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Charles Sumner, 
 
 THE 
 
 Idealist, Statesman and Scholar. 
 
 ^VlsT ADDEESS 
 
 DELIVERED 0N T 
 
 PUBLIC DAY, JUNE SO, l^r^t. 
 
 Repest of lie Faculty of lie University ef South Carolina, 
 
 RICHARD THEODORE GREENER, 
 
 N 
 
 Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy in the University. 
 
 COLUMBIA, S. C: 
 republic^ printing company, book and job printers. 
 
.1 
 
3 
 
 CORRESPONDENCE. 
 
 University of South Carolina, 
 
 Columbia, July 7, 1874. 
 Professor R. T. Greener : 
 
 Dear Sir — Having listened with pleasure to your able address on 
 Senator Sumner, delivered before the Faculty and Students of the 
 University, we would request a copy for publication, to be placed in the 
 archives. 
 
 Very respectfully, 
 
 BENJ. B. BABBITT, Chairman, 
 A. W. CUMMINGS, 
 HENRY J. FOX, 
 FISK P. BREWER, 
 T. N. ROBERTS, 
 WILLIAM MAIN, 
 RUDOLPH VAMPILL, 
 E. W. EVERSON, 
 Librarian and Secretary of the Faculty. 
 
 University of South Carolina, 
 
 Columbia, July 11, 1874. 
 To Professors Benj. B. Babbitt, Chairman, 
 
 and Cummings, Fox, Brewer, Roberts, &c, 
 
 Members of the Faculty : 
 Gentlemen — Your favor of the 7th instant is at hand. My address 
 on Senator Sumner, to whom my race owes so much, was a work of 
 gratitude and affection, designed more for the privacy of the University 
 and our friends than for the general public. 
 
 Because you have received it so kindly, and since it would never have 
 been written unless at your request, I the more readily yield to your 
 desire for its publication. 
 
 I am, gentlemen, 
 
 Very truly yours, 
 
 RICHARD T. GREENER. 
 

" At quern viruru !" ... 
 
 Terentius-Phornuo. 
 
 " In the long vista of the years to roll, 
 
 Let me not see my country's honor fade ; 
 
 Oh! let me see our land retain its soul ! 
 
 Her pride in freedom, and not freedom's shade." 
 
 Keats. 
 
 " Help, Lord ; for the godly man ceaseth ; for the faithful fail from among the children of 
 
 rnen." ^ .. * 
 
 Ps. xii, 1. 
 
 " Justice is the key-note of the world— sill else is ever out of tune." 
 
 " There never was a great truth but it got reverenced; never a great institution, nor a 
 great man that did not, sooner or later, receive the reverence of mankind." 
 
 Theodore Parker. 
 
 " No tombstone for me could bear a fairer inscription than this : ' Here lies one who, with- 
 out the honors of emoluments or public station, did something for his fellow-men.' " 
 
 Senator Sumner's Speeeh on Repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. 
 
 " He that, to correct an evil tree which brings forth bad fruit, shall begin at master bough, 
 and so lop downwards, is in danger to fall himself before the tree falls. The safer and speedier 
 way is to begin at the root ; and there, with submission, would I lay the axe." 
 
 Pym. 
 
 " Non divitiis cum divite, neque factione cum factioso, sed cum strenuo virtute, cum 
 modesto pudore, cum innocente, abstinentia certabat ; esse quam videri bonus malebat ; ita 
 quo minus petebat gloriam, eo magis ilium sequebatur." 
 
 Sallustius- Catilinse Cowjuratio. 
 
 " He had the basis, the indisputable basis, of all high character, unspotted integrity and 
 honor unimpeached. If he had aspirations they were high, honorable and noble, nothing- 
 groveling, low or meanly selfish came near his head or heart. Firm in his purposes, patriotic 
 and honest, as I am sure he was in the principles he espoused and in the measures he defended, 
 I do not believe that, aside from his large regard for that species of distinction that conducted 
 him to eminent stations for the benefit of the Republic, he had a selfish motive or a selfish 
 
 feeling." 
 
 Webster's Euloov on Calhoun. 
 
"He was one of those divine men, who, like a chapel in a palace, remains unprofanecl, 
 while all the rest is tyranny, corruption, and folly. All the traditional accounts of him * * 
 
 * * represent him as the incorrupt lawyer and the honestest statesman, as a master orator, 
 a genius of its finest taste, and as a patriot of the noblest and most extensive views, as a man 
 who dispensed blessings by his life, and planned them for a posterity." 
 
 Lord Orford'a Estimate of Chancellor Somera. 
 
 Yea, let all good things await 
 
 Him who cares not to be great, 
 
 But as he saves or serves the State. 
 
 Not once or twice in our rough island story 
 
 The path of duty was the way to glory : 
 
 He that walks it, only thirsting 
 
 For the right, and learns to deaden 
 
 Love of self, before his journey closes, 
 
 He shall find the stubborn thistle bursting 
 
 Into glossy purples, which out-redden 
 
 All voluptuous garden-roses. 
 
 Not once or twice in our fair island-story, 
 
 The path of duty was the way to glory : 
 
 He, that ever following her commands, 
 
 On with toil of heart and knees and hands. 
 
 Thro' the long gorge to the far light has won 
 
 His path upward and prevail'd, 
 
 Shall find the toppling crags of duty scaled 
 
 Are close upon the shining table lands 
 
 To which our God himself is moon and sun. 
 
 Such was he. His work is done ; 
 
 But while the races of mankind endure, 
 
 Let his great example stand 
 
 Collossal, seen of every land, 
 
 And keep the soldier firm, the statesman pure ; 
 
 Till in all lands, thro' all human story, 
 
 The path of duty be the way to glory." 
 
 Tennyson. 
 
 " A consecrated life bravely and solemnly ended. A great work left, in the Providence of 
 God, unfinished — the completion of which not many of us, I fear, will now live to see. We 
 meet to pay another tribute of respect to the memory of the greatest man, and the purest, 
 that Massachusetts has lent to the National Councils during this generation or the last; the 
 one who has done the Nation more service and earned the State more honor than any other. 
 If we measure greatness by rare abilities, lofty purpose, grand achievement and a spotless 
 life, then neither this generation nor the last has, in Massachusetts, any civil name worthy 
 to stand by the side of Charles Sumner, the last Martyr— literally a Martin — in the cause of 
 free speech and personal liberty." 
 
 Wendell Phillips. 
 
ADDEESS. 
 
 Gentlemen of the Faculty, Ladies and Gentlemen : 
 
 We have met, in accordance with a time-honored custom of the 
 University, at the close of the collegiate year, to crown our week of 
 academic festivities. The occasion itself has a peculiar signification, and 
 the record of the school year, just finished, furnishes much material 
 for reflection, and presents many causes for congratulations to the Le- 
 gislature, the Board of Trustees and the friends of impartial and univer- 
 sal education throughout the State. We are favored, in the unsurpassed 
 charms of our academic grove, by the balmy air of leafy June, by the 
 propitious skies which encourage us, and in the truly catholic and un- 
 proscriptive character of this audience, which meets to do honor to 
 the just principles of education at last asserted and demonstrated by 
 the honored Board of Trustees of the University. Not least among the 
 peculiarly important facts, the harbinger, I trust, of the better state 
 that is to be, is your choice of me, to speak of a Senator of the 
 United States, whose name, until within a few years, was uttered only 
 with scorn throughout the State of South Carolina, and in terms of 
 reproach even within these walls, consecrated to learning. 
 
 I am conscious of the difficulty of the task with which you have seen 
 fit to honor me, while I am devoutly thankful for that triumphant 
 march of ideas which enables me to speak in this University of 
 the ablest statesman Massachusetts has had in the Federal Congress, 
 Charles Sumner, a name pre-eminently worthy to rank with the purest 
 of the long line of illustrious statesmen she has contributed to the service 
 of our common country. 
 
 The death of no public officer has given rise to more heartfelt sor- 
 row, or prompted more elaborate eulogies. The loss of Calhoun, the 
 foremost statesman of South Carolina, was deeply and justly de- 
 plored. He had endeared himself to those of his own political faith 
 by extraordinary powers of intellect, a rare persistency and a single- 
 ness of motive devoted to the championship of a pernicious and delu- 
 sive doctrine. Massachusetts shed some natural tears for Webster, who 
 might have led the hosts of freedom to victory, who could have estab- 
 lished the real value of the Union, since he so correctly enunciated its 
 
8 
 
 theory, had he possessed either the uncultured sternness of Jackson, 
 the incorruptibility of his keener opponent, or had he loved principle 
 more than the illusive bauble of the Presidency. 
 The wail of sorrow which followed 
 
 "The deep damnation of his taking off" 
 
 came not so much from a recognition of great gifts of mind or speech in 
 Abraham Lincoln, but rather from that universal approbation which 
 appreciates and cherishes the lives of those who, in times of danger, 
 remain anchored to the rock of duty, and preserve fidelity to principle — 
 the gallant few in every age and every clime who have maintained for us 
 those imperilled ideas which make civilization alone worth upholding. 
 
 The death of Senator Sumner, though not unlooked for by those who 
 knew the precarious state of his health, seems at once a private bereave- 
 ment and a public calamity. He has departed from his place in the 
 Senate, the last survivor of the statesmen of the past generation, a man 
 trained up to the work of statecraft, suddenly snatched from us just at 
 a time when his counsel, advice and remonstrance are most seriously 
 needed. After the pulpit and the press have offered such glowing 
 tributes to his services and character ; after the old Cradle of Liberty, 
 adorned with the portraits of Webster and Calhoun, of Adams, Otis and 
 Hancock, of Benton and Quincy, of Choate and Everett, has listened 
 to our own noble representative, giving a negro's tribute to the champion 
 of his race ; when Music Hall, which saw the mob crowding its galleries 
 in 1861, thirsting for the blood of the dauntless Phillips, has heard 
 that same matchless orator introducing the accomplished Senator from 
 Missouri as the eulogizer of his friend ; when the State of Massachusetts, 
 wishing to crown the meed of her beloved son's deserts, has selected for 
 her final tribute the sweet poet of the Friends to chant his requiem, 
 the most accomplished litterateur, the graceful orator, the delightful 
 essayist, the earnest humanitarian, to pronounce his praise, which he has 
 done so tenderly and with such lofty discrimination, and such loving 
 appreciation ; when a life-long opponent* has, in Congress, risen superior 
 to party and section, scattering the flowers of regret and forgiveness 
 above his bier — what remains there to say either new or appropriate ? 
 
 Not, surely, the record of his studious youth. It is a lesson and an 
 incentive to every earnest student. Not the period of his congressional 
 career, his sufferings, labors and ultimate triumph. They are a part of 
 the invaluable legacy he has left to the ambitious student of Political 
 Science and the noble-minded legislator every where. And yet there 
 are reasons peculiar to our University, pertinent to the race for which 
 
 *Hon. L. Q. C. Lamar, Miss. 
 
he dared so much, appropriate to me, from having enjoyed the honor 
 of his personal friendship and advice, due, above all, to the vindi- 
 cation of his claim to a wider philanthrophy than was accustomed to be 
 accorded to him, and a defense of his statemanship, which has not been 
 sufficiently and heartily acknowledged, because somewhat obscured by 
 the brilliancy of his efforts against a specific, overwhelming and unen- 
 durable wrong, which, I humbly trust, may not render the chaplet we 
 would place upon the simple grave at Mfc. Auburn liable to the charge 
 of being superfluous or tardy. 
 
 As American citizens we are the heirs of his fame, the enduring result 
 of a life of toil and usefulness. As scholars, still treading the quiet paths 
 which he once said would have been the height of his ambition to tread 
 through life, we are the inheritors of his learning. As educators we 
 are the legatees, executors and promoters of that policy of Equality in 
 Matters of Education to whose successful vindication he devoted his 
 rising talent. 
 
 In the scholarly oration of Senator Schurz there is an implied 
 censure that Senator Sumner was an Idealist, rather than a practical 
 statesman ; and, further, there is the criticism that he was not a statesman, 
 in the highest sense of the term. Not only the Senator from 
 Missouri, but many political opponents and not a few well-meaning 
 friends share this view. It may not, then, seem inappropriate, and 
 cretainly not unnecessary, if I venture to claim for Senator Sumner 
 the highest qualities which go to make up the greatest benefactor to 
 his country, the Idealist, the Statesman and the Scholar. In his political 
 faith and private life he was a loyal disciple of " the truth-loving 
 Plato,"* whose abiding and comprehensive thought was : How shall 
 we best improve strength, purify and consolidate the State? How shall 
 we educate the individual in the truest manner — morally, intellectually 
 and physically ? How, after we have accomplished this, shall we com- 
 bine the two in mutual union, reciprocal protection — the one assisting 
 in the work of the other, and the latter alone able to make the ideal 
 Commonwealth a possibility ? 
 
