A philosopher and an artist, he was drawn by circumstance into the
vortex of affairs. Except for the stirring events of 1848, he might
have lived and died a professor at Bonn or Heidelberg. If he had
pursued his musical studies at Leipsic he must have become a master of
the piano keyboard. As it was, he played Schumann and Chopin
creditably. The rescue of Kinkel, the flight from the fatherland, the
mild Bohemianizing in Paris and London awakened within him the spirit
of action rather than of adventure.
There was nothing of the Dalgetty about him; too reflective and too
accomplished. His early marriage attests a domestic trend, from which
he never departed; though an idealist in his public aspirations and
aims he was a sentimentalist in his home life and affections. Genial in
temperament and disposition, his personal habit was moderation itself.
He was a German. Never did a man live so long in a foreign country and
take on so few of its thoughts and ways. He threw himself into the
anti-slavery movement upon the crest of the wave; the flowing sea
carried him quickly from one distinction to another; the ebb tide,
which found him in the Senate of the United States, revealed to his
startled senses the creeping, crawling things beneath the surface;
partyism rampant, tyrannous and corrupt; a self-willed soldier in the
White House; a Blaine, a Butler and a Garfield leading the
Representatives, a Cameron and a Conkling leading the Senate;
single-minded disinterestedness, pure unadulterated conviction,
nowhere.
Jobs and jobbing flourished on every side. An impossible scheme of
reconstruction was trailing its slow, putrescent length along. The
revenue service was thick with thieves, the committees of Congress were
packed with mercenaries. Money-making in high places had become the
order of the day. Was it for this that oceans of patriotism, of
treasure and of blood had been poured out? Was it for this that he had
fought with tongue and pen and sword?
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.