CHAPTER III
WHEN we arrived in America, in May, 1856, the public mind seemed to be in a state of high political animation. The hotels and the railroad cars and the steamboat decks were buzzing with eager discussions of the slavery question and the impending presidential campaign, which were not seldom enlivened by bitter attacks from Democrats upon those who had left the Democratic party to join the new Republican organization, then entering upon its first national contest. Of that bitterness of partisan spirit I had already received a taste on the steamer which several months before had carried us to Europe. I met there a Democratic politician from one of the Western States who had been appointed by President Pierce as American Consul at one of the German ports. He seemed to be a good-natured, bright, and jovial person, and we had many pleasant walks on deck together. But when our conversation turned on American politics, his brows contracted, his eyes shot fire, and I remember distinctly the expression of malignant, hissing disgust with which that otherwise jolly good fellow would ejaculate: “Of all men the most contemptible is the Democrat who deserts his party to join the Black Republicans.” He was evidently very much in earnest, and it puzzled me greatly how he could be.
My German neighbors in Watertown, Wisconsin, were almost all Democrats. As a rule, the foreign immigrants had drifted into the Democratic party, which presented itself to them as the protector of the political rights of the foreign-born population, while the Whigs were suspected of “nativistic”
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