 The world has not reached the ideal of the foremost philosopher, 
 nor has it attained to the pure height of the greatest moral teacher, 
 yet among the many noble lives spent in the search after truth, 
 and amid the countless endeavors made after right, equity and justice, 
 the only ideas which can truly ennoble the State, the name of Charles 
 Sumner is destined to rank conspicuously among the first. 
 
 His was the idealism which rendered Luther so impracticable and 
 dogmatic to the church conservatism of his day. The same spirit 
 
 *Clem. Alex. IUe deus noster — Cic. ad Att. IV, 16. 
 
10 
 
 made Pym, Hampden and Milton the hot-headed enthusiasts of the 
 early and later English Revolution ; and that identical idealism nerved 
 the soul of Hancock, Otis and Adams in the North, and Rutledge 
 and Piuckney in the South, to resist a petty tax, because it violated 
 a principle. It consisted in a profound conviction of the equality 
 of all men before the law, and associated with it was the dogma so 
 often attacked and scouted, but never yet successfully controverted, of the 
 rights of man. Correlative with these, and of more immediate impor- 
 tance, because pertinent to the needs of our country and the genius of our 
 times, were an abiding faith in the sincerity of the Declaration of 
 Independence, and a belief that the Constitution of the United 
 States was the Magna Charta of Freedom and not of Slavery. 
 He knew at what a cost Liberty had been preserved in England. He 
 had read of its terrible trials in France. He loved the good name and 
 the future fame of his native land, and seizing those old principles which 
 will forever make the English Revolution justly memorable, and borrowing 
 the phrase equality before the law from the French Revolutionists of 
 1793, he interpreted and applied them to his own land in the light of the 
 Declaration and the Constitution, by that act rendering his name 
 celebrated as the great Idealist of our country. This he did, not from mere 
 whim alone. His youth had been passed at the feet of the statesman who 
 brought the country through the ordeal of acquiesence to the Constitu- 
 tion, and from out the hopeless chaos of the Confederation. The 
 favorite of that staunch Federalist, the opposer of the Louisiana 
 purchase, the friend and correspondent of the old Carolina Federals — 
 Josiah Quincy* — he learned in his boyhood the wiles and the unscrupu- 
 lous character of the slave territory propagandists. 
 
 He witnessed the growth and arrogance of this spirit, hostile to American 
 Liberty. He saw its advocates demanding the whole territory for slavery. 
 The persistent camel whose nose was first permitted under the blanket was 
 fast usurping the entire bed. He was old enough to sympathize with " the 
 old man eloquent" in his contest for the Right of Petition. And he had 
 what must have been a constant source of inspiration, the friendship and 
 the warm personal respect of that American Chatham, whose principles 
 he was destined to carry forward to their triumphant completion. For- 
 tunate in the friendship and companionship of such elders, trained in 
 law by the learned Story, who forged constitutional thunderbolts for the 
 Olympian Webster, is it strange that this Sumner, familiar with the prin- 
 ciples of liberty at home, the favorite of the radical Lord Brougham, 
 while yet a studious young lawyer in England, whose scholarship and 
 manly beauty made him the envied of his fellows, the hope of his elders, 
 
 *Life of Josiah Quincy — by Edmund Quincy, page 188, et seq. 
 
11 
 
 should oppose the annexation of Texas on principles of the broadest 
 philanthrophy, should refuse offices which others long for, and should be 
 so daring as to address Webster, then at the zenith of his power — " By the 
 vigor, argument, and eloquence with which you upheld the Union, and 
 that interpretation of the Constitution which makes us a Nation, you 
 have justly earned the title of Defender of the Constitution. By masterly 
 and successful negotiation, and by efforts to compose the strife concern- 
 ing Oregon, you have earned another title, Defender of Peace. * * * * 
 Assume, then, these unperformed duties. The aged shall bear witness 
 to you; the young shall kindle with rapture, as they repeat the name of 
 Webster; the large company of the ransomed shall teach their children 
 and their children's children, to the latest generation, to call you blessed; 
 and you shall have yet another title, never to be forgotten on earth or in 
 heaven — Defender of Humanity." Alas, there was no idealism in the mind 
 of the great apostate. The high promises of Plymouth Rock had been sunk 
 in the wine and intrigues of Washington, and the hosts of slavery had 
 marked well their man when they pandered to his failings and relieved his 
 necessities. Party and Office stifled the noble aspirations of his youth. He 
 was too much absorbed in the contemplation of the concrete terms, place, 
 power and money, to value the abstractions, Liberty, Equality and Hon- 
 esty, and, therefore, deservedly missed the honors he coveted ; was cheated 
 by the slave oligarchy to which he had sold himself, and died disap- 
 pointed, betrayed, broken-hearted, leaving to his youthful and ardent 
 successor, the presumptuous adviser, the honor of winning for himself 
 the lofty title — Defender of Humanity. 
 
 The Idealist is always the keenest of intellects. His quality of brain 
 is direct, suggestive and synthetic. Knowing the causes of things, fortified 
 in his opinions by the widest induction, he demonstrates, almost by in- 
 tuition, the necessary conclusion. Foreseeing that all reasoning, how- 
 ever accurate or erratic, must reach one result, he directs his energies to 
 the attainment of that end. His principles are few, but comprehensive. 
 If he fail or die without the sight, we are accustomed to sneer at him as 
 an enthusiast, a visionary, an idealist. If he succeed only partially, if 
 he determine only a portion of the eternal truths upon which our happi- 
 ness and development are predicated, common justice alone should lead 
 us to acknowledge his prescience, directness of thought, and the wonder- 
 ful combination of events which have enabled him to do so much for 
 us. Yane and Sydney were enthusiasts, apparently unsuccessful, whose 
 martyrdom has helped to bolt down the foundations of English liberty. 
 Danton and Robespierre saw far ahead the ideal of a republic which 
 the fierce elements of the day would not permit them to make real. New- 
 ton was the same visionary after years of successful computation on the 
 attraction of gravitation as he was when brooding over the falling apple 
 
12 
 
 or wandering, lost in thought, along the shore " of the deep resounding 
 sea." The idealist is always a rifleman, the sharpshooter along the skirmish 
 line of intellect, not able to win the battle in and of himself, but contrib- 
 uting vastly to the grand result. He does not waste his intellectual 
 ammunition. He knows the value of the scale, the effect of depression 
 and mirage. No idle and desultory shooting for him, he carries bullets 
 and each one must do its duty. An idealist, Loyola, loving the Church, 
 takes her sorrows and trials into his own great heart and mourns over 
 them until he has seen the vision of her increased power and splendor. 
 His mission, then, has begun, and henceforth, to the carrying out of 
 this idea he devotes his own life and shapes the lives of thousands. 
 The Jesuits, determined, self-sacrificing and enthusiastic, are today 
 known in every quarter of the globe as the bone and sinew of the 
 Roman Catholic Church. 
 
 The Southern idealists had early foreseen the danger, no larger 
 than a man's hand, which would, in time, overshadow them in 
 the Electoral College, and hem in their peculiar system of labor. 
 In time they began their agitation silent, relentless, clannish, un- 
 patriotic, insiduous, but successful. Louisiana was admitted to the 
 Union. Federalism struggled feebly in the Southern States for an 
 existence, and Virginia and South Carolina, gathering all the spoils, 
 proved the efficacy of power, when consolidated in the hands of the few. 
 They usurped the commanding offices of State — controlling the politics, 
 dictating men and measures to their Northern sycophants, demoralizing 
 even the teachings of Christianity and domineering in the Congress as 
 they were accustomed to do on their plantations. Everywhere, in 
 speech and in act, they exemplified the boldness of Danton. De 
 Vaudaee ! encore de Vaudaee ! et toujours de Vaudace ! They controlled 
 the Democratic party which had grown into stalwart youth, strong in its 
 affection for slavery, and in process of time they sapped and mined 
 the principles of the Whig party, which, starting with an idea, ended 
 without one, falling asunder from its intrinsic worthlessness and 
 recreancy. Then, at last, sprang forth from the chaotic elements the 
 germ of a new party, made up of what was still strong and true of the 
 Whigs and that part of the Democracy, so called, not yet wholly 
 corrupted, a Spartan band of earnest men who believed in Freedom in 
 the Territories. Their party-name symbolized the work, the preparatory 
 work, that was to be done— Free Soil — the forerunner of the great 
 Republican party, " the voice of one crying in the wilderness." 
 
 Into the ranks of such men stepped Charles Sumner, an idealist, as 
 pronounced in favor of freedom as any had been before him of slavery. 
 Around him clustered all the best traditions of the illustrious common- 
 wealth • all the liberty-loving associations of his native city of Boston, 
 
13 
 
 with her stoned memories of honored sons, tried so often in the scorching 
 fires of the Revolution, stimulating him like another Thernistocles — 
 sleepless on account of the trophies in the Ceramicus. His soul was 
 inspired hy the memories handed down of Otis and Adams and 
 Hancock. 
 
 His mind was stored with the ripest learning of the Ancient Uni- 
 versity, at whose bountiful lap no trusting, earnest son has ever sat, who 
 did not learn to reverence her venerable name — who did not sadly leave 
 the shadows of her classic elms, without feeling his heart strengthened 
 by the record of her historic past, and with a purpose calm and immuta- 
 ble to do something worthy of her ancient honor. Not only Christo 
 et EocLESiiE, but Patria also, she taught him to lisp, and with it, by her 
 own radiant example, Humanitas. 
 
 Revered Mother ! whose record of statesmanship and literature is 
 perennial, and whose Memorial Hall, just opened to her loving children, 
 bears aloft the names of those who dared to die that their native land 
 might be preserved, these are the natural outgrowths of your sterile soil 
 and hardy training, but the greatest praise is that your 
 
 " — free latchstring never was clrawed in 
 
 Against the poorest child of Adam's kin." 
 
 With such traditions, training and lofty purpose, Mr. Sumner entered 
 the arena of politics, not to turn political cranks, nor to swear allegiance 
 to every petty master. He pulled no party wires, and he made no servile 
 promises. His life was known ; his sentiments had been avowed 
 against caste in schools, against the acquisition of slave territory, and 
 against war, in his famous oration on the True Grandeur of Nations. 
 With regard to scholarship, had not Everett and Quincy and Adams 
 listened delighted to his eloquent, lofty and scholarly homage to the 
 memory of Channing, Story and Allston, before his Alma Mater ? His 
 robes had not been soiled in the scramble for office. There was a bright 
 halo of promise about his spotless integrity, and a charm of novelty in 
 his contempt for political chicanery. From these concurrent gifts and 
 graces came the hope of a brighter future for the commonwealth than 
 she had seen, since recreant public servants had bound her to the slave 
 empire. 
 
 From the day of his election, in which Democrat and Freesoiler clasped 
 hands,* she breathed freer, and during the twenty-three years of con- 
 tinuous service with which she honored him, loftily and honorably, 
 bravely and untiringly did he keep alive her old prestige, and once, 
 wheu she herself, blinded by the smoke of the rebellion, saw not so clearly 
 
 * Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America— Henry Wilson, Vol. II, and " Charles 
 Sumner's " election as Senator— Works of S. D. Bradford, p. 293 et. scq. 
 
14 
 
 as he — once, and once only — she turned away her face, censuring him 
 with words which stung to the depths of his sensitive soul. Before his 
 death, saving herself the anguish of King Lear,* repentant, self-accusing 
 and weeping, she folded him once more in her motherly arms, raining 
 down a blessing of tears upon the low-bowed head that, ever jealous of 
 her stainless honor, was always erect in her service ! Through the vista 
 of that stormy period, now dim amid the battle smoke of Avar and 
 patriotic passion, when stalwart treason and giant loyalty had grappled 
 in the frenzy of death, what figure stands more calm than his ? Whose 
 intellect, steadied more clearly by a well defined conviction, enriched by 
 the precedents of history, sees clearer the end to be desired and moves 
 more surely to its attainment ? He was the statesman, above all others, 
 who was " the closet-student," the expounder of the lore of Greece and 
 Rome, the " visionary," " fanatic," the too impracticable statesman for our 
 time! 
 
