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gave us the most assistance, for he was in deed and in truth our hero—our champion.
And while we can name a host of true friends—friends who have been tried and found steadfast and immovable, none more so than his colleague for many years, Vice-President Wilson, I do not know of any who could measure arms with Mr. Sumner. He began at home in Massachussetts, and although he found no actual slaves there when he mounted the arena of manhood; he found the cold hand of discrimination, and fought till he had driven it out.
When he went to Washington he found it the abode of slaves and the den of oppression; he mustered the armies of Jehovah and flayed the monster, for like Herecules he held the poison-fanged viper by the neck till the horrid reptile twitched in death.
He fired the hearts of the North on the one side, and of the South on the other, and opened a chasm which could never close till the negro passed through it on his way to Canaan. He,in conjunction with Thadeus Stevens, Horace Greely and others, held the rod over the great Lincoln, and whipped him step by step and from corner to corner during the late bloody war, till he issued his world-renowned proclamation of emancipation.
At the end of the war he with Chief Justice Chase and Thadeus Stevens at his side, led the crusade against the admission of the South to representation, till the negro had his oath in the court house, and was clothed with the ballot. These being obtained, he turned his attention to the district of Columbia, and crushed out all distinctions between races and colors so completely that any one visiting the national capitol to-day, would be astonished to learn that such a hydra-headed monster ever stalked at large in that beautiful city.
When President Johnson sent General Grant, who was no statesman or politician at the time, through the South on a tour of inspection, and he (General Grant) returned and reported things all quiet and peaceable between the whites and blacks, it was Mr. Sumner who rose up in the Senate and told the country that the report was white-washed, and so counterbalanced or counteracted the effects of the report as to turn the tide of popular sentiment in favor of those who stood in need of the protection of the
