A Sketch of Carl Schurz's Political Career 1869-1906

By Frederic Bancroft and William A. Dunning

In this book, Bancroft gives a detailed account of Carl Schurz's political life. Carl Schurz was a German revolutionary and an American statesman, journalist, and reformer. He was active in political life for more than 50 years and had much influence on the new Republican Party. He was a prolific writer of books, articles and speeches.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DigiCat
• Release date: Jun 3, 2022
• ISBN: 8596547054795

Book preview

Frederic Bancroft, William A. Dunning

A Sketch of Carl Schurz's Political Career 1869-1906

EAN 8596547054795

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: [e-mail]

Table of Contents

The Rising Senator

The Liberal Republican

The Senatorial Freelance

The Secretary of the Interior

Journalism, Cleveland's First Administration, Literature and Business

Editor of Harper's Weekly, Political Sage

Anti-Imperialism and the End

The Rising Senator

Table of Contents

I

Table of Contents

THE RISING SENATOR

WHEN Mr. Schurz entered the Senate the political conditions centering in that body were very peculiar. The arduous conflict between President Johnson and Congress had shifted the center of gravity of our constitutional system far over on the legislative side, and the Senate especially had gained unprecedented prestige and importance. Through the Tenure of Office Act Senators were enabled, as never before, to influence the personnel of the civil service and thus to check and control the presidential policy in every branch of the administration. The consequences were serious. In the absence of unified and certain control the civil service had become demoralized beyond even its wartime state. The Senate was displaying an overweening hauteur as if it were the government. In the heat of the fierce struggle with Andrew Johnson these exceptional conditions had been little thought of, although they were factors in determining the acquittal of the President on impeachment, and also in inspiring the first concrete proposition for a civil-service reform. Soon after Grant took possession of the White House the relation of the Senate to the offices became a subject of serious debate.

Carl Schurz 1879.jpg

CARL SCHURZ IN 1879

The new President, assuming that there was no longer any reason for the restrictions that had been imposed upon the powers of his office when Johnson filled it, suggested the repeal of the Tenure of Office Act. The House, always restive under any access of power to the Senate, promptly and enthusiastically supported the President's suggestion. In the Senate, however, a strong opposition was manifested. A number of the ablest Republican Senators, having supported the passage of the act by grave doctrines of constitutional law and with a serious purpose of exalting the authority of the Senate, were reluctant to reverse themselves. But Grant grimly announced that he would make no removals till his hands were freed. Under pressure of this attitude, so grievous to the spoils-mongering Congressman, and of the general desire among the Republicans to have harmony between the legislature and the new Executive, a disingenuous bill was patched up and passed that in a devious manner restored the power of removal to the President.

The debate on this subject, running through March, 1869, gave to Mr. Schurz an opportunity to put on record, at the very outset of his senatorial career, the conviction and purpose which were peculiarly to distinguish his whole public life, and to make it unique in American politics. In the effort to adjust the different views as to what should be done with the Tenure of Office Act, a proposition was made to suspend its operation for a time, instead of repealing it. This suggestion was on its face ignoble, but it received considerable support, especially from those who were tormented with a desire for an immediate clean sweep of the Johnson incumbents. Schurz voted for the motion to suspend on wholly different grounds. The great need of the time, he declared, was the abolition of the spoils system and of Congressional patronage, and the establishment of appointment through examination. The more the existing system and its evils should be discussed, the nearer would be the accomplishment of reform. If the Tenure of Office Act should be suspended for a time, the end of the period fixed would bring a fresh discussion of the general subject — a result wholly desirable and warranting support of a proposition otherwise unjustifiable.

The purpose thus announced naturally failed of realization in the particular form here proposed. But Schurz held fast to his policy; and on December 20, 1869, he introduced a bill embodying a far-reaching system of civil-service reform. This incorporated the scheme already advocated for several years by Representative Jenckes, of Rhode Island, but extended its provisions over a much greater number of offices. In taking up the advocacy of this project Schurz identified himself with a group of Senators — Trumbull, Thurman, Sumner, Bayard — that included some of the best minds in public life. However, many influences conspired to render comprehensive reform impossible at this time. To the majority of Congressmen patronage and spoils were indispensable instruments of party success, and party success was the sole practical method of promoting patriotic ends. President Grant, by throwing his powerful influence in favor of reform in the manner of appointments, insured the adoption of a measure in 1871 under which a commission was established and a system of examinations was instituted. But by the time it was fairly in operation some of the strongest supporters of the reform had become antagonistic to the administration, and the consequent alienation between these men and Grant made it possible for the congressional adversaries of the reform to reduce the new system to a nullity, for a time, by refusing the necessary appropriations. However, the law remained and furnished a basis for the developments of later years.

