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arrive at that period in Mr. Sumner's life when he was to become known through all the United States as the advocate of human freedom. When Judge Story died in 1845, hoping that the young student he had trained up would succeed him in the professorship of the law school. Charles Sumner had just chosen another path in life. He delivered his oration before the Boston municipal authorities, and the author of the True Grandeur of Nations therein unfolded the banner under which he was to enter political life. It was delivered on the Fourth of Julv, 1845, and from that day dates Mr. Sumner's career as one of the leading figures in the history of the anti-slavery struggle.
The struggle for the annexation of Texas, and the consequent extension of the slave power, was at its height at this time. The Whig Party opposed it bitterly, but it was evident that the Democracy would carry their point. Mr. Sumner raised his voice in indignant protest against what he knew to be almost inevitable, but against a wrong which was not the less a wrong because it had the weight of numbers in its favor. At a public meeting in old Faneuil Hall, he pronounced an elequent and thrilling oration, denouncing such an extension of the slave power as was proposed; and again in the year after, in the same place, addressed the Whig State Convention on the "Anti-slavery Duties of the Whig Party." Not long after he published a letter of rebuke to Hon. Robert C. Winthrop for his vote in favor of the war with Mexico. On the 17th of February, 1847, he delivered before the Boston Mercantile Library Association a brilliant lecture on "White Slavery in the Barbary States," which he subsequently expended and published in book form. At Springfield, in September of the same year, he made a speech before the Massachusetts State Convention on "Political Action Against the Slave Power and the Extension of Slavery," and in June, 1848, another, "For Union Among Men of All Parties Against the Slave Power and the Extension of Slavery," in which he forcibly characterized the movement of the day as a "revolution destined to end only with the overthrow of the tyranny of the slave power of the United States." These able productions, so masterly, forcible, and direct, the earnest speakings of an advanced thinker and a man of profound convictions, gave Mr. Sumner a wide celebrity; but they had alarmed the Whig Party, of which he was a member, by their uncompromising antagonism to slavery. The Pro-slavery Democracy was all-powerful; the Whigs were, in mass, timid of going to an extreme length in opposition to it, and Mr, Sumner withdrew
