratorically flamboyant young man, rend the Union “from turret to foundation stone.” There was in the bearing
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