THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
tendencies, hostile to the foreign born. Although these nativistic tendencies were in fact directed more against the Irish than against the Germans, the feeling that their rights were in danger was, at the time, much sharpened among the Germans, too, by brutal excesses that were being committed in various places against the foreign born by the rough element of the native population, and by the springing up of the “Know-nothing” organization, which was set on foot for the declared purpose of excluding the foreign born from participation in political power. The attachment of the foreign born, and among them the Germans, to the Democratic party was, therefore, not at all unnatural, and although the Germans were at heart opposed to slavery, yet their anxiety about their own rights outweighed, for the time, all other considerations, and served to keep them in the Democratic ranks. Sitting on a dry-goods box in front of one of the stores on the “Main Street” of Watertown, I had many an arduous, but, of course, good-natured talk on the political situation with groups of fellow-townsmen, without, however, at first accomplishing much more for the anti-slavery cause than that I occasionally called forth a serious shaking of heads or an admission that the slavery question was indeed a matter very much worth thinking about.
But what I read in the newspapers of the invasions of the Territory of Kansas by the pro-slavery “border ruffians” of Missouri, and of their high-handed and bloody attempts to subjugate the Free-State settlers there, deeply agitated me. In June, the national conventions of the great political parties were held. That of the Democrats met at Cincinnati, in its platform approved the opening of the Territories to slavery under the guise of “popular sovereignty,” and nominated Buchanan and Breckinridge as its candidates; that of the young Republican party met at Philadelphia, in its platform
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