There was Sumner—the great Sumner—who had quarreled with Grant and
Fish, to keep him company and urge him on. There was the Tribune, the
puissant Tribune—two of them, one in New York and the other in
Chicago—to give him countenance. There was need of liberalizing and
loosening things in Missouri, for which he sat in the Senate—they could
not go on forever half the best elements in the State disfranchised.
Thus the Liberal Movement of 1872.
Schurz went to Cincinnati elate with hope. He was an idealist—not quite
yet a philosopher. He had his friends about him. Sam Bowles—the first
newspaper politician of his day, with none of the handicaps carried by
Raymond and Forney—a man keen of insight and foresight, fertile of
resources, and not afraid—stood foremost among them. Next came Horace
White. Doric in his simplicity like a marble shaft, and to the outer
eye as cold as marble, but below a man of feeling, conviction and
tenacity, a working journalist and a doughty doctrinaire. A little
group of such men formed itself about Schurz—then only forty-three
years old—to what end? Why, Greeley, Horace Greeley, the bellwether of
abolitionism, the king bee of protectionism, the man of fads and isms
and the famous “old white hat.”
To some of us it was laughable. To Schurz it was tragical. A bridge had
to be constructed for him to pass—for retrace his steps he could
not—and, as it were, blindfolded, he had to be backed upon this like a
mule aboard a train of cars. I sometimes wonder what might have
happened if Schurz had then and there resigned his seat in the Senate,
got his brood together and returned to Germany. I dare say he would
have been welcomed by Bismarck.
Certainly there was no lodgment for him thenceforward in American
politics. The exigencies of 1876-77 made him a provisional place in the
Hayes Administration; but, precisely as the Democrats of Missouri could
put such a man to no use, the Republicans at large could find no use
for him. He seemed a bull in a china shop to the political organization
he honored with a preference wholly intellectual, and having no stomach
for either extreme, he became a Mugwump.
III
He was a German. He was an artist. By nature a doctrinaire, he had
become a philosopher. He could never wholly adjust himself to his
environment. He lectured Lincoln, and Lincoln, perceiving his earnest
truthfulness and genuine qualities, forgave him his impertinence, nor
ceased to regard him with the enduring affection one might have for an
ardent, aspiring and lovable boy. He was repellant to Grant, who could
not and perhaps did not desire to understand him.... To him the
Southerners were always the red-faced, swashbuckling slave-drivers he
had fancied and pictured them in the days of his abolition oratory.
More and more he lived in a rut of his own fancies, wise in books and
counsels, gentle in his relations with the few who enjoyed his
confidence; to the last a most captivating personality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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