 He lacked, indeed, the bonhomie of Hale, the bluff sturdiness of Giddings, 
 and was the political contradictory of Seward, weakness and sinuosity 
 personified, the model of average success and policy, quieta nonmovere ;f 
 but he possessed a mind that saw clearly above the passions of the hour 
 beyond the wrong which he hated, independent of the misguided friends 
 of that wrong whom he always pitied, high over the prostrate race, the 
 glad vision of a land freed from the ancient curse, knowing neither 
 master nor slave, conqueror nor conquered, where labor was respected, 
 equality stretched her ample wings over all and the promises of the De- 
 claration of Independence were at length fulfilled. 
 
 This was the idealism of the Senator w 7 hose character and talents I 
 attempt to sketch to-day — mentem non potui pingere.X Judged by 
 events, was it absurd, visionary or ill-timed? If the capstone has not 
 yet reached its place, it is in consequence of no fault of his. He, the 
 master workman, has sketched the plan ; has helped to furnish part of 
 the work, and is gone ; but the perfect design remains in all the purity 
 of its original conception. The theorist and idealist — as ever in life, the 
 earnest theorist — scoffed at by the short-sighted and the grovelling, 
 proves to be, at last, with the triumph of his plans, the sternest realist, 
 " the fiercely practical." 
 
 Senator Sumner began his career as a Statesman at a period when 
 the policy of the South seemed every where triumphant. The press was 
 gagged, the church defended slavery as " a Divine institution," and 
 the statesmen of that time were seeing which could bend the pregnant 
 hinges of the knee best, to the demand of their master. Many were 
 
 * Act V, scene 2. 
 
 t The maxim Walpole complacently received from his father. 
 
 + Durer's inscription under the portrait of Melancthon. 
 
15 
 
 apologizing for having dared to hope freely abroad, or, inadvertently, at 
 home, that America would one day be free. Rewards were offered for 
 the heads of men who lived to raise the star-spangled banner again 
 over the blackened ramparts of Sumter. South Carolina's star was on 
 the wane, as the old Federals had prophesied when she became " a 
 parish of Virginia."* Calhoun was dead, and in the place cf that 
 leader, a weaker race from his own State, and a Mason, as a Chrichton 
 of chivalry and law, blew the trumpet for Virginia, whose echoing horn 
 South Carolina was following. Henry Clay, who looked Winthrop into 
 silence, was in the Senate for the last time, when Sumner, Wade and 
 Mallory took the senatorial oath. The last time Webster visited the 
 scene of his former triumphs, he heard the rising hope of the Xorth, the 
 expounder of the old theory of the government, asserting the unconsti- 
 tutionality of the same law he had gone down on his knees to ask them 
 to accept. Everett had borne testimony to the extrinsic, if not innate, 
 virtues of slavery and its universality. Surely Belshazzar's throne was 
 secure. The fugitive slave bill was a law, and every northern free- 
 man was, by its provision, bouud to become a bloodhound. It was an 
 hour when Walpole might have said, Caribs black caribs, had no 
 representative in Congress ; they had no agent but God, and he was 
 seldom called to the bar of the House to defend their cause, f 
 
 Hitherto the sway of the South had been almost undisputed, if we 
 except a show of resistance on the Wilmot Proviso and the admission of 
 California. John Quincy Adams kept them at bay for ten years, on the 
 right of petition and the gag-rule ; but even his anti-slavery contest had 
 been secondary to attainment of office, and sprang rather from the 
 opposition to petitions and gag-law. While he had desired the day 
 of redemption to come, " whether in peace or in blood ;" while 
 he gave no encouragement to the petitions for the immediate eman- 
 cipation in the District of Columbia, without compensation, but said 
 he would vote against it, and sneered at the anti-slavery societies, still he 
 could write: " The fire of liberty burns yet, though with a flickering flame 
 in New England. It will yet kindle and consume to ashes the dastardly 
 sophisms with which slavery would pollute our souls. I may not live to 
 see the day, but will wait for it only to say, with Simeon : ' Lord, now 
 lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.'" Again: " I rejoice that the 
 
 * "You will have long since seen, by our measures, that this State is a Parish of Virginia. 
 Her politics and her measures govern us entirely, and we arc, as I believe, perfectly contented 
 to rise or fall with Virginia. That Virginia politics will dissolve this Union, I have long 
 since predicted, and I look for it at 110 distant day.' - - -Life of Josiah Quincy, pp. 190, 192, et 
 8eq. 
 
 W. Crafts to Josiah Quincy. 
 
 Chancellor H. W. DeSaussure to same, p. 190. 
 
 IWalpole's Letters, Vol. II, p- 234. 
 
16 
 
 cause of human freedom is falling into younger and more vigorous hands. 
 * * * * The summons has gone forth ; the youthful champions of 
 the rights of human nature have buckled and are buckling on their 
 armor, and the scourging overseer, the lynching lawyer, and the servile 
 sophist, and the faithless scribe and the priestly parasite will vanish 
 before them like Satan touched by the spear of Ithuriel." 
 
 The youthful champion was now upon the arena, and with " more 
 vigorous hands " had grasped the thunderbolt, awaiting only the fitting 
 moment to hurl it at the enemy. The clarion blast which awoke the 
 North from its lethargy, which reverberated even through Europe, reveal- 
 ing the odious nature of the man-stealing bill, and uniting more firmly 
 the champions of freedom, was greeted by Hale as the " new era in the 
 history of the politics and of the eloquence of the country," making " a 
 draft upon the gratitude of the friends of humanity and liberty that will 
 not be paid through many generations." 
 
 Mr. Chase wrote, at the time : " It will distinguish the day when the 
 advocates of that theory of governmental policy, constitutional construc- 
 tion, which he has so ably defended and so brilliantly illustrated, no 
 longer content to stand upon the defensive in the contest with slavery, 
 boldly attacked the very citadel of its power." 
 
 In constitutional learning, in felicity of illustration, in cogent reasoning, 
 this speech laid bare the temporary and expedient character of slavery, 
 its baseless assumptions and its peculiar sectional claim. At last 
 Milton's man " of rare abilities, and more than common industry, not 
 only to take back and review what hath been taught heretofore, but to 
 gain further, and to go on some new enlightened steps in the discovery 
 of truth," had arisen, and thereafter the anti-slavery basis of the Consti- 
 tution being vindicated by youth, profound conviction, argument and 
 learning, the hitherto helpless minority — Chase, Wade, Hale and 
 Seward — had a leader. 
 
 Throughout the Kansas-Nebraska battle he maintained the same pre- 
 eminence, protesting against the bad faith of slavery in the repeal of the 
 Missouri compromise, protesting at midnight against its passage, when 
 rising to the prophetic vein he boldly proclaimed : " Sir, it is the best bill 
 on ivhich Congress ever acted, for it annuls all past compromises with 
 slavery, and makes any future compromises impossible. Thus it puts free- 
 dom and slavery face to faee, and bids them grapple. Who can doubt the 
 result f It opens wide the door of the future, when at last there will really 
 be a North, and the slave power will be broken, when this wretched despotism 
 will cease to dominate over our government. * * Thus, Sir, standing at 
 the very grave of freedom in Nebraska and Kansas, I lift myself to the 
 vision of that happy resurrection by which freedom will be assured, not only 
 in these Territories, but everywhere under the National Government. More 
 
17 
 
 dearly than ever before, I now penetrate that great future ivhen slavery 
 must disappear. Proudly I discern the flag of my country, as it ripples in 
 every breeze, at last in reality, as in name, the flag of freedom, undoubted, 
 pure and irresistible. Am I right, then, in calling this bill the best on which 
 Congress ever acted?" Thus in all the manly vigor of intellect and 
 heart, the statesman of the new crusade, a scholar by education and 
 thorough training, a constitutional lawyer by instinct and extraordinary 
 opportunities of study, both at home and abroad, a statesman in the 
 broadest sense, since he possessed the prophetic second-sight, seeing the 
 futility and the unpardonable error, the false economy of tampering 
 with wrong, pointed out the true policy of the nation. Ah ! had it 
 been followed, instead of the perfidious scheme of the ambitious and 
 pliant Douglass, stimulated by the insensate advocates of slavery, we 
 should have been, by this policy of freedom, preserved from the horrors 
 and the uncalculable losses of the civil war. 
 
 When South Carolina boasted, in reply that slavery gave us the consti- 
 tution, he opened the pages of her history and showed the record, adding, 
 "And yet, in the face of this combined and authoritative testimony, we 
 are called to listen, in the American Senate, to the arrogant boast from 
 a venerable Senator, that American Independence was achieved by the 
 arms and treasures of slave-holding communities;" an assumption base- 
 less as the fabric of a vision, in auy way it may be interpreted. * * * 
 Not by slavery, but in spite of slavery, was Independence achieved. 
 Not because, but notwithstanding, there were ' slave-holding communities,' 
 did triumph descend upon our arms." 
 
 He, too, was the first to air the pretentions of the supercilious Mason, 
 and prick the thin babble of his legal assumption. Our champion of 
 liberty gave him, (the author of the hated bill) no quarter. " With 
 imperious look," said Senator Sumner, " and in the style of Sir Forcible 
 Feeble, that Senator undertakes to call in question my statement, that 
 the fugitive slave Act denies the writ of habeas corpus, and, in doing this, 
 he assumes a superiority for himself, which, permit me to tell him now 
 in this presence, nothing in him can warrant ; * * * and to his peremptory 
 assertion, that the fugitive slave Act does not deny the habeas corpus, I 
 oppose my assertion, peremptory as his own, that it does, and there I 
 leave the issue. * * * * Sir, I challenge the Senator to defend his 
 progeny not by assertion but by reason. Let him rally all the ability, 
 learning and subtlety which he can command, and undertake the impos- 
 sible work." 
 
 Some of you may still remember the forensic and phillipic, in which 
 he denounced and portrayed the Crime against Kansas. All of us are 
 familiar, sadly familiar, with the details of the cowardly assault which 
 followed the delivery of that speech, while his victim was engaged in 
 
18 
 
 writing, and with back to his foe, by a son of South Carolina and an 
 alumnus of the South Carolina College. The hot blooded atrocity of 
 the assault dwindles, if it were possible, beside the cool approval of this 
 species of argument by Jefferson Davis, Mason, Toombs and the press of 
 Charleston, Columbia and Richmond, and the elaborate eulogy of the 
 Southern Quarterly Review, * which justified or palliated its enor- 
 mity. Senator Sumner himself freely forgave, at the time, his personal 
 assailant, and afterwards, so generously, the section which applauded, 
 that the caricaturist has recently represented him as casting flowers 
 upon the grave of Preston S. Brooks. Easily, then, can we forgive, at 
 this late day, in view of the stupendous effect it had upon the country, 
 and remembering how the Mephistopheles that prompted the blow has 
 been laid low. 
 
 That assault was like a trumpet-call to the doubtful and indifferent. 
 It united the friends of freedom, saved Kansas from slavery, and helped 
 to form the great Republican party, destined, I trust, to carry out to 
 its utmost fulfilment the true Republican doctrine — Equal Rights 
 for all. 
 
 Years of exile followed, during which, in pursuit of health, in the moun- 
 tains of his native land and across the sea, he wandered, never forgetful 
 of the cause for the vindication of which he had been stricken down. 
 Willingly he submitted to the surgeon's knife and the burning iron, endur- 
 ino- the pangs of cauterization without recourse to anaesthetics, and bear- 
 ing all with a fortitude and heroic endurance that challenged the admi- 
 ration of the physicians, and proved that moral and physical courage 
 are not inverse qualities, but capable of reaching their highest expres- 
 sion in the same man.f During all his exile Massachusetts kept the va- 
 cant chair for him, deeming no other son worthy to fill that seat while he 
 lived. He was not idle while seeking that former vigor, which, alas ! never 
 returned, except to the brain, which not even a bludgeon could perma- 
 nently injure. 
 
