Three years later Webster once more marked out the basis of the North's position for all time in a debate with Calhoun himself. Without the magnificent flights of eloquence which distinguished the Reply to Hayne, this speech of February 16, 1833, was filled with close and powerful reasoning. Once and for all he maintained:
"1. That the Constitution of the United States is not a league, confederacy, or compact between the people of the several States, in their sovereign capacities, but a government proper, founded on the adoption of the people, and creating direct relations between itself and individuals.
"2. That no State authority has power to dissolve these relations; that nothing can dissolve them but revolution. And that consequently there can be no such thing as secession without revolution."
The importance of that argument in the history of our country cannot be overestimated. As James Ford Rhodes has put it: "The justification alleged by the South for her secession in 1861 was based on the principles enunciated by Calhoun; the cause was slavery. Had there been no slavery, the Calhoun theory of the Constitution would never have been propounded, or had it been, it would have been crushed beyond resurrection by Webster's speeches of 1830 and 1833. The South could not in 1861 justify her right to revolution, for there was no oppression nor invalidation of rights. She could, however, proclaim to the civilized world what was true, that she went to war to extend slavery. Her defense therefore is that she made the contest for her constitutional rights, and this attempted vindication is founded on the Calhoun theory. On the other hand, the ideas of Webster waxed strong with the years; and the Northern people, thoroughly imbued with these sentiments, and holding them as sacred truths, could not do otherwise than resist the dismemberment of the Union."
The great crisis that broke Mr. Webster's health and perhaps his heart came through a misunderstanding. In 1850 the discussion over the Wilmot proviso was stirring the Senate; Henry Clay had brought in his series of compromise resolutions, based on the sober belief that the Union was in imminent danger, and that once again the skillful hand that had penned the Missouri Compromise might turn the country back into the path of peace and prosperity. Calhoun, the second of the great Triumvirate, was already within a month of death. Too weak to read his speech, he was wheeled into the Senate Chamber, to sit with closed eyes while his last haughty, arrogant defense of the South's rights was read by Senator Mason. But the greatest of them all was yet to speak. Webster had the foresight of Civil War, with rivers of blood, and a man on horseback. Influenced by what we now see was the broadest patriotism, he delivered his "Seventh of March Speech,"—the opening words of which disclose a motive and a purpose too often overlooked by his critics. "I speak to-day for the preservation of the Union. 'Hear me for my cause.'" Briefly, his position was this:—that the Union was primary, dealing with the liberties of fifty and later one hundred millions of people,—white men as well as black,—and that the slavery question was secondary, involving an artificial, less important and less permanent institution. He discussed slavery from the view-point of history, with arguments of the philosopher rather than those of the orator. He defended the compromise measures, with their clause in favour of strict enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, on the ground that the Government was solemnly pledged by law and contract, and, indeed, "had been pledged to it again and again." He closed with that famous paragraph demonstrating the impossibility of peaceable secession. "Sir, he who sees these States now revolving in harmony around a common centre, and expects them to quit their places, and fly off without convulsion, may look the next hour to see the heavenly bodies rush from their spheres, and jostle against each other in the realms of space, without causing the wreck of the universe."
But he had defended the Fugitive Slave Law!—Therefore Abolitionists burned Webster in effigy. Wendell Phillips called him a second Judas Iscariot. Whittier wrote "Ichabod" across his forehead. Horace Mann described him as a "fallen star—Lucifer descending from heaven!" Every arrow was barbed and poisoned. Webster suffered like a great eagle with a dart through its heart, beating its bloody wings upward through the pathless air.
But now that long time has passed, thoughtful men realize that Webster had studied the fundamental question more deeply, knew the facts better, and saw clearer than his detractors. It is true that he erred when he criticized the Abolitionists on the ground that in the last twenty years they had "produced nothing good or valuable,"—that his words were chosen in a way that irritated the North unduly,—and, more important still, that in his remarks on the Fugitive Slave Law he swerved from the broad statesmanship which distinguished the rest of the speech. But twelve years later Abraham Lincoln read Daniel Webster's Seventh of March Speech, and said Webster was right and Boston was wrong. Lincoln put Webster's position into his letter to Greeley: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; if I could save the Union by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save the Union by freeing some, and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union." And to-day, after sixty years, our foremost writers are agreeing that "from the historical view-point Webster's position was one of the highest statesmanship." But the recognition of Webster unfortunately came too late.
As time passed Webster felt more and more keenly the injustice done him. Bitterness poisoned his days, and sorrow shortened his life. When the autumn came, he made ready for the end, knowing he would not survive another winter. One October morning Webster said to his physician, "I shall die to-night." The physician, an old friend, answered, "You are right, sir." When the twilight fell, and all had gathered about his bedside, Mr. Webster, in a tone that could be heard throughout the house, slowly uttered these words, "My general wish on earth has been to do my Master's will. That there is a God, all must acknowledge. I see Him in all these wondrous works, Himself how wondrous! What would be the condition of any of us if we had not the hope of immortality? What ground is there to rest upon but the Gospel? There were scattered hopes of the immortality of the soul, especially among the Jews. The Jews believed in a spiritual origin of creation; the Romans never reached it; the Greeks never reached it. It is a tradition that communication was made to the Jews by God Himself through Moses. There were intimations crepuscular, but—but—but—thank God! the Gospel of Jesus Christ brought immortality to light, rescued it, brought it to light."
Then, while all knelt in his death chamber and wept, Webster, in a strong, firm voice, repeated the whole of the Lord's Prayer, closing with these words: "Peace on earth and good will to men. That is the happiness, the essence—good will to men." And so the defender of the Constitution, the greatest reasoner on political matters of the Republic, fell upon death.
Reflecting upon Webster's unconscious influence as set forth in the words, "I still live," one of his eulogists says that when Rufus Choate took ship for that port where he died, a friend exclaimed: "You will be here a year hence." "Sir," said the lawyer, "I shall be here a hundred years hence, and a thousand years hence." With his biographer let us also believe that Daniel Webster is still here; that he watches with intense interest the spread of democracy; that he now perceives our free institutions extending their influence around the globe, beneficently victorious in many a foreign state; that he rejoices as he beholds "the gorgeous ensign of the Republic, now known and honoured throughout the world, bearing that sentiment dear to every true American heart, liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable."
