But at the time of which I speak, all he said was so deeply grounded in his feelings and conscience, that it was for him difficult to understand how others could form different conclusions. When, shortly before the National Republican Convention of 1872, he had delivered in the Senate that fierce philippic for which he has been censured so much, he turned to me with the question, whether I did not think that the statements and arguments he had produced would certainly exercise a decisive influence on the action of that convention. I replied that I thought it would not. He was greatly astonished,—not as if he indulged in the delusion that his personal word would have such authoritative weight, but it seemed impossible to him that opinions which in him had risen to the full strength of overruling conviction, that a feeling of duty which in him had grown so solemn and irresistible as to inspire him to any risk and sacrifice, ever so painful, should fall powerless at the feet of a party which so long had followed inspirations kindred to his own. Such was the ingenuousness of his nature; such his faith in the rectitude of his own cause. The result of his effort is a matter of history. After the Philadelphia Convention, and not until then, he resolved to oppose his party, and to join a movement which was doomed to defeat. He obeyed his sense of right and duty at a terrible sacrifice.
He had been one of the great chiefs of his party, by many regarded as the greatest. He had stood in the Senate as a mighty monument of the struggles and victories of the anti-slavery cause. He had been a martyr to his earnestness. By all Republicans he had been looked up to with respect, by many with veneration. He had been the idol of the people of his State. All this was suddenly changed. Already, at the time of his opposition to the Santo Domingo scheme, he had been deprived of his place at the head of the Senate Committee on Foreign
