THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
didate for the lieutenant-governorship of Wisconsin in the State election of 1857 had long vanished from my mind. But many of the German-born citizens of the State who had joined the Republican party took a more serious view of the matter. They saw in my defeat, while other Republican candidates were elected, a striking proof of the prevalence of nativistic tendencies in the Republican party, and charged Governor Randall with having secretly intrigued against me because I was foreign born. There was no proof of this, and although Mr. Randall as a politician was not over-sympathetic to me, I sincerely discredited the story. But appearances rather encouraged the suspicion of a nativistic spirit in the Republican organization, and the German-born Republicans insisted that it must be disproved or atoned for by a signal demonstration of good faith. Moreover, the Republican party in power had not fulfilled its promises, but indulged itself in a sort of political management on the spoils principle, which it had vociferously denounced when practiced by Democrats—a shortcoming which I had so pointedly reproved in my speech on “Political Morals” in celebrating our victory of the year before. All these things co-operated in inducing the German-born Republicans, and some native American Republicans of the same way of thinking besides, to move my nomination for the governorship by the Republican State Convention to be held in the autumn of 1859. As Carl Roeser, the editor of a Republican journal at Manitowne, expressed it in one of his leading articles: “We are, on principle, in favor of the nomination of Carl Schurz as candidate for governor, not because he is a German, but because we demand of the Republican party that by an open, living deed, namely, the nomination of a foreign-born citizen who has won general esteem throughout the United States, it condemn the proscription of foreign-born citizens.”
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