In retrospect, historians make a large place for the eloquence of the anti-slavery epoch, as a force explaining the abolition movement. Every great movement must have its advocate and voice. Garrison was the pen for abolition, Emerson its philosopher, Greeley its editor, and in Wendell Phillips abolition had its advocate. Political kings are oftentimes artificial kings. The orator is God's natural king, divinely enthroned. Back of all eloquence is a great soul, a great cause and a great peril. Our history holds three supreme moments in the story of eloquence—the hour of Patrick Henry's speech at Williamsburg, Wendell Phillips' at Faneuil Hall and Lincoln's at Gettysburg. The great hour and the great crisis, the great cause and the great man, all met and melted together at a psychologic moment. In retrospect Phillips seems like a special gift of God to the anti-slavery period. Webster had more weight and majesty, Everett a higher polish, Douglas more pathos, Beecher was more of an embodied thunder-storm, but John Bright was probably right when he pronounced Wendell Phillips one of the first orators of his century, or of any century.
The man back of Wendell Phillips and the abolition movement was William Lloyd Garrison. This reformer began his career in 1825, as a practical printer and occasional writer of articles for the daily press. Among Garrison's friends were two Quakers, one a young farmer, John Greenleaf Whittier; the other was Benjamin Lundy, who for several years had spent his time and fortune protesting against the slave traffic. Lundy had visited Hayti, to examine the conditions of negro life there,—had returned to Baltimore, where he had been brutally beaten by a slave dealer, and had finally come to Boston to test out the anti-slavery sentiment in New England. He held a meeting in a Baptist church, only to have it broken up by the pastor, who refused to allow Lundy to continue his remarks, on the ground that his position could only be offensive to the South, and therefore dangerous. But Lundy succeeded in having a committee appointed to consider the problem, and young Garrison was one of its members. A few months later, Garrison was made the editor of a journal in Bedford, where he began to advance more and more radical theories, until a rival editor was irritated to the point of charging him with "the pert loquacity of a blue jay." But Garrison's fidelity to his own convictions, and his courage in airing them in public, had won the respect of the Quaker enthusiast, Lundy, and the old man walked all the way from Baltimore to Bedford to ask Garrison to join him in his work of agitation. A year later the two men, one old and discouraged, the other young and hopeful, both being practically penniless,—started work in Baltimore. Troubles came thick and fast. The slave dealer who had beaten Lundy now attacked young Garrison. Carelessly worded criticisms of a Northern slave dealer from Garrison's own town of Newburyport led to a suit for libel, and a fine of fifty dollars; neither man could raise the money to pay the fine, and Garrison went to jail for forty-nine days. But the youth was full of courage and faith, and in 1831 we find him once more in Boston, starting a new paper, that was, if possible, more radical than ever.
In this second venture he was alone, his office was a garret, his only helper a negro boy whom he had freed. His paper was called the Liberator, and the first edition appeared in January, 1831. Garrison registered his sublime vow in his opening editorial: "I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice.... I am in earnest,—I will not equivocate,—I will not excuse,—I will not retract a single inch,—and I will be heard." His battle cry was "Immediate, unconditional emancipation on the soil."
No movement that wrought so great a national convulsion ever had a more feeble origin. The Revolutionary fathers had three million colonists as supporters. The leaders of the Home Rule movement had four millions of Irishmen to back them. Cobden and Bright were supported and cheered on by the manufacturers of Central England. But young Garrison stood alone, with empty hands, a slave boy to support, a hand-press printing a sheet twelve inches square, never knowing where the money for the next edition was to come from. His motto was "Our country is the world, and our countrymen all men, black or white." The genius of his message was unmistakable: "Is slavery wrong anywhere? Then it is wrong everywhere. Was it wrong once in Palestine? Then it is wrong in all lands. Is a wrongdoer bound to do right at any time? Then he is bound to do right instantly." He distributed his sheets among the merchants of Boston. Beacon Street shook with laughter, for a new Don Quixote had arisen. But from the first the South was alarmed, for that little sheet from the printing-press fell upon the South like the stroke and tread of armed men.
The Liberator soon brought friends to this unknown youth. But in August of this same year, 1831, an event occurred which lifted Garrison,—almost without his being aware of it,—into truly national prominence. This was the Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia,—a negro uprising under the leadership of a genuine African slave who knew the Bible by heart, who claimed to have communication with the Holy Spirit, and who finally employed an eclipse of the sun as a sign to his followers that they were to arise and slay their masters. The massacre which resulted lasted forty-eight hours, and sixty-one white people on the neighbouring plantations lost their lives. Retribution followed swiftly, and where the slightest suspicion of guilt was to be found, negroes were shot at sight or burned against the nearest tree. Southampton County saw a veritable reign of terror. A storm of indignation swept over the South; thousands of slave owners living on their great estates, miles from the nearest military station, feared themselves victims of a servile insurrection. The cause of the uprising was at once sought for, and a hundred writers laid the blame at the door of the Boston Liberator. Garrison was indicted for felony in North Carolina. The legislature of Georgia offered a reward for $5,000 to any one who would kidnap him and deliver his body within the limits of the state. With one voice the entire South cried out that the Liberator must be suppressed.
Later it became clear that Garrison's part in the Nat Turner rebellion was nil. The Liberator had not a single subscriber in the South; Nat Turner had never seen a copy of the paper,—and Garrison had been specific in his statements that he did not believe in active resistance to authority, or in the use of force of any kind. But the storm had broken, and Garrison had to fight his way through it.
Even in Boston Garrison had to face the mob, and meet the scorn of the ruling classes of the city. His movement had no popular support, in the true sense of the word, as it had twenty years later, when Wendell Phillips led the forces of abolition. Cotton was king, and the fear of losing the Southern trade sent the mercantile classes into a panic of fear. Garrison's enemies were by no means confined to the South. He was like David with his sling; and slavery, with all its vassals, North as well as South, was Goliath armed with steel. But for Garrison there were only two words, Right and Wrong, and he would not compromise concerning either.
Within two years he succeeded in organizing in Philadelphia the American Anti-Slavery Society; by 1835 he convinced William Ellery Channing that the time had fully come for an active crusade, and this old minister, with a literary reputation in Europe almost as great as that of Washington Irving, published an abolition book called "Slavery," which is said to have been read by every prominent man in public life. In 1840 the society numbered not less than 200,000, and the hardest of Garrison's work was done.