 * " A man who would endeavor to fix a fanatic by argument, says a renowned English 
 writer, might as well attempt to spread quicksilver with his fingers. Mr. Brooks concluded 
 it was his duty to chastise. He was impelled by the double motive of vindicating the honor 
 of his State, and the character of his aged and beloved relative. lie had sought him repeat- 
 edly in the Capitol grounds and elsewhere, but it became apparent that Mr. Sumner had 
 determined to keep out of his way. The Senate Chamber was the only place where he could 
 meet him, and he made up his mind to inflict the punishment upon the very spot where he 
 had perpetrated the outrage." February, 1857, Vol. II, Article , Honorable Preston S. Brooks, 
 
 p. 348. 
 
 t I saw Charles Sumner in Rome, he looked well, but was much more disconcerted by com- 
 ing up two or three flights of stairs than a strong man would have been. 
 
 — Life of Samuel J. May. 
 
 Dr. Brown-Sequard, in his Lowell Institute course, a year ago, volunteered the interjected 
 remark, in illustrating a point under treatment, that he never in his practice subjected a 
 patient to a more terrible ordeal than he did Mr. Sumner, after his injury in the Senate 
 Chamber, and he never saw the severest known treatment endured by any man with more 
 unflinching nerve than by that Senator.— Boston Journal. 
 
19 
 
 On his sick couch, and during his saunterings about the art treasuries 
 of Paris, the Louvre and the Luxemboug, he cultivated anew those 
 aesthetic tastes which made him the friend of the meritorious artists, the 
 delightful companion of the virtuoso and the compeer of the learned 
 connoisseur. The fruits of that enforced leisure were seen in the rare 
 gems, the souvenirs of the Rostra and the Bema, the Forum and Mars 
 Hill, the Place de la Concorde, the Colonna Trajana, the Vatican and 
 Versailles, painting, engraving, bust, statue, books and coins, which pro- 
 claimed his taste, relieved the solid days of toil, beguiled those of slow 
 recovery, amused him and instructed many a friend. 
 
 The opposition prophesied he would never return. The wish was 
 father to the thought. But he did return and filled that empty chair with 
 even more grace and intrepidity, with additional learning, intensified 
 hostility, and an opposition so determined as to be destined to end only 
 in the utter extermination of the cause. 
 
 "Who can forget, who heard of it, or fail to be inspired with it, who 
 reads to-day, the war of the onset which told of the attack on the 
 Barbarism of Slavery. His was the right, by virtue of suffering, to lead 
 the van, as, in the days of old, his Kentish ancestors claimed the front 
 of battle as their right, and formed, at a well-known siege, the majority 
 of the hosts of King Henry of Navarre. It justified the faith of the 
 State in waiting for him ; it confirmed the brilliant predictions of his 
 friends and the gloomy forebodings of his enemies. The venerable 
 Quincy, the first Mayor of Boston, while Senator Sumner was 
 a Latin-school boy, and the energetic head of the University when 
 he was a senior in college, was not too enthusiastic when he had 
 welcomed him home, in " the voice of the great multitude of your 
 fellow-citizens. In their name, and by their authority, I welcome you 
 home to Massachusetts, expressing their honor and thanks for the 
 fidelity with which you have fulfiled your duties as their representative 
 in the Senate of the United States, where, unshaken, unseduced, 
 unterrified, you kept your love, your zeal and your loyalty to liberty, 
 where neither number nor example, threat nor sneer, ' within you 
 wrought to swerve from truth, or change your constant mind.' " 
 
 The period marked by his return to his seat and the onset against 
 slavery, strengthened by the increased anti-slavery sentiment of the 
 North, portray vividly the second and most active period of his career. 
 A short summary is only a partial record of his valuable service during the 
 vacillations, treachery and vicissitudes of the war. Throughout the 
 entire period, whether in his place in the Senate, as the adviser, friend 
 and companion of the Martyr-President, in raising troops, encouraging 
 Governor Andrew, demonstrating the necessities and safety of Emanci- 
 pation, or in organizing colored troops, demanding equal rights for their 
 
20 
 
 officers, rebuking Massachusetts' officers who toadied to rebellion, or aid- 
 ing by his own personal appeal to President Lincoln, emancipation in the 
 District of Columbia, protesting against the return of fugitives who 
 brought information to our armies, or urging the recognition of Liberia 
 and Hayti among the family of nations, opposing the inscription of 
 names of victories over our own fellow-citizens, on regimental colors, 
 asserting the right of Fremont and Hunter to fight rebellion with fire, 
 urging National Emancipation or opposing, with all his ability, the 
 double-dealing policy of England on armed neutrality, until, at last, 
 the negro a soldier, emancipation proclaimed, the war a reality, the 
 North in earnest, victory perched upon the triumphant eagles of the 
 Republic, proclaiming the soil of America henceforth sacred to freedom — 
 the Senator from Massachusetts was ever earnest, loyal, hopeful, 
 indefatigable and constant of purpose. 
 
 It makes no difference whether we judge his statesmanship by the mea- 
 sures he advocated on his first appearance in public life, by any of his pub- 
 lished speeches or addresses during his early senatorial career or in its later 
 ripening, during the period of the war with its intricate duties and 
 delicate trials, or amid the equal dangers of President Johnson's treachery 
 and incompetency, or the perplexities and really grave questions of recon- 
 struction, weshall find in himthesame grasp of fundamental principles, 
 that keen discrimination which separates the essential from the accidental, 
 an astounding accumulation of precedents and a wealth of illustrations 
 always pertinent and sound in law and analogy, a variety of topics, and 
 an infinity of details that prove him to have been the hardest worker, 
 the clearest headed man, the most pains taking and really patriotic 
 Senator in the halls of Congress. Go back to the list as it greets us on 
 the page of history ; consult the records of those portentous years 
 locked up in the archives of legislation, and while Seward was diplo- 
 matic, machiavelian, and despotic, and Chase intrepid, and careful of 
 the purse strings, Stevens unconquerable and Wade determined, Fessen- 
 den eloquent and Schurz learned and versatile, but understanding liberty 
 to mean one thing in America and another in Germany, Sumner seems 
 to have combined, just so far as it was possible, the highest and best 
 qualities of all. Had you asked any of them in their day, who was the 
 ablest mind, they would have assigned the second place to Charles 
 Sumner, as the generals after Salamis, arrogating the merits of the 
 victory as due first to themselves unanimously gave Themistocles the 
 second place. Henceforth, as the student of our earlier history seeks 
 the pages of Hamilton and Jefferson and Adams and Madison, to learn 
 the hidden springs and motives, the aim and scope, as well as the insid- 
 ious and open dangers that menaced our infant nation, so he who would 
 know at what a cost and through what perils our liberties, now partially 
 
21 
 
 attained, have been rescued, must seek it in the intellectual remains, the 
 monument cere perennius, which the patriotism and industry of Charles 
 Sumner has left behind to instruct and stimulate the youth of our 
 country.* 
 
 It would be a far seeing and wise policy which would establish in our 
 own University an annual prize dissertation demanding on the part of 
 the contestants a thorough examination of these speeches and addresses, 
 and the period to which they refer. Judging Senator Sumner by these 
 alone, and they are an irrefutable record, I dare to call him, compared 
 with any standard, ancient or modern, a statesman in the truest and most 
 enduring sense. In addition to his accumulated stores of learning on 
 matters of public policy, he looked into the future, hoping to find- that 
 ideal and permanent good, based upon the Golden Rule, the Declaration 
 and the Constitution : and until the one loses its high place in pure 
 ethics or the other in politics, or the latter among the compact of nations, 
 we ought not to censure him who aims to make them realities in the 
 State. 
 
 He entered public life in the weak minority, a gallant Swiss band of 
 freemen, couargeous enough to die willingly at their posts, rather 
 than desert their colors. He lived to wield, amid the jealous and presump- 
 tuous, the wand of a powerful majority, not always directly and openly, 
 for the great leader generally offends some, oftentimes the majority : it is 
 only the politician of more cunning than soul, and possessing more in- 
 tellect than conscience, who pleases the crowd and is considered " avail- 
 able." 
 
 Mere party zeal did not unduly influence him, although, strictly 
 speaking, he was a partizan. Authority, founded upon any other than 
 just principles, had no terrors for him, 
 
 " When new Presbyter was only old Priest writ large." 
 
 He had a lofty dogmatism, self-assertion, imperiousness, whatever we 
 may call it, which is never, at least, the characteristic of a weak mind. 
 In him it was the calm expression of conscious worth and rectitude of 
 intention. At worst it only reminds one of Cicero and Burke, Dr. John- 
 son and Calvin, Knox and Milton. Unlike the timid Tully, nihil affir- 
 viabo, quaeram omnia, dub itans pier umque et mihi ipse diffidens, he always 
 enunciated some truth, sought only one end, doubted nothing and never 
 despaired of himself. He dared, amidst the excitement of the war, an- 
 nounce, No Names of Victories over Fellow-citizens on Regimental Colors, 
 remembering that no Triumph was led up the via sacra for the conquerers 
 in a civil war, that the Romans forbade Qesar to enjoy a triumph over 
 
 *Works of Charles Sumner, Lee & Shcpard, Boston, 1871. 
 
22 
 
 Potnpey, and that neither Culloden, Bunker Hill, Camden, Guilford Court 
 House, Yorktown or Saratoga can be seen upon the colors of the British 
 regiments, that served in Scotland and America. Cavalier and Roundhead 
 Guelph and Ghibelline, Monarchist and Republican, unite to forget the 
 horrors of a civil war, and are unwilling that the smouldering coals of treason 
 should be kept alive by signs of degradation and defeat. In time of war 
 all things were just to save the Republic. Everything for Human Rights, 
 nothing for sectional triumph. Equal laws for all citizens. No im- 
 munities from duties, and no withholding of rights. These are the 
 axioms of a statesman. For the maintenance of such sentiments he 
 bore, with patience and his usual firmness, the storm of opprobrium, 
 which at a later time his Battle- flag Resolution raised, receiving without a 
 remonstrance the censure of his beloved commonwealth, until at last the 
 true public policy prevailed, toiling slowly up to the height upon which he 
 stood, and the old Bay State, with averted head, tore out the shameful 
 page from her statute book and sent a negro, one of her own law-givers and 
 the Senator's personal friend, to announce the retraction. 
 
 "When slavery considered itself best intrenched, and had insolently 
 leaped over the slight wall of freedom, just rearing its crested head, it 
 was Sumner who prophesied the down-fall, which he lived to see. When 
 treason was stealing forts and hurrying our ships to foreign waters, and 
 northern sycophants were endeavoring to apply the old poultice of 
 compromise, short-sighted men, well-meaning men, perhaps, who would 
 have "saved" the Union with tears and surrender of principle, 
 rather than by the strong arms of its loyal defenders, came to him, 
 among them life-long friends, respected instructors once, allies in politics 
 often, with revered leaders, whose age begot respect ; but they found 
 him inflexible. 
 
 Justum et tenacem propositi virum 
 Non civium ardor pravajubentium, 
 Non voltus instan tis tyrrani 
 Mente quatit solida, neque Auster. 
 
 The popular heart was inflamed to the white heat of war. We were 
 about to sacrifice upon the altar of our wounded pride a principle of 
 international law for which we had contended since the establishment 
 of the government, His voice, speaking from the Senate chamber, 
 with the authority of his position and knowledge, strengthened the 
 hands of the Secretary of State at that most perilous juncture. It 
 was heard, far above the ominous murmurs and rumblings without the 
 Senate, advising the surrender of his former political opponents, Mason 
 and Slidell ! On questions of reconstruction his advice was followed in 
 nearly every instance. When President Lincoln, injudiciously, was 
 about to turn over Louisiana to rebel control, Sumner saved the State 
 
23 
 
 by a series of parliamentary tactics that proved him master of the 
 situation. 
 
 Was it a question of finance? He was always in favor of a speedy 
 return to specie payments, and a prompt aud honest payment to the pub- 
 lic creditor. He took this stand, not from sectional interest, but rather 
 from the grounds of its justice and undoubted expediency. He was con- 
 firmed in this by reading and the experience of nations. The speeches he 
 delivered in the Senate, at the Boston Exchange, and in favor of Gen- 
 eral Grant's election in 1868, all contain the same sentiments. 
 