The same intellectual and political traits of which Mr. Schurz's zeal for civil-service reform was born made his hostility to the administration inevitable. His whole conception of public policy was far above the play of merely personal and party interests. He had no taste for political controversy that turned mainly on the rivalry of ambitious leaders, or for the creation of efficient vote-getting machinery without reference to the principles and the vital issues that the votes should sustain. Perhaps his indifference to these considerations was, at times, extreme for a statesman in a democracy; but it gave to his senatorial career exceptional seriousness and dignity. From his first appearance in the debates, the lofty tone of his speeches, emphasized by graceful diction and impressive delivery, at once commanded the close attention of his colleagues on the floor and of large audiences in the galleries. Every formal speech also had much of the literary quality of a well-rounded essay on the subject under discussion; and his argument always appealed to minds capable of grasping the larger aspects of history and philosophy. Although there was no lack of satire and cutting denunciation for false theories and objectionable projects, mere personalities and unreasoned invective were disliked and avoided. Consequently Schurz early won from serious opponents a degree of respectful consideration that Sumner, popularly regarded as the leader of the Senate, had never been able to secure. The characteristic qualities of Schurz's senatorial oratory were especially manifest in his speeches on Reconstruction, and on the attempted annexation of Santo Domingo.

In the spring of 1869, eight of the eleven secessionist States were in normal relations with the general government, and were politically in the hands of the Republicans, to whom, by enfranchising the freedmen and disfranchising many whites, Congress had given control. The remaining three States, Virginia, Mississippi and Texas, completed the steps necessary to readmission, and came up for formal acceptance by Congress in the winter of 1869-70. By this time social and political conditions throughout the South were revealing the difficulties of the new dispensation. Against the rule of Northern men and negroes, extravagant, inefficient and corrupt, the Southern whites reacted through secret organizations, terror and violence. The Ku Klux and their deeds made a gruesome record in many localities, and the inability of the State governments to suppress the disorders exposed the frailty of the new political régime.

In Congress, Republican sentiment was seriously divided as to the method of dealing with the Southern situation. All factions agreed in requiring the three States yet to be admitted to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment; and the same requirement was imposed upon Georgia, whose Conservative legislature, by the exclusion of negro members from their seats, had brought the State into a process of re-reconstruction. But when the radicals in Congress undertook to press through a barefaced project for prolonging the term of the Republican governor and legislature in Georgia, regardless of the State law, the moderate Republican Senators joined the Democrats and thwarted the scheme.

Schurz gave hearty aid to the moderates. Abating nothing of his confidence that reconstruction through negro suffrage had been the least objectionable policy, he declined to recognize that the maintenance of Republican party supremacy in the restored States was a sufficient ground for continued interference by the central government. The widespread political and social disorders in the South were regarded by hot partisans like Senators Morton, Drake and Wilson as expressions of the old rebellious spirit in the whites and of a malignant purpose to thwart by violence the building up of the Republican party in the reconstructed States. Louisiana and Georgia had been lost by the Republicans in the presidential elections in 1868; Tennessee and Virginia had chosen Conservative or Democratic State governments in 1869. The tendency thus manifested was held by the extremists to justify any degree of rigor in maintaining Republican ascendancy in the other States.

Schurz regarded such a spirit as in the highest degree mischievous. In the long debates on the Georgia question and on the Enforcement Act during the spring of 1870, he set forth his general views on the Southern situation. Like every other rebellion in history, ours must have its epilogue, he said; and the unrest and disorder in the South were incidents of this. They had a far deeper source than mere party politics; they were evidences of that process of second fermentation through which he anticipated that all the Southern States would have to pass. The proper treatment of this condition must be like that of a fever: watchfulness and care in guiding its course, but no radical or drastic action till time should have done its work. The inveterate habits, opinions and ways of thinking of Southern society must be transformed, and such a change can be of but slow growth. The greatest obstacle to a restoration of sound conditions would be legislative and executive action of purely partisan and extra-constitutional character. This would confirm the influence of the worst elements in the South and would provoke a disastrous Democratic reaction. The great need of the time, he believed, was that the Southern question should be wholly detached from partisan politics, and that the national government should leave the reconstructed States to work out their own problems. The most important positive action that Congress should take was the removal of the disabilities that still excluded many of the ablest Southerners from political life.

There was discernible in Mr. Schurz's attitude on the Southern question a profound discontent with the practical working of negro suffrage and of Republican party machinery in general as well as in the reconstructed States. By the end of the year 1870 this feeling became a matter of national notoriety by the sensational course of politics in Missouri. The factional division of the Republicans in this State, manifested in the contest that put Schurz into the Senate, came to a decisive issue in 1870 on the question of repealing the extremely rigorous laws by which Confederate sympathizers were disfranchised. The original justification for these laws had long ceased to have force, and their chief function was to furnish unscrupulous Republican politicians with the means to maintain party supremacy in State and local affairs. The liberal element of the party took up the demand for an immediate abolition of the whole system. The radicals, who controlled the party machinery, opposed the demand, and, by shrewd and unscrupulous manipulation of the mass of negro voters just created by the Fifteenth Amendment, secured control of the State convention.

To Schurz the procedure of the radical politicians was objectionable from every point of view. It promoted among the whites a policy of exasperation and proscription where he believed conciliation and concord were needful; it identified the newly enfranchised negroes with a cause that must bar them from all cordial relations with the better class of whites and leave them the dependents of mere political schemers; and it exhibited, in the methods through which the convention had been packed by the radicals, the