But he was to have a potent ally in Wendell Phillips, the explanation of whose career is in his birth gifts. One of his ancestors was a Cambridge graduate, who rebelled against the tyranny of Charles, and exchanged wealth and position for a New England wilderness. It was one of his forefathers who was the first mayor of Boston. Another founded Phillips Exeter Academy. Wendell Phillips himself began his career at the moment when Madison's State Papers had won him the presidency, when John Adams was the glory of the city, when Channing was the light of the pulpit, and Lyman Beecher was the idol of orthodox Boston. He was in his early teens when he waited four hours on a Boston wharf to see Lafayette's boat come in. He was thirteen when he heard Daniel Webster's oration on Adams and Jefferson. He was sixteen when he entered Harvard College, and formed his lifelong friendship with his roommate, John Lothrop Motley. He studied law with Charles Sumner, in the office of Judge Story, a legal star of the first magnitude. He was counted one of the handsomest youths in Boston. There was nothing too bright or too hard for Wendell Phillips to aspire to, or hope for. At the critical moment, when he had to decide upon his future career, ambition sang to him, as to every noble youth. George William Curtis represents Phillips as sometimes forecasting the future, as he saw himself "succeeding Ames, and Otis and Webster, rising from the bar to the Legislature, from the Legislature to the Senate, from the Senate—who knows whither? He was already the idol of society, the applauded orator, the brilliant champion of the eloquent refinement and the conservatism of Massachusetts. The delight of social ease, the refined enjoyment of taste and letters and art, opulence, leisure, professional distinction, gratified ambition, all offered bribes to the young student." The measure of his manhood is in the way he thrust aside all honours and emoluments that stood in the path of duty. Only he who knows what he renounces gains the true blessing of renunciation.
The young orator's attitude towards slavery was determined by the mobbing of Garrison. One October afternoon in 1835 Wendell Phillips sat reading by an open window in his office on Court Street. Suddenly his attention was diverted from the page by voices, angry and profane, rising from the street without. Looking down he saw a multitude moving up the street, and soon found that the multitude had become a mob. Five thousand men were collected in front of the anti-slavery office, and were trying to crowd their way up the stairs in search of Garrison. In another room thirty women were assembled to organize a woman's abolition society. When the women found that the mob wanted to put them out also, they sent a message to Mayor Lyman asking protection. When the mayor arrived with the police, instead of dispelling the mob and protecting liberty of speech, the mayor dispelled the women and protected the mob. Discovering that they had the sympathy of the mayor and would be protected by the police, the lawless element rushed upon the office of the Liberator, smashed in the doors and windows, and dragged Garrison forth. Bareheaded, with a rope about his waist, his coat torn off, but with erect head, set lips, flashing eyes, Garrison was dragged down the street to the City Hall. On every side rose the shout "Kill him! Lynch him! —— the abolitionist!" Asking who the man was, Phillips was told that this was Garrison, the editor of the Liberator. Meeting the commander of the Boston regiment, of which he was a member, he exclaimed, "Why does not the mayor call out the troops? This is outrageous!" "Why," answered the officer, "don't you see that our militia are also the mob?" It was all too true. The mob was made up of men of property and standing. In that hour Wendell Phillips had his call. In the person of that man dragged down the street with a rope around his waist, the most gifted speaker in Boston had found his client; in the crusade against slavery he found his cause, and soon his clarion voice was heard sounding the onset.
To Garrison's organized agitation, begun in 1832, that soon spread all over the country, must be added a second cause for anti-slavery sentiment,—the murder of Lovejoy. This was on the night of November 7, 1837. The Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy was a young Presbyterian minister, a graduate of Princeton Seminary. He began his career as pastor of a little church in St. Louis and editor of the Presbyterian Observer. At that time he was not an abolitionist, and, perhaps because he had married the daughter of a slave owner, he had taken no strong position either for or against slavery. One day an officer arrested a black man in St. Louis who resisted arrest, and in the mêlée the officer was killed. His friends claimed that the negro was a freeman, and that there was a plot to kidnap him and sell him into the Southern cotton fields, and that he had a right to resist. The real facts will, doubtless, never be known. To slave owners, however, it was intolerable that a black man should resist an officer under any circumstances. A mob collected, the negro was bound to a stake, wood piled round about, and the prisoner was burned to death.
Efforts were made to punish the murderers. In the irony of events the name of the judge was Lawless, and he charged the grand jury substantially as follows: "When men are hurried by some mysterious metaphysical electric frenzy to commit a deed of violence they are absolved from guilt. If you should find that such was the fact in this case, then act not at all. The case transcends your jurisdiction, and is beyond the reach of human law." Of course all the murderers went free. When Mr. Lovejoy commented editorially upon this outrageous charge, encouraging lynch law, once again the "mysterious, metaphysical electric frenzy" broke forth, only this time it destroyed his printing office. The young minister decided to leave the slave State, and crossed to Alton, Illinois, where there was not only liberty of speech but liberty of the printing-press. But a mob crossed over from Missouri and destroyed his press. Determined to maintain his rights, Lovejoy then brought another press down the Ohio River from Cincinnati. A group of his friends carried the type from the steamboat to the warehouse, but the next night a second mob collected, and when Lovejoy stepped from the building he was riddled with bullets, the warehouse burned, and the press, for the third time, flung into the Mississippi. The news of this murder aroused the continent, filling the South with exultation, and the North with alarm. Slavery, a subject which had long been tabooed, suddenly became the one topic of conversation in the home, the store, the street-car. All editors wrote about it; all Northern pulpits began to preach on the subject. More faggots had been flung upon the fire, and oil added to the fierce flames.
Every explosion asks for powder, but also a spark. Falling on ice, a spark is impotent, falling on powder, an explosion is inevitable. Wendell Phillips had already been aroused to sympathy with Garrison and hatred of slavery, and news of the murder of Lovejoy fell upon his heart like a spark on a powder magazine. When Boston heard that Lovejoy had been shot by the mob in Alton, Illinois, while defending his printing-press, the leading men of Boston came together in Faneuil Hall. William Ellery Channing made the opening address, and asked that the meeting go on record through an indignant protest against this assault upon the rights of free citizens. James T. Austin, attorney-general of the commonwealth, replied in a bitter and insulting reference to Channing, asserting that a clergyman with a gun in his hand, or mingling in the debate of a popular assembly in Faneuil Hall, was marvellously out of place. Austin compared the slaves of the South to a menagerie of wild beasts, and asserted that Lovejoy in defending them was presumptuous, and died as a fool dieth. He added that the rioters in Alton killed Lovejoy and flung his press into the river in the spirit of the Boston mob that boarded the British ships in 1773, and threw the tea overboard on the night of the "Boston Tea Party."