 Was he the indiscriminate eulogizer of England, as many would have us 
 believe? Let us recall the fate of the Johnson-Clarendon Treaty, which 
 he stopped on its joyous march through the Senate, in the face of a large 
 majority, and sent back to the oblivion it merited. The first instance, 
 I believe, in the history of our country, sustaining the National honor and 
 rendering arbitration, the loved theme of his youth a possibility. Once 
 it was the South hating him as the embodiment of the voting abolition- 
 ists. Then, it was the loyal North, believing he wished to detract from 
 the fame of the patriotic dead. Lastly, England, whose past was so full 
 to him of all that was heroic in suffering and lofty in patriotism and 
 great in intellect, was fiercest in her upbraidings. Cculd there be any 
 better test of the breadth and humanitarian aspects of his statesmanship 
 than that all, at last, came up to his view, when the sober second thought 
 cleared their mental vision. He advised neutrality with regard to 
 Spain and Cuba three years ago, and during the excitement, a short time 
 before his death. Not from a lack of sympathy with the struggling Cu- 
 bans, but, beside the difficulties of International Law, he scorned to help 
 men who shouted against oppression while they themselves held slaves. 
 In railroad matters, commerce, protection to shipping, more general 
 principles of public policy, on all he has left an opinion, not one, per- 
 haps, dare I venture to say, from which some may not honestly differ 
 with him, but all bearing evidences of close thinking and a trained and 
 thoughtful mind. 
 
 Did he have influence and possess political acumen? He killed the 
 Santo Domingo negotiations, and every lover of his country ought to re- 
 joice at it. In 1868 he stated the issue of the canvass to be, "Shall the 
 men %cho saved the Republic continue to rule it, or shall it be handed over to 
 rebels and their allies f" The question is very nearly answered to-day, 
 when a guerrilla chief rules the political fortunes of Virginia, under the 
 sanction of a Republican President; when Stephens and Gordon dare to 
 creep back to the United States Congress, and unblushingly argue against 
 the rights of six millions of their fellow-citizens, their superiors, so far 
 as the benefits of the republic are concerned ; when the first victory for 
 those conquered in the Rebellion is celebrated by the boomiug of cannon 
 upon the defeat of the Civil Rights bill. 
 
24 
 
 While Senator Sumner was magnanimous and forgiving, he did not 
 cringe to traitors nor hasten to grant favors to rebels while he withheld rights 
 from loyalists. Upright in his own private life, too pure to be contami- 
 nated with the vices of the Capital, austere in his public capacity, no 
 shadow of corruption dogging his footsteps, caste integreque, who could 
 more consistently sound the alarm? He who, Cato-like,had never pandered 
 to place and power himself, could not easily condone for another's weak- 
 ness. Well he knew that the most trying period of a country was not 
 when the armies were in the field and the plough was forsaken, the work- 
 shop closed; but after the victory had been won, when the cowardly, the 
 false-hearted, those who were ready to stop the war at any time and let 
 slavery rule, the men who never fought for the idea on either side, they 
 who lived only by the hope of power or a thirst for political aggrandize- 
 ment, too often retarded the attainment of some rights and wickedly 
 bartered away those secured by centuries of toil. France, after 1793, 
 England swinging back into corruption and every species of political and 
 social vice on the accession of Charles II, are melancholy and dis- 
 heartening instances. 
 
 "There arc a thousand evils worse than death or any war." 
 
 But the " practical statesman," in distinction from the idealist, finds 
 places for his friends, and as he mounts the ladder himself, helps up his 
 less fortunate comrades below 7 . A portfolio, or a mission, an office, or 
 " a job," is the return. Fidelity to principle is not wholly unrewarded, 
 though sometimes it wait long for recognition. Of those who combined 
 to send Senator Sumner to the Senate twenty-four years ago, all have 
 enjoyed a fair share of honors, whether by the lucky juncture of the stars, 
 the flight of birds, or the self abnegation of one who considered the sen- 
 atorship from Massachusetts the highest office in the land, it is not for 
 me to say. It happened that the gifted Rantoul and Horace Mann, the 
 foremost educator America has produced, both went to Congress, although 
 they died prematurely for the good of the State and their own 
 promising fame. Palfrey became a prominent office-holder, Henry 
 Wilson, the Warwick of the movement, became Senator, and is now our 
 honored Vice-President. Banks became Speaker of the Lower House, 
 went to Congress, and was an able Speaker of that body in the lower 
 branch, Adams was Minister to the Court of St. James, during the 
 perilous negotiations of the war, winning honors for his family name and 
 State, for the third generation of diplomatic service, Andrew became the 
 foremost war Governor, who kept Massachusetts always at the front, and 
 upon whose great heart Sumner leaned with genuine confidence. Of 
 his compeers in the Senate minority, Hale and Wade, Seward and Chase, 
 all played their parts well, meriting and receiving well of the Republic. 
 
25 
 
 "When President Lincoln, relying upon the ability and valuing the 
 assistance Senator Sumner had rendered, sought to do him honor, 
 he offered him the highest office in the gift of the American peo- 
 ple — the Chief Justiceship. But he declined in favor of his friend 
 Chase, whose appointment he advocated and carried in the teeth of much 
 opposition. We cannot help pausing to admire such disinterestedness 
 of spirit and self-sacrifice for the good of others. Decline a seat on that 
 Bench, already dignified by the ability and learning of a Marshall and a 
 Story ! Decline to be a successor of that teacher whose favorite pupil he 
 had been at the law school, whose chair he had filled so acceptably, 
 while yet a young man, whose reports he had edited with such ability ! 
 Refuse it at a time of life when the main battle for which he had de- 
 voted himself had been fought and won ; when true scholarship, peculiar 
 fitness and congeniality of pursuit woo to ease and literary tranquility ! 
 
 Thirty years before, when a young stripling in the law, but of 
 brilliant promise, a boarder in the same house with Grayson, McDuffie 
 and Griffin of South Carolina, and Dr. Lieber, afterwards the distin- 
 guished professor in the South Carolina College, Dr. Blake, of Washing- 
 ton, another boarder, still living and respected, there, struck by the remark- 
 able ability of the youthful Sumner, prophesied that he would one day wear 
 the highest judicial ermine.* Here was the opportunity, and the 
 temptation could not, perhaps, have been presented in a more seductive 
 form. He felt, however, that liberty was not yet fully secured. There 
 remained much to be done, which no one could do so well as he in the 
 Senate. While upon the bench, the main issues — the amendments and 
 finance — could be trusted in the hands of a veteran like Chase. 
 
 He put aside ambition and adhered to duty. The slave of Epaph- 
 roditus must have had such a noble soul in mind when he said : 
 " AVho then is unconquerable ? He whom the inevitable cannot over- 
 come. For such a person I imagine every trial, and watch him as an 
 athlete in each. He has been victorious in the first encounter. What 
 will he do in the second ? * * * What if he be tested by fame, by 
 calumny, by praise, by death ? He is able to overcome them all. If 
 
 * " A few days before his departure from Washing-ton, [1S34,] Dr. Blake remarked to him : 
 ' Mr. Sumner, * * * I make the prophesy that, if you live and diligently pursue your 
 profession, the mantle which John Marshall now so gracefully wears will some day descend 
 upon your shoulders.' * * * When the announcement of the appointment of Judge 
 Chase was made, it soon became spread about that it was accomplished through the influence 
 of Senator Sumner, who was the earnest friend of both Secretary Chase and President 
 Lincoln; and perceiving that an estrangement of feeling was growing up between them, and 
 apprehending that it might result, if not checked, in an open rupture and endanger the 
 harmony of the party, he sacrificed his own interest for the sake of friendship, and the good 
 of his party, and it was mainly through his instrumentality and exertions that the selection 
 devolved upon Judge Chase."— Recollections of Sumner, by Dr. J. B. Blake.— National 
 Republican, Washington, March, 1S74. 
 
26 
 
 he can bear sunshine and storm, discouragement and fatigue, I pro- 
 nounce him an athlete uuconquered indeed."* 
 
 These acts, a part only of the honorable record he has left, assert the 
 character and breadth of his statesmanship. He did not believe with 
 Macaulay and Peel, with Palmerston and Disraeli, that statesmanship 
 consists in compromise. The trimmer, he knew was ever a heartless, 
 supple-jointed creature, who cared naught for principle, loving only the 
 retention of power, if he possessed it, and striving only to attain it even 
 if it were obtained by a murder of his faith. And he had studied the 
 history of compromises, on question of right, too well to trust over- 
 much to their seductive song. Willingly would he have sacrificed the 
 good of some to preserve the rights of all ; but it could only be done 
 when there was an identity as well as an equivalence of rights and the 
 common cause must be really in danger. The famished sailors wrecked 
 on the merciless deep may justly cast lots for the sacrifice. When 
 favoring breezes follow and the good ship is in no danger, they cannot, 
 without invoking disaster, sacrifice their weaker passenger or feeble 
 sailor. The test of real statesmanship is when it preserves the rights of 
 the minority, while it holds with a strong hand, for public ends solely, 
 the rule of the majority. It seeks for causes that are eternal, not 
 evanescent, and employs means to reach simply the true states- 
 man's end, either the maintenance or the re-establishment of Justice. 
 It looks at the future more than the present, and but little at the 
 past. Where no lasting principle is to be maintained for the future, 
 there can be no statesmanship in the true sense. In days of compro- 
 mise the politician may barter away the peace of a community, or the 
 honor of his country, professing always his desire to preserve them. 
 But the statesman sees in such subterfuges only the patching of the 
 bridge, the plugging up the leak in the dyke with an old rag. He 
 knows these are the last resort of minds of inferior discernment, the 
 timidity of hearts postponing, until after their day, the sweep of the 
 deluge. 
 
 Gladstone, devoting his retirement from office to the triumphs of 
 scholarship, is only, to my mind, one grade less in height, because he 
 dared not, being an Englishman, do full and complete justice to Ire- 
 land. In defeat even, so far as he was sincere and earnest in reform, 
 he looms up above his wily compeer. Calhoun was a statesman in 
 the true sense ; for the test must be independent of the principles in- 
 volved. He believed slavery to be equitable and just. He foresaw the 
 sure influence of the States destined to draw a cordon about the system, 
 and hence he first sought to strengthen the argument which should be, 
 
 * The works of Epictetus.— T. W. Higginson, pp. 56, 57. 
 
27 
 
 in case of failure, a basis of safety, then, like a skilful general, he 
 moved to the attack. Defeated by the firmness and promptness of Jack- 
 son, he shifted, adroitly, the arena and the weapons. He aimed to con- 
 trol the Senate and the cabinets, thus increasing the political impor- 
 tance of his section. Men of his own incorrupt nature and profound 
 conviction could only successfully cope with him, and, even they, dubi- 
 ously, had he not been" contending against the inevitable — the power 
 higher thau that of man — that power which crushed Napoleon, and 
 saved the liberties of Europe on the field of Waterloo, and cast down 
 his nephew at Sedan — that power which preserved in safety from the 
 Moncks, Clarendons, Buckinghams and Itochesters the germs of civil 
 and religions liberty in England — the same power which, thus far in 
 our history, has neutralized the mild treason of Burr, the ambition of 
 Webster, the weakness of Douglass and the treachery of Jefferson Davis. 
 The history of the American trimmer, like that of his English proto- 
 type, is the story of men of learning, often men of consummate ability, 
 enervated by success and pleasure, intoxicated with power, or, too often, 
 inflamed with a love of gold and fame. Run over the list, it is no 
 difficult task, and you will find the statesmen casting their clear, steady 
 light from comparatively few centres, while the whole concave of our 
 history is scintillating with the borrowed light of the temporizers. Few 
 know their names, and we group them in constellations. Numerically 
 they appear great. Individually they are as good as ciphers. 
 
 The Statesman, building not for a day but for all time, is open to the 
 cavils and censures of the feebler artist. The product often of two or 
 three generations of culture himself, the happy combination of tempera- 
 ments and opportunities, the foe of mere precedent and routine, no 
 wonder it is that the hungry, jostling ephemera do not comprehend him, 
 and are unable to measure his lofty stature with their ten foot poles. 
 
