Schurz was personally not at all what anyone would call a
Radical Republican.
And yet the report he wrote for President Johnson in the summer
of 1865 was positively damning with regard to the attitude of the Southern
whites towards the end of slavery, their profound and vicious racism toward
blacks, and their indomitable stubbornness against making the freedmen and
their posterity even remotely legally, economically, and socially free, and
equal to white men.
He reports, for example, that even the most enlightened of
the Southern people are convinced blacks cannot be got to work without force and even the lash.
Apparently consciously alluding to Dred Scott, he reports
things will never go as they should until eventually the whites of the South
finally adopt the conviction that black people do indeed have rights a white
man is bound to respect – a conviction they nearly universally and utterly
lacked.
You would think that, given the awful truths he reports, he
would have supported the reconstruction plans of the Radical Republicans rather
than of the much softer Johnson.
He did not.
Perhaps he lacked confidence in any plan to win hearts and minds with bayonets.
Or, as we might say today, nation building.
More than ten years in country and we can't even get the Afghans to let their little girls go to school in safety.
And the Taliban are at the door, again, like a vast reserve army of Ku Kluxers.
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