That was a great moment in the history not only of liberty, but also in that of eloquence. Wendell Phillips, then but six years out of Harvard College, rose to reply. "A comparison has been drawn between the events of the Revolution and the tragedy at Alton. We have heard it asserted here in Faneuil Hall that Great Britain had a right to tax the colonies. And we have heard the mob at Alton, drunken murderers of Lovejoy, compared to those patriot fathers who threw the tea overboard! Fellow citizens, is this Faneuil Hall doctrine? The mob at Alton were met to wrest from a citizen his just rights,—met to resist the laws. Lovejoy had stationed himself within constitutional bulwarks. He was not only defending the freedom of the press, but he was under his own roof, in arms with the sanction of the civil authority. The men who assailed him went against and over the laws. The mob, as the gentleman terms it (mob, forsooth!—certainly we sons of the tea-spillers are a marvellously patient generation!), the 'orderly mob' which assembled in the Old South to destroy the tea were met to resist, not the laws, but illegal exactions. Shame on the American who calls the tea tax and Stamp Act laws! Our fathers resisted, not the king's prerogative, but the king's usurpation. To find any other account you must read our revolutionary history upside down. To draw the conduct of our ancestors into a precedent for mobs is an insult to their memory. They were the people rising to sustain the laws and constitution of the province. The rioters of our day go for their own wills, right or wrong. Sir, when I heard the gentleman lay down principles which place the murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips [pointing to the portraits in the hall] would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American,—the slanderer of the dead. Sir, for the sentiments he has uttered, on soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and the blood of patriots, the earth should have yawned and swallowed him up. Imprudent to defend the liberty of the press! Why? Because the defense was unsuccessful? Does success gild crime into patriotism, and the want of it change heroic self-devotion into imprudence? Was Hampden imprudent when he drew the sword and threw away the scabbard?"
The next morning young Phillips, like Lord Byron, awoke to find himself famous. Merchants, politicians, who had long been staggering like drunken men, indifferent to their rights, and confused in their feelings, were stunned into sobriety, and began to discuss principles, and weigh characters, and analyze public leaders, and wakening, men found that they had been standing on the edge of a precipice. Phillips, already devoted to the slave, became now his tireless champion through many years, till the emancipation of 1863.
One evening in May, 1854, a negro was seen skulking in the shadows near a dock in Boston. This coloured man, Anthony Burns by name, was a slave, who had escaped from his Southern master, and after weeks had reached Philadelphia, where a Quaker had stowed him away in a ship bound for Boston. A Boston policeman who caught sight of the negro recalled the rewards offered for the capture of slaves, and soon ran the fugitive down, and had him before United States Commissioner Loring. The next morning Theodore Parker hastened to the court-room to say that he was the chaplain of the Abolition Society, and had come to offer counsel. But the fugitive was afraid to accept the overture, lest his master punish him the more severely.
The news spread quickly throughout the city, and two nights later a meeting in Faneuil Hall was attended by an enormous gathering, aroused to the highest pitch of excitement. Hand-bills had been put out, stating that kidnappers were in the city. The people were in a frenzy. Theodore Parker delivered one of his most impassioned addresses. "I am an old man; I have heard hurrahs and cheers for liberty many times; I have not seen a great many deeds done for liberty. I ask you, Are we to have deeds as well as words?" Parker moved that, when the meeting adjourned, it should be to meet the following morning in the square before the court-house. But he had raised too great a storm to control; a rumour that a mob of negroes was at that very moment trying to rescue Burns was all that was needed to empty the room; and the crowd rushed out to the court-house square. There they discovered a small party of men, led by Thomas W. Higginson, trying to batter down the court-house doors. The crowd lent them willing hands. But the marshall defended the building,—shots were fired,—Higginson wounded, and several of his followers arrested. Two companies of artillery were at once ordered out by the mayor, and the attempt to rescue the negro met with complete and disastrous failure. Wendell Phillips and Parker were the leaders in the fight. When asked what he would regard as grounds for the return of Burns to his master, Phillips answered, "Nothing short of a bill of sale from Almighty God."
The day of the transfer of the slave to the United States revenue cutter found Boston in a state of siege. Twenty-two companies of Massachusetts soldiers patrolled the city; two rows of soldiers, armed with muskets, shotted to kill, stood on either side of the street through which Burns was to be led to the vessel. The windows were filled with people, the houses hung in black, the United States flags were draped in mourning. From a window near the court-house hung a coffin, with the legend: "The funeral of liberty." The procession itself was composed of a battalion of United States artillery, one of United States marines, the marshall's posse of 125 men guarding the fugitive, and a small cannon, with two more platoons of marines to guard it. To such a pass had come Boston, with its respect for law, and its reputation for obedience to those clothed in authority. A Charleston paper spoke of the return of Burns as a Southern victory, but added that two or three such victories would ruin the cause. For the movement against slavery was now rising, with all the advance of a tidal wave and a mighty storm.
The public excitement was greatly increased by the Fugitive Slave legislation of 1850 and 1854. Many Northern men who were opposed to slavery in the North condoned slavery in the South. Just as Demetrius urged that by the making of images of Diana "we have our gain," so timid capital in the North bowed like a suitor at the feet of the imperial South, and advised silence, remembering that through the money of Southern planters it had its livelihood. Wendell Phillips went up and down the land stirring up opinion against the law. He spoke three hundred times in one year and two hundred and seventy-five times in another year. Phillips rose upon the opposition like a war eagle against an advancing storm. Brave men defied the law, organized the Underground Railroad, and in every way possible defeated the purpose of the Fugitive Slave Law. So in 1854 when Senator Douglas engineered through Congress the famous Kansas-Nebraska Bill, repealing the Missouri Compromise, the North refused to accept what was so palpably pro-slavery legislation. This was revolutionary. Instantly the North divided into two camps. The one question of the hour was "Shall a fugitive slave be furnished with weapons with which to defend his person, and has he the right of self-defense?" The whole land became a debating society, and heaved with excitement, like the heaving of an earthquake. The merchant pointed to his ledger, and urged caution. But liberty was stronger than the ledger, and the heaving emotion burst through the statutes and rent the laws asunder. Soon the Fugitive Slave Law, had become a dead letter. The South had gone one step too far. Abolition stood suddenly in a new light; "More abolitionists had been made by this single piece of hostile legislation," said Greeley, "than Garrison and Phillips could have made in half a century."