 St. Peter's, seen near at hand, is disappointing, so the travelers tell us. 
 But viewed from the extensive plain of the historic campagna and bathed 
 in the rich glow of an Italian sunset, it reveals in that gorgeous dome and 
 symmetrical structure the vast design of Buonarroti. Our own national 
 Capitol, much abused and belittled far more than its deserts, used to be a 
 source of annoyance from whatever part of the great city it was seen ; 
 but since the spirit of improvement has dared to carry into effect 
 the original design of Washington, and broad avenues have been suita- 
 bly graded tn its base, from whatever quarter of the city you behold 
 it, the elegance and beautiful proportions of the building fill out 
 the artistic conception. In such a sense as this, Senator Sumner 
 was not appreciated, often by real friends. In this same loftiness above 
 the common standard, he was often deceived by the petty. So grand, 
 however, were his own conceptions of right and duty, that no evil result 
 
28 
 
 followed. I ventured to differ with him in 1872 on the question of 
 President Grant's renomination, and I essayed to point out to him, as we 
 were crossing the ferry from Jersey City to New York, that the colored 
 people of the country could not follow his advice, then recently given, to 
 vote for their old friend Mr. Greeley. Granting, if necessary, all that 
 he had urged, and he did it with an earnestness and breadth of view 
 which I wish his associates had understood at the time, I stated the sim- 
 ple issue to be, if no other, the safety of the colored people of the South. 
 In that conversation alone, he disclosed to me the extent of his states- 
 manship and nationality, in no sense narrow or partizan. His father- 
 laud was not the dear old Boston, which gave him birth, nor the natural 
 boundaries of mountain and stream or the pettier limits of State lines. 
 It was a statesmanship which loved the native land when she was the 
 asylum of the oppressed and the promoter of the best interest of man- 
 kind. Lessing might say "Patrotism" was a thiug he had no con- 
 ception of; at the highest considering it only a heroic weakness, which 
 he was glad to be without. He only uttered what many silently but 
 unsuspiciously believe. At best their conception is only a negative one, 
 shadowy, vague, indefinite, having no adequate expression. No more 
 than the finite can grasp the infinite or the vulgar comprehend the rea- 
 soning of the learned can patriotism, the basis of statesmanship, be com- 
 prehended by any except the truly heroic mind. Never can it be fully 
 known unless it be by the man who sees in his own land only a portion 
 of that Republic of Nations destined at some time to exist on the earth. 
 Senator Sumner will hold an honorable place as a scholar beside 
 any of his cotemporaries, and far in advance of many of his predecessors, 
 upon whom we are accustomed to look as wonders of learning. If 
 scholarship be not restricted to the exhaustive pursuit of a single branch 
 of learning, but, more extended to that extensive basis of all learning, 
 ancient and modern, which constitutes the culture of our day, and dis- 
 tinguishes the scholar from the pedant or the gerund-grinder, then 
 he yields to none of his cotemporaries. The extent and thorough- 
 ness of his classical knowledge is shown in his published speeches, though 
 not so strongly by that, to the judicious, as the daily conversation on those 
 subjects of poetry and heroic prose with which the classics abound. Here 
 he was pre-eminently at home. In history and international law, I 
 imagine he has had few, if any superiors in the Senate, while in general 
 literature his attainments often astounded his friends. As chairman of 
 the Committee of Foreign Relations, he brought a mature mind, 
 more solid training, the fruits of longer legislative experience, and more 
 adequate idea of the requirements of that arduous position and a better 
 acquaintance with " the language of diplomacy," than any of his prede- 
 cessors. His name will rank worthily with the Adamses, Legare, 
 
29 
 
 Rutledge and Dallas, Webster and Everett. In the history of the im- 
 portant constitutional periods, he was extensively and deeply read, as I 
 have had abundant opportunity of knowing. There seemed iudeed 
 scarcely a name with which he was not intimately familiar. The founda- 
 tions of this vast store of knowledge was laid while at College in 
 the magnificent library which he always remembered through life, 
 when he attended the lectures of the different professors in law, art, belles- 
 lettres, philosophy, and afterwards while studying Italian history and 
 literature at Rome from early morning until five in the evening, and then 
 exploring the treasures of art under the tutelage of Crawford, whose bust 
 of him while young is in the library at Cambridge. During the period 
 of his study of the law, and directly after his admission to the bar, it was 
 sensibly increased ; but it was enlarged while abroad, and augmented and 
 systematized during the years of his senatorship, when social ostracism 
 banished him to the society of those friends that delight us at home and 
 accompany us abroad. He was a devourer of books, I often thought a 
 species of biblio-megatherium, possessing at the same time prodigious 
 powers of acquisition and assimilation. Lawyer like, he always knew 
 where to go for what he wished, possessed such a troop of learned friends, 
 as easily followed any trail he once started. The records of his draughts 
 upon the Congressional Library, and the testimony of the Athenaeum 
 and the Harvard Libraries, when he was supposed to be enjoying the 
 congressional vacation, will, I am sure, bear out this assertion of his 
 " terrible " reading. 
 
 He was equally a toiler, wearing out secretaries, and, like all great 
 minds in any department, was both artist and artizan. No labor was too 
 difficult for him ; the very drudgery of the copyist he did not despise. 
 He had served his apprenticeship at the slavery of the law in A.merica 
 and England, and the pile of manuscripts which were found upon his 
 floor early in the morning and late at night, gave evidence of that train- 
 ing, and his natural capacity. 
 
 Amid the fiercest debates, at times of his utmost physical prostration, 
 he found leisure, often against the remonstrance of his physician, to an- 
 swer by his own hand trivial letters of his humblest correspondents. I have 
 had the pleasure of looking over much of his valuable war corres- 
 pondence, and I hope, at some early day, it may see the light, to show 
 how varied in station and situation the correspondents of this noble soul 
 were. When he was surrounded by his friends, embanked often by 
 books and newspapers, his tables, chairs and lounge actually covered with 
 volumes in German, Italian, French, Latin and Greek, the cheery lamp 
 burning and the open grate shedding its soft light upon his classic 
 face, he always seemed to me one of the type of statesman of another 
 age, a literary character of the last century. How supremely happy, 
 
30 
 
 child-like and genial he appeared at such times ! With what tenderness 
 he would bring forth his art and literary treasures, a missal, some book 
 in law French or patois, a black lettered volume, Claudianus with the poet 
 Gray's autograph, Cicero de Officiis in MSS. of the XVth century, Haydns' 
 Armida, in MSS. by the author, Ossian's Poems with Byron's autograph, 
 Pindar with notes in Milton's hand writing, a little book with Sum Ben 
 Jonsoni, Grotius' Book of Autographs with notes by Milton on Seneca, 
 here a copy of Pojws Essay on Man, with the author's MSS., notes and 
 corrections, showing his critical ear and almost faultless taste ; there the 
 Bible of Bunyan, with the tinker's neat autograph, on one side the book 
 in which the name America occurs for the first time amid ponderous 
 Latin, and on the other Burns' "Scots whahae wi Wallace bled," in that 
 bold round hand of Scotland's ablest bard ! How grandly, too, would 
 he sometimes read those lines which Burns composed during the ride in 
 the blinding storm, drenched with rain, but in imagination charging the 
 English army with Bruce at Bannockburii I 
 
 " By oppression's woes and pains ; 
 By your sons in servile chains, 
 AVe will drain our dearest veins 
 
 But they shall — they shall be free t 
 
 Lay the proud usurper low! 
 Tyrants fall in every foe ! 
 Liberty's in every blow ! 
 Forward ! Let us do, or die !" 
 
 The large collection of engravings and paintings which gave his 
 apartments the appearance of an art gallery, would have stamped him as 
 a man of the highest taste in art, had he not left a more notable proof 
 in an admirable article contributed to a literary magazine.* Before the 
 death of his mother many of these paintings adorned the walls of the 
 modest mansion, No. 20 Hancock street, but were afterwards re- 
 moved to his residence in Washington. Many of them were master 
 pieces, but the engravings, while valuable as a private collection, 
 were surpassed by more elaborate and costly ones, the Appleton in 
 the halls of the Boston Public Library, and the famous Gray collection 
 at Cambridge, gathered at an expense of $30,000, and in some respects 
 one of the best private collections in the world. The munificent donor 
 of these engravings gave an unlimited commission to that distinguished 
 connoisseur, Dr. Louis Thies, to purchase them in Europe, being aware of 
 his long experience and knowledge of the subject. As this collection of 
 engravings was the indirect means of introducing me to Senator Sumner 
 and of getting an estimate of his knowledge of art from one who had 
 devoted a lifetime to its cultivation, I may be pardoned for relating 
 the incident here. 
 
 * " The City "—The Best Portraits in Engraving— New York— January, 1S72. 
 
31 
 
 Dr. Thies was the curator of the engravings, and learning, through 
 his son, a college friend, of my taste for art, kindly invited two other 
 collegians and me, as an especial mark of favor, to view the engraving, 
 at that time kept jealously guarded in the upper story of Gore Hall, 
 away from the sight and touch of the profane ; but since, as I learn, 
 by a more liberal policy, thrown freely open to the student-world. 
 Never shall I forget that day when we roamed delighted through those 
 treasures of the limner's art. — " E. S." (1466), Martin Schongauer, Al- 
 brecht Durer, 
 
 " Emigravit " is the inscription on the tombstone where he lies, 
 Dead he is not, — but departed, — for the artist never dies." 
 
 Penez's vignettes and those of the cousins Behmen, Durer's successors. 
 My enthusiasm, overflowed in an article contributed to the college 
 paper, which, happening to be issued on " class-day," met the eye of 
 Senator Sumner, then visiting the poet Longfellow. He inquired of Dr. 
 Thies the author. It was conjectured by the latter gentleman that I 
 was the guilty one. As a punishment for my audacity, I had the honor 
 of receiving the Senator's card, through Dr. Thies, with an invitation to 
 call on him. In presenting the invitation, I remember, Mr. Thies said, 
 " You will have an excellent opportunity of conversing on art, and will 
 gain much information, for the Senator is, in my opinion, the best art 
 critic in America." 
 
 I found him on this occasion in company with an eminent Judge and 
 author of western Massachusetts,* and his private secretary. f He was 
 reclining upon a lounge, conversing with the Judge, and correcting, at 
 the same time, that able address of his on the " Position and Duties 
 of the Merchant, illustrated by the Life of Granville Sharp," in which 
 he had quoted the well-known extract from Lord Brougham's speech 
 on negro slavery, beginning, " Tell me not of rights — talk not of the 
 property of the planter in his slaves. I deny the right — I acknowledge 
 not the property. The principles, the feelings of our common nature, 
 rise in rebellion against it." The conversation naturally turned upon 
 this passage, and he pointed out the effect of Lord Brougham's accu- 
 rate study of Demosthenes, in the arrangement of the sentences, the 
 order of the emphatic words, and the effect of the rhetorical order, 
 criticising, if I remember correctly, the use of one or two words. From 
 the speech of Lord Brougham, to his own acquaintance with him, was an 
 easy transition, and for nearly two hours he entertained the learned Judge, 
 Secretary, and a college junior, with delightful reminiscences of the Eng- 
 lish statesman of that day. Thus began a friendship with one whom I 
 shall ever revere, not so much from his extraordinary gifts of head and 
 
 Joel Prentiss Bishop, Esq.- t Moorfield Story, Esq.. 
 
32 
 
 heart as his unselfish, uninterrupted and ardent championship of my 
 race — a friendship which lasted, deepening and extending on my part, 
 till I received the telegram announcing his death. 
 
 Long had I reverenced him, at a distance. As a little boy, I walked to 
 the Roxbury line to hear the venerable Quincy welcome him home from 
 exile. I had climbed the rail of the State House at Boston to hear Governor 
 Gardner hail him as "the eloquent orator, the accomplished scholar, and 
 the acknowledged statesman ; not only as the earnest friend of suffering 
 humanity and of every good cause, not only as one who, educated in the 
 institutions and by the altars and firesides of Massachusetts, has won 
 imperishable laurels on the arena of the nation's conflicts, but especially 
 now do we welcome you as the successful defender of her integrity and 
 honor." I looked into his face, when, for the first time after his resump- 
 tion of his senatorial duties, the evening before Mr. Lincoln's election, 
 he spoke in old Faneuil Hall on the issues involved in the vote of the 
 following day. I heard him as with prophetic voice he rang out through 
 the arches of that temple of liberty — " the great clock will soon strike its 
 knell. Every jour years a new President is chosen, but rarely a new 
 government. To-morrow we shall have not only a new President but 
 a new government. A new order of things will begin, and 
 
 OUR HISTORY WILL PROCEED ON A GRANDER SCALE IN HARMONY 
 WITH THOSE SUBLIME PRINCIPLES IN WHICH IT COMMENCED." On 
 
 the next evening, at the house of the sage, Emerson, and on the 
 classic ground of Concord, he showed the true use to be made of 
 victory : " Having obtained this great victory, let us study to use it with 
 moderatio7i, with prudence, with wisdom. Through no failure on our part 
 must its proper fruits be lost. Happily, Abraham Lincoln has those elements 
 of character needed to carry xis through the crisis. He is calm, prudent, 
 wise, and also brave." 
 
