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.