For thirty years Wendell Phillips was the crowned king of the lecture platform. It was the golden age of the lyceum. Men had more leisure than to-day. Our era of the drama, music, and travel pictures had not yet come. The winter nights were long, books few, magazines had not yet developed, and the people were hungry for instruction and eloquence. Wendell Phillips achieved the astonishing feat of speaking three hundred times a year. Eloquence is born of a great theme like the woes and wrongs of three million slaves. It is sometimes said that oratory is dying out in our Congress. But Congress is now a board of trade, discussing duties, protective tariffs on wool, cotton, and hides. Beecher and Phillips had a great theme—liberty, the emancipation of millions of slaves. The modern orator in the Senate discusses the mathematics of woolen goods. It is hard to be eloquent over one salt barrel and two piles of cowhides. A sermon or a lecture on topics that fifty years ago would have crowded the greatest room and the street outside would not to-day draw a corporal's guard.
But in those heroic days, there was a great opportunity, and the opportunity was matched by the man. Phillips was handsome as an Apollo. His voice was sweet as a harp. No man ever studied the art of public speech more scientifically. He played upon an audience as a skillful musician upon the banks of keys in an organ. A Southern slaveholder heard him in the Academy of Music, hating him, but paying him this tribute, "That man is an infernal machine set to music." His method was practically the memoriter method. A gentleman, who heard him give his "Daniel O'Connell" four times in succession, found that the lecture was repeated without the slightest variation whatsoever, in ideas, sentences, inflection of the voice, or even gesture. Phillips prepared his lectures with the greatest care, and then repeated them hundreds of times. From the moment when he came upon the platform his presence filled the eye and satisfied it. His very ease and poise begat confidence and delight. He carved each sentence out of solid sunshine. He stood quietly, made few gestures, adopted the conversational tone and took the audience into his confidence.
Some of his finest effects were produced by the injection of a parenthesis. Once in an evening sermon in Plymouth Church, when Beecher was urging the reëlection of Lincoln and defending the Republican party, a disputatious individual called out from the congregation, "What about Wendell Phillips?" To which Mr. Beecher made the instant answer, "Wendell Phillips is not a Republican. Wendell Phillips is a radical and an independent. What this country needs is not a man of words but a man of deeds." A few nights later Wendell Phillips was lecturing in the Brooklyn Academy of Music before the St. Patrick's Society, and made his reply in the form of a parenthesis, barbing his shaft with an exquisite inflection of his voice. "Mr. Beecher said last Sunday night (forgetting his own vocation), 'Wendell Phillips is a man of words, instead of a man of deeds.'"
Not that the two men were ever unfriendly, for they were co-workers, standing side by side in the great movement. Once when the trustees of yonder Academy refused to allow Mr. Phillips to speak, Mr. Beecher made it a point of honour with his trustees to let Wendell Phillips speak in Plymouth Church, and ran the risk of the mob destroying the building. The tumultuous scenes of that night, when bricks came through the windows, and the police were stationed in Cranberry and Orange Streets, were repeated all over the land. Again and again Wendell Phillips was mobbed. Once, at the very beginning of his career as an abolitionist, he spoke with an old Quaker. People waited to greet the old Quaker and asked him home for the night; but they pelted Wendell Phillips with rotten eggs as he went down the street in the dark. Afterwards Wendell Phillips said to the old Quaker, "I said just what you did, and yet you were invited home to fried chicken and a bed, while I received raw eggs and stone."
"I will tell thee the difference, Wendell. Thou said, 'If thou art a holder of slaves, thou wilt go to hell.' I said, 'If thou dost not hold slaves, thou wilt not go to hell.'"
But Wendell Phillips would not butter parsnips with fine words. Once in Boston four hundred men surrounded him, got possession of the hall, and jeered him for an hour and a half. Finally he leaned over the desk and shouted down to a reporter, "Thank God there is no manacle for the printing-press." Armed friends rescued him, guarded him home, and for a week, night and day, the Boston police guarded the house. Those were tumultuous days. But this great man braved and outlived the storm.
When the Emancipation Proclamation was declared, William Lloyd Garrison said nothing remained now but to die. But Phillips opposed the dissolution of the Anti-Slavery Society, because he saw that when the physical fetters were broken, there still remained the fetters of the mind and heart that must be destroyed. So far from ending his labours, Phillips now redoubled his activities. He threw himself into the labour movement and helped organize the working classes into a solid force against capitalism. He took up the cause of suffrage and the higher education of woman, gave himself to the temperance problem and prohibition. He lectured oftentimes two hundred nights a year in the great cities of the land, seeking always to manufacture manhood of a good quality. He became himself our finest example of the power and influence of the scholar in the Republic. And when the end came, he received from his fellow countrymen the admiration and the love that he had deserved. And the friends who knew him best were not surprised that the last words on his lips were the words of his friend James Russell Lowell, that summarized the ideal that Wendell Phillips had pursued for thirty years.
"New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;
Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key."
In every country and time, the era of national peril has been the creative era for the intellect. The eloquence of Greece was at its best when Philip attacked Athens and Demosthenes defended its liberties. Dante's poems were born of the collision between the despots who sought to enslave Florence, and the patriots who dreamed of democracy. Milton's songs were written during the English Revolution, when the Puritan, seeking to diffuse the good things of life, and the Cavalier, who wished to monopolize the earth's treasure, came into a deadly collision.
In accordance with that principle it seems natural to expect that the scholars of the Republic should do their best work during the era of agitation, when the national intellect was white hot, and public excitement burned by day and night. The anti-slavery epoch, therefore, was the Augustan Era of American literature, when the historians, poets and philosophers lent distinction to American literature. At that time Motley was writing his "History of the Netherlands"; Prescott, his "History of Mexico and Spain"; Whittier, his songs of slavery and freedom; Lowell was the satirist of the debate, and was writing his "Biglow Papers," and Emerson, the philosopher, was undermining the foundations and shaking the principles of slavery, even as Samson pulled down the temple of the olden time.