 Afterwards, when a school boy at Audover, I left the books for a day, 
 to hear Charles Sumner recapitulate the wisdom, prudence and faith, 
 which marked so eminently the Martyred President, and connected his 
 name so irrevocably with all that is heroic in every land. He spoke 
 from that same platform where, a few weeks ago, the Senator from Mis- 
 souri paid the last tribute to his virtues, and where, later, George 
 William Curtis, who approaches Sumner nearest in graces of scholarship, 
 integrity and devotion to humanity, has made further eulogies unnecessary. 
 
 As an orator, Senator Sumner will rank, I am inclined to think, among 
 the third class that Cicero enumerates.* His voice was sonorous and 
 impressive, his pronunciation and enunciation a marvel of perfection in 
 this day of provincialism and vulgarities of style. 
 
 * Tertius est ille aniplus, gravis, ornatus in quo profecto vis maxima est. Dc Oratore, XVIII. 
 
33 
 
 The matter of his speeches being always important, weighty and well 
 selected, comported perfectly with his commanding presence and the 
 grand voice with which nature had endowed him. You forgot Senator 
 Sumner, the orator, while listening to him, and remembered only the 
 cause he was advocating, the wrong he was exposing. He had no 
 tricks of the mere elocutionist, much less the vulgarisms of the schools, 
 the rant, the exaggeration and the false sentimental ism which cheapen 
 American oratory ; but his eloquence was " the hearty love of truth," 
 the lofty purpose, so transparent and sincere, so earnest and emphatic, 
 that you felt it pervading the very atmosphere in which he stood— 
 ! si ilium vidisse ; ! si ilium audisse ! 
 
 It is the intense love of liberty, a hearty patriotism meeting us at 
 every turn, that gives the rapt charm to the orations of Lysias. A life 
 consecrated to the cause of virtue and the undimmed honor of the State, 
 led Cicero and Quintilian to extol Isocrates in an age when the orator 
 and the statesman were identical. 
 
 It heightens the respect due to Senator Sumner that, while he 
 neglected nothing which might give weight to the word he was to speak 
 at the fitting moment, even elaborately writing and carefully reading his 
 speeches, feeling, like Demosthenes, ashamed to come before a cultivated 
 audience unprepared, yet the cause in jeopardy and the attainment of 
 some good end were ever before him, and not the praise or censure of 
 men. Mr. Phillips surpassed him, perhaps, in the keen polish of 
 extemporaneous speech, and equalled him certainly in loftiness of pur- 
 pose and delicacy of sarcasm; but he wanted the weight of testimony 
 with which Senator Sumner always silenced, if he did not invariably 
 convince an opponent or a doubter. 
 
 You left Mr. Phillips with the silvery tones still ringing in your ear, 
 the epigrammatical thrust still tingling in your side, wondering at the 
 art which led you captive, and feeling that he had not finished all 
 he had to say. After hearing Senator Sumner you felt as 
 though the question of immortal life or everlasting death had been 
 presented, the final sermon had been preached, and you had only time to 
 choose that day whom you would serve. The perfect finish of gesture 
 and the classical arrangement of the period he left to the graceful and 
 scholarly Everett, and they will live in the history of the eloquent 
 literature of the country. For himself, he found no time for mere 
 sentence making. The sweep of the argument, strong in details, 
 stengthened in the morale, equipped with logic and illustration, rushed 
 on with a movement of conviction 
 
 " — that clanked like armor in the charge."' 
 
 To this was added an intensity of sentiment, cherished and stimulated 
 3 
 
34 
 
 by his habits of life and a devotion to great ideas, an idiomatic use of 
 sturdy English, a mailed hand and a grasp of principles relating to Gov- 
 ernment, which recall Milton and Burke, the latter of whom he so 
 strongly resembled in personal appearance that the familiar portrait of 
 that orator, which graced his study, was often mistaken for himself. He 
 had the scholarly, learned and imperious temper of Milton, and hia 
 Saxon dogmatism and persistency, and, like him, he did not presume " to 
 sing of high life and lofty deeds" until he knew that in his own person 
 existed "the pattern of the noblest things." 
 
 Mure favored, however, than the great " secretary for foreign languages," 
 the hands of Senator Sumner were held up throughout his career by 
 the sturdiest hearts, the brightest intellects, and the purest souls our land 
 has produced, and the gifted aud earnest abroad loved and watched his 
 career with affectionate interest. Phillips, the Agitator, spared him when 
 hurling his invectives ; often, indeed, he supplemented his labors. Garri- 
 son, the Iconoclast of Slavery aud Constitution, had only words of cheer 
 for the "young man eloquent," Poetry lent the charm of her inspiration. 
 The bards who have best touched the National heart and given us a name 
 abroad were his personal friends. The single, clear and piping note of 
 Whittier, like the sky-lark flying aloft, the melodious trill of Longfellow, 
 heard like the cheery robin afar, and the shrill sarcasm, the triumphant 
 paean of patriotism bursting from the eagle throat of Lowell, the senten- 
 tious, aphoristic approval of Emerson, the praise of the radical Parker, the 
 benedictions of Quincv and Adams and Story, is it strange that Charles 
 Sumner, in heart, accomplishments and statesmanship easily surpassed 
 the men of his own time? He was a combination of physique, training, 
 fortuitous surroundings, the fortunate juncture of affairs at which he en- 
 tered public life, the eventful period during which he labored, and the 
 subtle and open influences which helped to keep him in his place, such as 
 we shall not see again in this century. 
 
 The political heir of the Whigs of the Revolution, the Federalists of 
 the new Constitution, the Whigs of the Proviso battle and the Free-Soil- 
 ers, he reached success in the ranks of the Republican party, which he, 
 as much as any other man, helped to form. Had he looked merely for 
 the applause of men, or had he been weary of well-doing, he might, like 
 Mr. Garrison, have rested after Emancipation had been proclaimed. 
 But, remembering his early determination to render the work complete, 
 knowing the danger of leaving the seeds of disease, and seeing the help- 
 less condition of the race, whose advocate he was, he pressed forward 
 with the old ardor to complete the work of Regeneration by confirming 
 by law the Civil Rights of all citizens of the United States. He remem- 
 bered, perhaps, Livy's sentence: Dum nullum Jastiditur genus eniteret 
 virtus crevit imperium Romanum ; and he well knew that he who waited 
 
35 
 
 for his rights until a majority, without solicitation and unspurred by 
 nec3ssity, granted them, was like Horace's 
 
 Rustieua expectat dum defluat amnis at ille, 
 Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis levum. 
 
 Comparing the efforts of INIr. Sumner, in behalf of this measure, with 
 those of Clarkson and Wilberforce, for the negroes of the West Indies, 
 and Fox and Burke, in aid of the East Indians, I know I shall be 
 accused of being swayed by personal interest, when I assert that they 
 transcend in disinterestedness, in unanswerable reasoning, and in far- 
 seeing statesmanship, his arguments even against slavery and in behalf 
 of emancipation. As a humanitarian, a scholar aud a gentleman, he 
 could not help opposing slavery. As a patriot, all his thoughts naturally 
 turned to the preservation of the Republic. Emancipation on every 
 consideration looked toward this. But, on all these issues, the cold, 
 calculating economist, the professional Union-saver, could stand with 
 him. The halfhearted Union-men became all Unionists when their 
 country was in peril, and many who had never cared for the clanking 
 of chains, and the horrors of the slave-pen, became humane -when 
 they read of Belle Isle and Andersonville, or believed in freedom Iwhen 
 their own first-born were laid lifeless corpses before their own doors, or 
 filled nameless graves on Southern battlefields. There was not in the 
 masses the deep-seated horror of the wrong, no deeply intrenched idea 
 of justice, universal and impartial, such as filled the mind of Charles 
 Sumner. Hence the difficulty in employing colored troops, the trouble 
 with regard to colored officers, and the consequent first flush.of success 
 on the side of the rebellion. Mr. Hill, of Georgia, acknowledges now that 
 emancipation benefited the South. Thankful for the clemency which 
 spared his head, granting the benefit of free labor, he dares to 
 oppose your rights and mine. Nay, he is back in the Senate, where he 
 may contend against the measure. Senator Sumner saw that this would 
 happen at the close of the war, and attempted to provide against it. He 
 saw that men of less ardent zeal and shallower philanthropy would be 
 satisfied with what was done, and would betake themselves to the spoils 
 of office, leaving the negro still only a half citizen in his native land, 
 a Pariah where he should be a complete freeman. 
 
 In devoting himself to this work, he merited Burke's eulogium upon 
 Fox.* In his persistent demand for this measure of simple justice, and 
 the unanswered arguments he has left in its favor, he raises himself as 
 much above the vulgar herd of politicians as Mont Blanc rears its snow- 
 white head above the clouds. 
 
 •Works of Edmund Burke, Vol. II, p. 533. 
 
36 
 
 Only such a man as Senator Sumner would have persisted in bring- 
 ing before each Congress such a measure — one who looked forward to the 
 homogeneity of the Republic — who felt that the national faith pledged 
 to the negro, when he led our scouts through the swamp, when he 
 served as a contraband, when we refused to take him as a soldier, and 
 enlisted as a soldier only to be treated with marked difference, when he 
 charged at Fort Pillow and Port Hudson and Wagner without hope of 
 quarter, when he suffered the cowardly outrages of midnight attacks by 
 the baffled enemies of the Republic, should be kept at all hazards by 
 those whom he had helped. He knew how low-bred Caste, the spawn of 
 slavery, the last refuge of weakness or inferiority, appealed to the easy 
 prejudices of the worst classes. The man, who in breadth of soul, in 
 learning, piety, or even physical strength, was the pronounced inferior 
 of his brother, could dominate over him, degrade and insult him, by 
 reason of that feeblest of all accidental properties — color. The intelli- 
 gent and the thoughtful are ashamed of it. Europe has never known 
 it with all her despotisms. Cultured New England and the open-hearted 
 West despise it, and leave it to the petty despotisms of the South — the 
 color-aristocracies of Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee, where even the 
 United States Government cannot protect its own officials from insult. 
 
 There is nothing heroic in contending for one's own rights aud being 
 zealous in the maintenance of those principles which will bring life, 
 liberty and the pursuits of happiness to our own homes ; but to feel for 
 those in chains as bound with them ; to cry out against the wrongs done 
 to our fellow-men ; to hate aud oppose the snobocracy of Caste, founded 
 on color or section, and to have manhood enough to come out and 
 demonstrate the absurdity of that contempt, is the part of a more 
 enlarged capacity and a truer manhood than as yet prevails in America. 
 But this was the height Senator Sumner had reached; I should rather 
 say this was the lofty plateau upon which he was born. His sentiments 
 were not merely aired in the Senate Chamber. They were exhibited 
 before the eyes of the public, at his private table, where a gentleman 
 met his equals, irrespective of color or nationality. It was not done for 
 political effect, it was no mania or idiosyncrasy, as it seemed often to 
 ignoble minds, but the altitude of a mind which had no conception of 
 color prejudice. When Attorney General Akerman, of Georgia, called 
 to pay his respects to Senator Sumner, he found him breakfasting with 
 Mr. Joshua B. Smith, his guest at the time When the Southern delegation 
 from Ciuciunati called to testify their admiration of Senator Sumner's 
 attitude in the Greeley campaign, they were individually introduced to 
 the colored visitors who happened to be present. I, myself, have met 
 at his house and hospitable board the representatives of the French, 
 English and German embassies. In that cosey study I have listened 
 
37 
 
 to the conversation of Ex-Governor Curtin, Frederick Douglass, 
 Vice President Wilson, Caleb Cushing, Assistant Attorney General 
 Hill, Professor Langston, Wendell Phillips, James T. Fields, and the 
 Marquis DeChambrun.and no air of patronage, no strained good breeding, 
 made any guest feel ill at ease. He merely carried into daily practice 
 the principle which ornamented a statuette that used to stand upon his 
 study table, Le bon Pasteur aime ses brebis de toutes couleurs. Therefore, 
 Senator Sumner's republicanism never needed expedients. It had 
 not one thing ready for the canvass and the lip ; but caste shut up in 
 the heart and ready to display itself after the victory. Hence, even 
 Republicans who could not emancipate themselves from the chains of 
 early prejudices, and Democrats who differed with him in theory, but 
 surpassed him in practice, could not help reverencing such fidelity and 
 consistency. In doiug this he did not exalt himself above the Fa- 
 ther of his Country, who, in a time of need, shared the blanket, 
 through the night, of Primus Hall, the negro soldier.* But when Sena- 
 tor Sumner dared to ask as much for the negro as for himself in the 
 Senate, saying: 
 
 " Sir, early in life I vowed mysslf to nothing less than the idea of 
 making the principles and promises of the Declaration of Independence 
 a living reality. This was my aspiration. For that I have labored ; 
 and now, at this moment, as its fulfillment seems within reach, I ap- 
 peal to my fellow Senators that there shall be no failure on their part. 
 Make, I entreat you, the Declaration of Independence, in its principles 
 and promises, a living letter ; make it a practical reality. * * * I long 
 to vote for amnesty; I have always hoped to vote for it; but, sir, 
 I should be unworthy of my seat as a Senator if I voted for it 
 while the colored race are shut out of their rights, and the ban of 
 color is recognized in this chamber. * * * Be just to the colored 
 race before you are generous to former rebels. Unwillingly I press this 
 truth, but it belongs to the moment. I utter it with regret, for I long 
 to record my name in behalf of amnesty. I here declare from my seat 
 that I am for amnesty, provided it can be associated with the equal 
 rights of the colored race, but if not so associated, then, so help me God, 
 I am against it ;" he trauscended, in true loftiness of soul, any senti- 
 ment, either of Washington, Jefferson or Adams. 
 
