9
soil exponents in the Senate. They were the nucleotic forces of of those fearful issues which were in a short time to change the land-marks of our country, and baptise the nation with freedom. Up to this time the right of petition was partially denied if it involved the subject of human rights, and those in the Senate who dared to present them were classed among fanatics, agitators, and the most inimical foes the country had.
But for one to so far forget his calling as to attack the wrongs of slavery, was to make himself such an unnatural piece of hybrid monstrosity, that no vocabulary could furnish a name with which to entitle him.
The reputation of Mr Sumner, though small at that time, had nevertheless, acquired sufficient celebrity to indicate his future course in the Senate; therefore, to thwart any mischievous designs on his part to the special institution whose advocates were always exceedingly sensitive, the pro-slavery senators resorted to every conceivable parliamentary strategy to prevent him getting the floor; but in due time he obtained it, and from the day he delivered his maiden speech to the day of his death he was the grand master of the Senate Chamber.
In a conversation with Chief-Justice Chase in Washington city in 1869, he told me when only three of them were in the Senate (meaning three Abolitionists) they were pointed out and looked at as wild beasts in a cage, but, said he, "Sumner kept them all busy,"
For three quarters of a century the Congress of the United States had never had a fearless champion of liberty. True there had been men there who had assumed timid positions favoring free speech, colonization, &c, but there had never been a man there who took bold grounds in favor of a free country.
Mr Sumner came on the stage of political action, just as Webster, Clay, and Calhoun were passing off. I think he came in the same day Mr. Clay went out. never to return. This was a trio of great men who had long been the bulwarks of what was fast becoming an obsolescent era in the history of our country. For over a quarter of a century their expositons of the Constitution of the United States, ranked equal to a decision from the supreme court of the nation. But the Missouri compromise, admission of Texas, and the Wilmot proviso, blended with the doctrine of squatter-sovereignty, which were to grow out of the Kansas-Nebraska struggle, was destined, under an over-ruling Providence, to embolden the advocates of liberty, and usher in