Emerson, the philosopher, did the thinking, and furnished the intellectual implements to the abolitionists. Beginning his career as a preacher, he resigned his position, moved to Concord, and dwelt apart from men, but "as he mused, the fire burned." Easily our first man of American letters, he is among the first essayists of all ages and climes. Essentially, however, he was a man of intellect, an American Plato, "a Greek head screwed upon Yankee shoulders," to use Holmes' expression. His essay upon "The American Scholar," and his book on "Nature," brought him fame in England, and invitations to lecture before their colleges. Early in his career he won the friendship of Arnold of Rugby, of Matthew Arnold the son, of Arthur Hugh Clough, and of Thomas Carlyle. He returned from his honours in England to find himself the centre of the intellectual movement of New England. A number of younger men gathered around him, until Emerson's group at Concord became like unto Goethe's group at Weimar, and Coleridge's in London. During the late forties American educators, orators and statesmen began to quote the striking sentences from Emerson. Little by little it came about that the fighters went to Emerson as to an arsenal for their intellectual weapons. His first notable contribution to abolitionism was his "Story of the West India Emancipation." Then came his "Essay on the Fugitive Slave Law," his speech on the Assault on Mr. Sumner, his writings on Kansas, and on John Brown. Few men have had such power to condense a statement of philosophy into a single epigram. Grant once said of his soldiers that while each man took aim for himself, Winchester slew all the thousands. Not otherwise, hundreds of orators and reformers went up and down the land attacking slavery, but while the voices were many, the argument was one, and Emerson for a time did the speaking for the abolitionists.
What Emerson stated in pure white light, Whittier made popular through his poems of Slavery and Freedom. By way of preëminence he was the poet of the abolition movement, and the Sir Galahad among our singers. Reared among the Friends, he had the simplicity of the Quaker, but the solidity and massiveness of the fighting Puritan. Strange as it may seem, he was at once the poet of peace, insisting upon the crime of war, and the poet of freedom, insisting upon the destruction of slavery. The fire and glow, the moral earnestness, the spiritual passion of Whittier, are best illustrated in his "Lost Occasion," and "Ichabod." At length the newspapers of the North took up his work. For some years before the war broke out, scarcely a month passed by without a new poem of liberty by Whittier. Soon these poems that were published in the newspapers were recited in the schools by the children, quoted in the pulpits by the preachers, and used by the orators as feathers for their arrows. Once Wendell Phillips concluded an impassioned oration by reciting one of Whittier's stanzas, when a man in the audience shouted, "That arrow went home!" to which Wendell Phillips answered, "Yes, and I have a quiver full of arrows, every one of which was made by a man of peace,—John Greenleaf Whittier." If Emerson's philosophy was like the diffused white daylight that makes clear the landscape for an army, Whittier's occasional poems like "Ichabod" were thunderbolts that blasted forever all compromise and expediency.
Sometimes what the essayist fails to achieve ridicule easily accomplishes. James Russell Lowell was the satirist of the abolition movement. With biting scorn and irony he laughed men out of narrowness, ignorance, and selfishness. During the last epoch in his career Lowell achieved world-wide fame as a diplomat, and was universally admired as the all round man of letters. But now that he has gone, in retrospect, the historian perceives that the first era of Lowell's career was the influential era. He was the Milton of the anti-slavery epoch, as Lincoln was its Cromwell. His influence in England, in developing an anti-slavery sentiment there, was, if possible, more influential than in the home country. The great English editor, William Stead, tells us that he owes to Lowell's message the influences that made him an editor and a reformer. In the critical moments of his life he found in Lowell the inspiration and support that he found in no other books, save in Carlyle's "Cromwell" and the Bible. "In Russia, in Ireland, in Rome, and in prison, Lowell's poems have been my constant companions." The poet used the story of Moses emancipating the Hebrew slaves as an illustration of the abolitionist as the unknown leader whom God would raise up to lead the three million black men out of Southern slavery. "What God did for the Egyptian bondsmen, he believed God would do; because what God was, God is. He goes on:—
"From what a Bible can a man choose his text to-day! A Bible which needs no translation; and which no priestcraft can close from the laity,—the open volume of the world, upon which, with a pen of sunshine and destroying fire, the inspired Present is even now writing the annals of God. Methinks the editor who should understand his calling, and be equal thereto, would truly deserve that title that Homer bestows upon princes. He would be the Moses of our nineteenth century; and whereas the old Sinai, silent now, is but a common mountain, stared at by the elegant tourist, and crawled over by the hammer of the geologist, he must find his tables of the new law here among factories and cities in this wilderness of sin, called the progress of civilization, and be the captain of our exodus into the Canaan of a truer social order."
Certain stanzas of Lowell, also, were quoted even more widely, and were ever upon the lips of college students. Many a soldier boy who went to battle from the forest and factory, the fields and the mines, scarcely knew that his inspiration—like Phillip's oratory—was embodied in Lowell's poem, "The Present Crisis":—
"Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,
And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.
"Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own."
Then came Charles Sumner, the scholar in politics, to make practical the student's message. Daniel Webster's defense of Massachusetts in his reply to Hayne, and his wonderful eloquence in the years which followed that first great address, lifted the old Bay State into unique preëminence in the Senate: when, therefore, Webster left the Senate and entered the cabinet of Millard Fillmore, the North and the South alike asked, with intense interest, who should succeed the defender of the Constitution. That no dramatic interest might be lacking when, in 1851, Charles Sumner entered the Senate chamber to take the oath of office, it came about that Henry Clay, the great Compromiser, left the Senate, going out at one door, on the very day that Conscience, in the person of this Puritan, entered it by the other door. John C. Calhoun, inflexible, iron to the end, adhering tenaciously to his doctrine of secession, had just died, quite unconscious of the fact that his speeches held the explosives that were to shatter the South and destroy half a million of his beloved people. Clay, too, was death-stricken, and with great pathos referred to himself as "a stag scarred by spears, worried by wounds, dragging his mutilated body to his lair to lie down and die." Webster was now gray and broken, with the shadow of the eclipse already drawing near. In such a moment Charles Sumner began his career by an appeal to the "everlasting yea" and the "everlasting nay."—"I desire to speak to-day of some laws greater than any passed in this capital or this country; older than America, older than India—I mean the laws of God."