 The slave power hated him because he was learned, and in the truest 
 sense aristocratic. It saw the brilliant promise of his early manhood, 
 and sought to woo him with that dalliance and arts to which so many 
 had succumbed. Imagine such a tower of strength for the South 
 planted in New England. Senators Butler and Mason were accustomed, 
 
 * Colored Americans of the Revolution— AViu. C. Nell. 
 
after he became Senator, to speak of having introduced him to society. 
 They introduce him ! — the fledgling in law, for whom the whole bench of 
 the Supreme Court left their cards on the first day of his arrival in 
 Washington, the day when, for the first time, he saw a fellow-countryman 
 in chains! Thev confer honor upon one who, in birth, education and ac- 
 complishments, was their peer then and the friend afterwards of Carlyle, 
 Brougham, Bright, Gladstone, Cobden, Stanley, Thiers, Tennyson and 
 Taine, Palmerston, the Duke of Argyle and the Duchess of Sutherland, 
 of Thackeray and Dickens ! 
 
 One is apt to believe in the aristocracy of birth and training when from 
 the "Gentleman's set" at Harvard, from out the ranks of the " Porcel- 
 lian," fruges consumere nati, the baldest rider and the most skilful boxer, 
 the accomplished " man of society," and the elegant dilettante become the 
 most eloquent orator and the foremost statesman of their time, beginning 
 at the bottom of the ladder with the despised Abolitionists and ending 
 with a country revolutionized in favor of freedom. 
 
 They remembered, perhaps, that an aristocrat Pericles led the democ- 
 racy of Athens and confirmed the glory of the State : that a Mirabeau 
 gave an impetus to the French revolution, and a Chatham pleaded for 
 the rights of the colonies, all abiding by the cause they espoused, while 
 more democratic aristocrats sold themselves for place or were corrupted 
 by gold. The relentless persecution which follows those who espouse a 
 cause different from the supposed faith of their fathers, is not without its 
 illustrations even in the State of South Carolina. 
 
 But Senator Sumner holds a peculiar, fitting and appropriate relation 
 to our University. If, as Professor Huxley has lately said at Aberdeen,* 
 the ideal University should be a place where thought is free from all 
 fetters "and in which all sources of knowledge and all aids to learning 
 should be accessible to all comers, ivithout distinction oj creed or country, 
 riches or poverty ;" if that able Federalist, the friend of Josiah Quincy, 
 Chancellor DeSaussure ; if Colonels Mitchell, May and Kershaw and 
 others, did not use language in a double sense or without any meaning 
 at all when they reported against such opposition " an Act to establish a 
 college at Columbia " saying in impressive and prophetic language: — 
 
 Whereas the proper education oj youth contributes greatly to the 
 prosperity of Society, and ought always to be an object of legislative at- 
 tention ; and 
 
 Whereas the establishment of a College in the central part of the 
 State, where all its youth may be educated, will highly promote the in- 
 struction, the good order and the harmony oj the whole community," 'f 
 
 * Universities, Actual and Ideal.— Inaugural Address, as Lord Rector, University of Aber- 
 deen, Feb. 27, 1S7L 
 t LaBorde's History of the South Carolina College, pp. 22, 23, and A. A. 1801, 5 Statutes, -in: 1 ,. 
 
39 
 
 then, at last, for the first time in the history of the college, has the 
 Honored Board of Trustees brought the University back to the original 
 design of the founders, in harmony with the theory of education abroad 
 and the foremost institutions of our country. After seventy years of 
 exclusiveness, and the development of a royal-priesthood of learning, 
 the State opens wide the doors of the University to " all its youth," 
 ennobling in this way her own proud record. 
 
 It is an ancient maxim that the king never dies. In France, during 
 the days of the monarchy, at the very moment the breath left the body 
 of the king, the mournful cry was taken up by the attendants and passed 
 from chamber to corridor, from corridor to street, from street to country, 
 Le Roi est mart) but before the last sound had died away the triumphant 
 reply came coursing back, announcing the successor, Vive le Roi! 
 
 Gentlemen of the Faculty, when scarcely a year ago the Secretary 
 of State,* bearing one of the most honored names of South Carolina, a name 
 which the sacred ordeal of martyrdom connects with those of Vane and 
 Sydney, and one which the graces of eloquence loves to link with that of 
 "Webster, dared to seek admission to these walls, honored professors, some 
 distinguished for learning and years of meritorious service, others emi- 
 nent in their several professions, some of whom had themselves studied 
 in colleges with students much darker in complexion than the daring in- 
 terloper — men whose culture, training and reading should have raised 
 them above the petty spirit of caste, and made them scorn to bend to the 
 lash of an intolerant and effete opiuion — fled from our quiet haunts and 
 charming academic walks, crying, in lugubrious tones, Le Roi est mort ! 
 Le Roi est mort.' The hostile press, one of whose editors graduated in 
 Paris, with a negro leading his class, took up the cry, Le Roi est mort. 
 But the sound had not yet ceased, ere the old response came triumphantly 
 back, Vive le Roi! It came in the students who entered, Vive le Roi.' 
 It came in our successful Junior Exhibition, Vive le Roi ! It came in 
 our scholarship bill, Vive le Roi! It has come finally and demonstra- 
 tively in the successful exercises of our academic week, Vive, vive le Roi! 
 
 We stand at the summit of the educational power of the State, resting 
 upon the common school system, firmly impressed with the importance 
 of the work we have to do and certain of its success. This work will re- 
 dound to the lasting welfare of every true citizen, and will reflect credit 
 upon the Trustees of the University, who dallied not w 7 ith the illiberal 
 and proscriptive character of caste in matters of education, but placed 
 themselves boldly on record as friends of Equality. 
 
 '■'■ Hon. II. E. Hayne. 
 
40 
 
 Today we have on our rolls students who, in points of numbers and 
 ability, will compare favorably with those of the old regime. It has been 
 within my own recollection, since Massachusetts, by geueral law, forbade 
 a distinction which never existed as a rule. But now, such is the liberal 
 tendency of the times, Brown, Wesleyan, Dartmouth, Ann Arbor, Amherst, 
 and Harvard, are all open, irrespective of class or condition. Yale grad- 
 uates her first colored academic student this year, while graduates of Got- 
 tingen, Heidelberg, Paris, Cambridge, England, Glasgow, Edinburgh and 
 Stonyhurst, are found among the colored men of the country, who, a few 
 years ago, were denied equal education at home. Within two weeks, 
 three colored students entered the New York Normal School. Already 
 there have been colored graduates of the high schools of Troy, N. Y., 
 Syracuse, Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, Cambridge and Worcester, show- 
 ing most conclusively that the so-called inability to learn, and "social 
 repugnance" for the negro, on other arenas than our own, has been 
 overwhelmingly refuted. Much of this spirit of liberality sprang from 
 the able argument of the young lawyer, Charles Sumner, in 1849, arguing 
 before the Supreme Court of Massachusetts — Equality before the 
 Law. Hence, it is peculiarly appropriate that we, to-day, representing 
 the College from which most of the mischievous and pernicious theories 
 fulminated before and during the rebellion, in the barbaric days of 
 slaverv, and I, the fortunate recipient of those educational advan- 
 tages which he helped to make free to all, should unite in this simple 
 chaplet to his memory, whose sound judgment and real statesmanship 
 made him insist upon an identity and not an equivalence in matters of 
 education. This, then, is our cause of congratulation, though the old 
 inquisitors may bid the friends of freedom and equal education retreat 
 and forswear their principles, denying to the children of the freemen of 
 the State opportunities of education. Let us determine to maintain 
 these " with the hazard of our lives, if need be," for without them a 
 republic is a misnomer, scholarship an empty bauble, and the blood 
 and treasure spent to redeem the land worse than wasted. 
 
 I stood a few weeks ago in that deserted mansion in Washington, 
 known so well to the generous and aspiring of both races. I wandered 
 mournfully through, its disordered rooms, even then confused with the 
 preparations for packing and removal. There was not a painting, a vase, 
 a statuette nor a souvenir, with which I was not familiar. The well 
 known busts, the clock with its cuckoo call, the old senatorial desk, the 
 vacant chair, all invoked the magnificent presence of their departed 
 master. How often from that doorway had I accompanied him during 
 the period of his convalescence, one short year before ! How much had 
 he planned for his recovery as he whirled over the broad avenues of the 
 
41 
 
 Washington dedicated to freedom ! How kind and genially he used to 
 greet the soldiers of Arlington, and how proudly he would point to the 
 glorious dome of the Capitol, seen from the heights of Georgetown, as we 
 slowly descended after the long drive, saying it never seemed so beauti- 
 ful, so worthy the name of a capital as since Freedom had ransomed it. 
 Six months before I had sat in that very chair and saw his flaming in- 
 dignation at the rumor that " the colored representatives were about to 
 desert " him " on the field of battle," such were his words, being willing 
 to surrender the school clause in the Civil Rights Bill. With what con- 
 scious pride I bade him be not alarmed, for every representative from 
 South Carolina would do his duty. I saw his smile of satisfaction after 
 our representatives had spoken ; I recall his pleasure at the resolutions 
 in favor of Civil Rights which the South Carolina Legislature sent him. 
 Here once during his slow recovery, when almost bent double with pain, 
 he said, rising and straining himself to the old senatorial height, 
 " I have been accused of imperialism and centralization. I am proud of 
 pleading guilty to the charge. I am in favor of centralization ; I am in 
 favor of imperialism — the Imperialism of Hubian Rights; and he who 
 accepts less than this is the enemy of his country." 
 
 As I stood there, book and picture, cathedral and portrait, statute and 
 vase faded away, and I heard again only the plaintive voice, " Oh ! if my 
 bill was only passed, I should seek rest. My work would then be finished 
 and I could rest." And he was gone, and an inscrutable providence had 
 not permitted him to accomplish that wish ! He died without the borders 
 of that promised land ; but he lived long enough and successfully enough 
 to see the Capital, where his footsteps had been dogged, and where faith- 
 ful friends had covered him with revolvers daily, without his knowledge, 
 cousecreated to Freedom. He saw the slave-pen disappear and the mag- 
 nificent school house which bears his name, rise above the noble city. 
 He lived to present a negro for admission to that Court which went out 
 of its way to deny the negro's rights to a common humanity. He lived 
 long enough to welcome the negro to the army as a laborer and soldier, 
 and theu, taking away his musket, to give him a ballot. Once more and 
 the wave dashed higher, he welcomed him to the Senate and seated him 
 in the chair of the Arch Rebel. He lived to see Hayti and Liberia re- 
 cognized, arbitration a fact, the resolutions of censure rescinded, and he 
 waited only for Civil Rights, and the coming of the day toward which 
 his gaze was ever directed, when the ploughshare of war should drip no 
 more with blood, when neither gibbet nor proscription should curtail the 
 rights of the meanest, or take the life of the basest, when the races of 
 our varied nationality should dwell together in mutual harmony and 
 protection, each striving to dare most for the honor and safety of their 
 common country. Oh ! Confederate and Federal, Negro and Saxon, was 
 it not the record of a noble life ? 
 
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