and methods in politics. European peoples had throughout history sought without ceasing, but in vain, to acquire power and prestige in warmer regions than their own. A romantic longing for the South had impelled many a happy nation to ruin; and, with words that could have come only from one trained amid the ideals and traditions that inspired the German reform movement of 1848, he illustrated his thought by reference to his native land. "It was on the beautiful plains of Italy that the German Empire spent its strength. It was in hunting after Southern shadows that it frittered away its great opportunities of home consolidation. It was, so to say, in the embraces of that beautiful Southern siren that the German Empire lost its manhood." As recent and immediately appropriate illustrations of the dangers to be shunned, he cited the experiences of Great Britain in India, France in Mexico, and Spain and France in Santo Domingo itself. "Do not," he concluded, "touch a scheme like this; do not trifle with that which may poison the future of this great nation; beware of the tropics."
This speech was much applauded and praised. In later years Mr. Schurz classed it as one of the best three of his senatorial career. Its effects on fellow-Senators, was, of course, not in proportion to its merits. Morton's resolution was passed by heavy majorities in both Houses; a commission under its provision went to Santo Domingo and made a report favorable to annexation. But Grant, realizing at last that public opinion was not with him, despaired of his undertaking. As we shall see, he was more ready than his critics to let the matter rest.
Meantime the discussion had sharpened the line of division between the friends and the enemies of the administration among the Republicans in Congress, and had furnished the President's critics with ample material for the forthcoming contest.
At the opening of the Forty-second Congress, March, 1871, the Republican senatorial caucus substituted Cameron for Sumner as chairman of the committee on foreign relations. This action—the removal of an important chairman without his consent—was a very unusual one, and was regarded by Sumner as revenge, dictated by the administration, for the Senator's activity in thwarting the President in his Santo Domingo policy. In reality other factors entered into the matter, though their influence was not fully understood at the time. Schurz and other Senators, even some who acted regularly with the administration group, protested with much warmth against Sumner's deposition, but in vain.
At this same session Grant, urged by Morton and others of his special supporters, committed himself to the application of the national war power to the suppression of the Ku Klux disorders. To this policy Sumner gave his full support, for to him it seemed to be only a new phase of the old anti-slavery movement, which so long had the first place in this thoughts. Schurz, while not less a philanthropist, was a philosophical public man, and since 1865 he had closely studied the Southern question, kept an open mind, and had become a resident of the South. His actual experience of negro suffrage in Missouri, and his clear insight into the purely partisan influences that so powerfully operated in promoting the administration's Ku Klux policy, compelled him to choose a course of action different from that of his dear friend Sumner. Practically all the other Republican Senators of the anti-administration group agreed with Schurz. Prestige had usually given to Sumner the nominal leadership of this group. Now, so far as there was any leadership, it fell to Schurz.
At the end of March, 1871, the Santo Domingo affair made its last appearance in formal debate. Sumner had introduced a series of resolutions censuring the use made of the navy in connection with Babcock's visits and with later proceedings under the preliminary protocol. This touched the weakest spot in the presidential case; for with cheerful disregard of all the nice points of diplomatic and international practice, Grant, Secretary Robeson, Babcock and sundry naval commanders had practically taken armed possession of Santo Domingo and committed acts of war against Hayti with no right whatever, but merely in anticipation of the ratification of the treaty. Schurz's speech on these resolutions was an extremely effective demonstration in public law. Morton, presuming, as he often did in colloquy with Schurz, that the latter's foreign nativity implied a lack of familiarity with our history, sought to trip him up by reference to the opening of the Mexican War, but spoke incautiously and without due preparation. Schurz easily, completely and ludicrously discomfited him. Sumner's resolutions failed, of course, to pass, but their chief purpose was attained in drawing public attention to some very reckless acts of the administration.
On the Ku Klux question, which was the chief subject of debate in the spring of 1871, a determined purpose was manifested by the radical leaders, when once they had secured the support of the President for their policy, to make it the supreme test of party fealty and to use it for effecting the re-nomination and re-election of Grant in 1872. The celebrated Ku Klux Act became law on the 20th of April, 1871. It not only gave the federal courts extensive jurisdiction for the punishment of the outrages, but also authorized the President to declare in rebellion regions infested by the Ku Klux, and to suspend the habeas corpus and suppress the disorders by military force. Substantially, this expressed the theory that the South was again, as it had been in 1861, in insurrection against the authority of the national government. The widespread Ku Klux organization was, the radicals asserted, a revival of the great rebellion, and the Republican party, under the man who had crushed the rebels in the open field, must see to it that they should not triumph by secret conspiracy.
Schurz vigorously opposed this legislation. His reasoning was the same as on the less drastic bills of a year earlier (above, p. 320). He believed the numbers of the Ku Klux to be grossly exaggerated and their purpose to be grossly distorted. The outrages ascribed to the mysterious order were, he said, no new thing, but merely expressions, less numerous and less shocking than just after the surrender in 1865, of the general unsettlement due to the social revolution in the South. The bad government of reconstruction had aggravated the evils and postponed their abolition; but time would bring the return of order. There was nothing in the situation to warrant the proposed legislation, with its excessive centralization, its ruthless overriding of the rights of the States and its "new doctrine of constructive rebellion—the first step toward a doctrine of constructive treason."
To the sharp and insistent demand of those who pressed the measure, that it be a test of fealty to the Republican party, Mr. Schurz took pains to give an unmistakable reply:—"I stand in the Republican party as an independent man." He categorically declared that he would not be a partisan; he was a "liberal Republican," and specifically announced the liberal creed: "We desire peace and good will to all men. We desire the removal of political restrictions and the maintenance of local self-government to the utmost extent compatible with the Constitution as it is. We desire the questions connected with the Civil War to be disposed of forever, to make room as soon as possible for the new problems of the present and the future."
The significance of this pronouncement was not misunderstood. It foreshadowed a political movement, on the lines of that recently successful in Missouri, against the policies and the men of the present Republican administration. It pointed to a readjustment of party lines and particularly to a firm resistance to the renomination of Grant. In the Senate the group of out-and-out anti-administration Republicans was small—Schurz, Ferry of Connecticut, Trumbull of Illinois, Tipton of Nebraska. Among the newspaper editors and other influential men of the party there was, however, a very widespread dissatisfaction with Grant. Greeley, Halstead, Horace White, and Samuel Bowles were especially outspoken and effective.
SAMUEL BOWLES
However pure Grant's motives and intentions, his actual conduct of the administration had been far from praiseworthy. Through love of his friends and his relatives he had given office to an unusual number of wholly unqualified persons, who had brought discredit upon him as well as themselves. His gratitude to the Congressmen who had sustained his Dominican policy had turned the federal civil service in a number of States into a mere machine for the promotion of personal political ends. Morton in Indiana, Conkling in New York, Chandler in Michigan, Cameron in Pennsylvania and Butler in Massachusetts, for example, were autocrats of their respective States through the patronage