Hitherto slavery had been the aggressor, crowding into Texas, edging into Missouri, with bullets forcing its way into Kansas. Freedom had always been on the defensive. Now all was changed, with the coming of a man whose watchword was "Slavery must be destroyed; liberty must be preserved." That cold body called the Senate became immediately conscious of the new influence that entered into the very being of the government, like iron into the rich blood of the physical system. Charles Sumner made it clear from the beginning that the movement against slavery was from the Everlasting Arm. With expediency he had nothing to do, but only with eternal right and eternal wrong. One day Daniel Webster reminded his young successor of the importance of looking on the other side, indicating that a shield that was gold on one side might at least be silver on the other, to which Sumner replied, "There is no other side." This Boston scholar became a voice for law, "whose seat is the bosom of God, and whose speech is the melody of the world." These eternal laws of God rose up to stay the progress of slavery like the beetling granite cliffs of Maine, that send forth their voice to the onrushing tides, saying, "Here stay your proud waves—thus far, and no farther."
Ancestry, opportunity and events all conspired to equip Charles Sumner with those implements that make man great. Like Phillips, he was a descendant of the early settlers of Boston. His father led the men who delivered Garrison out of the hands of the mob, and who told the excited populace that unless Boston was careful "our children's heads will be broken by cannon-balls." The plastic, critical hours of his youth were spent in Harvard College and in the law office of Judge Story. Never interested in philosophy and metaphysics, he was surpassed by few as a master of the humanities, general literature, and the story of the rise and progress of democracy and free institutions. Not a man of genius, Charles Sumner was gifted with talent of a very high order. He had, what is perhaps better than genius, a capacity for sustained labour and prodigious industry. He did nothing by halves. In his chosen realm he became a master of the details of every movement related to free institutions, since the days of the republics of Greece and Switzerland, Holland and England. Long after other students had blown out their lights, Charles Sumner's window was still flaming. At a very early epoch he exhibited his tenacity of will and his constitutional inability to change his mind. Once he planned with a companion to walk to Boston on Saturday morning, starting at half-past seven. When the hour struck, a snow-storm was raging. But having decided to go to Boston, to Boston the student went alone, floundering through the blizzard. Snow-drifts were little things, but changing his plan was an impossible thing. The centre of his character, about which all else revolved, was a certain axis of pride and self-esteem, which may be pardoned, perhaps, in view of the fact that the world takes a man largely upon his own estimate of personal worth.
In those days the atmosphere of Boston was charged with enthusiasm for education and the humanities. Among young Sumner's friends were Prescott, who was writing the history of Spain and Mexico; Bancroft, who was outlining his history of the United States; Story, the jurist; Horace Mann, the educator; Dr. Howe, the father of the movement for the education of the deaf and dumb; Emerson, Longfellow, Channing and Whittier—all were not simply friends but correspondents of Charles Sumner.
Nor must we forget the Boston of earlier days, the Boston of Adams, and Otis, of Warren and Quincy. In such a city, surrounded by the noblest traditions of patriotism, stimulated by the greatest group of scholars that the Republic has produced, Charles Sumner passed his early manhood. Then, remembering that Edward Everett had fitted himself for his work in Harvard University by four years abroad, Sumner, in his twenty-seventh year, went to Europe. He spent five months in Germany, where the spirits of Goethe, Richter and Luther lingered upon the scene. In Paris he studied French, French art, French literature, French philosophy, and finally attended the debates in the French Parliament, examining the problems with all the care of a member. He lingered long in England, where he was welcomed and lionized by the foremost men of letters, science, philosophy, as well as by the leading clergymen and statesmen of London. He was an honoured guest not at some, but "at most of the country seats of England and Scotland." He travelled the circuits as the companion of the greatest English judges, Vaughan, Parke and Alderson. He met on a familiar footing Macaulay and Grote, Carlyle and Jeffrey, Sidney Smith and Wordsworth. But his great year was in Italy, in the Eternal City, the city of Cæsar and Cicero, the city of Horace and Virgil. In all, Sumner spent thirty years in preparation for his labour. Few men in American politics have had a wider horizon, a better equipment in history and literature, or have known so intimately all the great men in the world of his own generation who were worth knowing. He went away to Europe an American; he returned a universal man, a citizen of the world.
Not until 1845, when he was thirty-four years of age, did a really great opportunity come to Sumner. Boston at that far-off day made much of the Fourth of July, and looked forward to the holiday as the great event of the year. During the previous autumn the mayor and aldermen of the city invited Sumner to deliver the oration. Webster made John Adams say, "When we are in our graves, our children will celebrate the day with song and story, with oration and pageant, and the explosion of cannon, and greet it with tears of joy and exultation." But unfortunately the speeches of that time had degenerated into false rhetoric, full of insincerity. In his oration, Sumner left the beaten track and plunged into an unknown way. His theme was the crime of war. He attacked his city and his country for spending millions upon fortifications in the harbour. He affirmed that the best protection of a nation was not dead stones but living patriots and heroes. He called the roll of the great wars of history, and found only one or two, like our Revolution, that were really justifiable. He defined war as the temporary repeal of all the ten commandments, and an enthronement of all the crimes.
In retrospect we know that Sumner overstated his case. His argument against physical force would forbid the police in great cities, the militia on the frontier, and would leave communities exposed to the ravages of brigands on land and pirates by sea. But for the most part, Sumner's argument in favour of peace was sound. To-day all civilized countries are coming to recognize war as a blunder, since questions of justice cannot be settled by brute force.
When we consider that France is an armed camp, Germany and Austria countries of bristling bayonets, that three years at the most critical epoch of the boy's life are consumed in a camp exposed to all manner of temptations and dangers, at the very time when the youth should be mastering his trade or his profession, war seems the capitalization of all the possible follies and wastes. The peasants of Europe plough, each carrying a soldier upon his back. The brick-mason builds, but staggers up the ladder with a heavier load than bricks,—the soldier upon his back. The symbols of nations are still the lion, the eagle and the wolf. Some political leaders even yet talk about the necessity of an occasional war to put boys upon their mettle, as if invention, the building of railways, the founding of cities, the fighting of economic and social wrongs would not put a man upon his mettle! To put a German on one side of a fence and a Frenchman on the other, and have one peasant empty his shotgun into the bowels of the other is about as noble as going out into a yard and shooting a Jersey cow. The best way to protect a nation is to build boys into men, through the processes of productive industry. Machine gun and dreadnought will soon be as obsolete in the presence of arbitration and the court at the Hague as an ox-cart is obsolete in the presence of a Pullman palace car.
Wendell Phillips once said that Lord Bacon had a right to lay his hand on the steam engine and say to Watt: "This engine is mine; I gave you the method." So Charles Sumner, after sixty-five years, has a right to stand yonder at the entrance of the Parliament House of Peace, now being completed in the capital of Holland, and say: "I laid the foundation stones of this structure and started a war against war." This oration of Sumner's on "The True Grandeur of Nations" made him a most unpopular figure at home, but Europe soon called for his speech. It was translated into many languages, two hundred and fifty-thousand copies were published and sold, and for the time Sumner was the most talked of man of the year.
Now the one man who was not on the defensive, who was not content to merely stay the forward progress of slavery, but insisted on driving it back into the Gulf and ultimately into the sea, to be drowned forever, was Charles Sumner, with his "Carthago est delenda." His favourite phrase was "freedom is national, slavery is sectional." Burke himself, depicting the sufferings of India, scarcely surpassed Sumner's speech on the devastation of Kansas by outlaws and guerrillas. Commenting upon the fact that a company of armed slave owners had crossed the borders at night, and destroyed the homes of a group of Northern settlers, Sumner said: "Border incursions, which in barbarous lands fretted and harried an exposed people, are here renewed, with this peculiarity, that our border robbers do not simply levy blackmail and drive off a few cattle, they do not seize a few persons and sweep them away into captivity, like the African slave-traders whom we brand as tyrants, but they commit a succession of deeds in which border sorrows and African wrongs are revived together on American soil, while the whole territory is enslaved. I do not dwell on the anxieties of families exposed to sudden assault, and lying down to rest with the alarms of war ringing in the ears, not knowing that another day may be spared them. Throughout this bitter winter, with the thermometer thirty degrees below zero, the citizens of Lawrence have slept under arms, with sentinels pacing. In vain do we condemn the cruelties of another age—the refinement of torture, the rack and thumbscrew of the Inquisition; for kindred outrages disgrace these borders. Murder stalks, assassination skulks in the tall grass; where a candidate for the Legislature was gashed with knives and hatchets, and after weltering in blood on the snow-clad earth, trundled along with gaping wounds to fall dead before the face of his wife."
With speeches like these, Sumner attacked slavery. The edge of his argument was keen, but his blows had also the power of sledgehammers. The Southern leaders were in a frenzy of anger. Harriet Martineau said of the situation that from 1830 to 1850, by general agreement, men in Congress referred to slavery under their breath, believing that only by silence could the Union be preserved. Now came a man who believed that silence was criminal, who would not be bullied, and would be heard, who believed in the Golden Rule, insisted on the Declaration of Independence, and who, in the name of freedom that was national, wished to destroy the Fugitive Slave Law and bring about the immediate and unconditional emancipation of all slaves on the ground.
When two opposing gases come together, an explosion is inevitable. One day in 1856, after the adjournment of the Senate, a Southern member of Congress entered the Chamber, and finding Sumner seated, with his legs under an iron desk screwed to the floor, and, therefore, helpless for defense, with a heavy walking-stick the assailant beat the powerless man into insensibility, two of his friends protecting him from those who would interfere in his murderous assault. Having lost enough blood to soak through the carpet and stain the very floor, unconscious, and hovering between life and death, Sumner was carried to a sofa, thence to his hotel. From that time on the scholar endured a living death. He was carried to Paris, where Dr. Brown-Sequard tried "the fire cure" upon the spine. But for years his desk was vacant. Massachusetts insisted that the empty seat should proclaim to the world her abhorrence of the barbarism that, unequal to intellectual debate, betakes itself to clubs and murder. Later on Sumner did return to his seat, but he was broken in health, and to the end was tortured with pain. Nevertheless, despite all the physical distresses, he remained the Puritan in politics, adhering inflexibly to his old ideals of liberty. The great lesson of Sumner's life is the importance of fidelity to conviction and singleness of purpose. All Sumner's speeches in Congress, all his lectures on the platform, his appeals to the people of the North during the years when he travelled incessantly, addressing great crowds all over the land, had a single theme, "Liberty is national, Slavery is sectional; Liberty must be established, Slavery must be destroyed." He had his faults and limitations, but men without faults are generally men without force. Limitations are like banks to a river; they increase the strength of the current for a mill wheel. Sumner's concentration made his enemies call him a narrow man and a fanatic. But Paul was narrow when he said, "This one thing I do." Luther was narrow when he nailed his theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. Garrison was narrow and a fanatic when he said, "I will not equivocate, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard." Rushing between the cliffs of its banks, the Rhine has power through confinement; spreading out over the plains of North Germany, the Rhine becomes a mere marsh, laden with miasm, blown to and fro with the winds.
The tallow candle is small, while the summer lightning flashes across the midnight sky. But for the purpose of studying a guide book in the dark, one lucifer match is worth a sky full of lightning.
Sumner had the courage of his convictions; he was brave as a lion. Having no physical fear, he was devoid also of moral fear. He had the foresight of far-off things, and could look beyond to-day's defeat to the coming victory for his cause. He had many bitter enemies. His intolerance and intellectual arrogance offended men. When a friend said to President Grant, "Sumner is a skeptic; I fear he does not believe in the Bible," Grant's instant retort was, "Certainly he does not; he did not write it."
But we can forgive much to a man who sacrificed much, and endured the murderous cross of cruelty, obloquy and shame. A lonely and companionless man, at the end, he trod the wine-press of sorrow in solitude and isolation. He had no woman's love to heal his wounded spirit. His one support was the cause he loved. To this cause he clung with a tenacity that was as sublime as it was pathetic. The last time he opened his eyes it was to repeat unconsciously the dearest thoughts of his life, "All humanity is my country." "Take care of my civil rights bill."
When long time has passed, many other great names will pass out of view like tapers that have burned down to the socket. But the name and memory of this Puritan will probably survive, as the highest type of the scholar toiling in the heroic age of the Republic.