Thanks for your favor of the 3d, which has reached me at just the right time. I am even now engaged in putting the address you refer to through the press, as part of a volume.
I am greatly obliged to you for calling my attention so frankly to the more important point touched upon in your letter. If my statement in regard to Sumner left the impression of “contempt,” or dislike, upon your mind, it certainly conveyed something wholly apart from my design. It is, however, very difficult, in dealing with the foibles of a public man, to do it in such a way as not to give prominence to that part of your [one's] portrayal. Sumner's foibles were very pronounced. I came in forcible contact with them more than once in dealing with him myself; and my father and mother came in such very forcible contact with them as to sever their relations [with him]. From personal experience, I think there was great truth in George William Curtis's incisive remark, that, with Sumner, difference of opinion, on a question in which he was deeply interested, assumed in his mind the aspect of moral turpitude. This it was which led to his break with my father. He actually had the impertinence gravely to inform my mother one day that he believed “Mr. Adams meant to be honest.” I imagine he was infinitely surprised when he was practically thereupon turned out of the house. Certainly, he never entered it again.
It was exactly the same in his treatment of Dr. Palfrey.
It was the same in his relations with Dana.
Now, as respects General Grant, I believe that, owing to these foibles, as we will call them, on Sumner's part, the antagonism between them was radical. It would have broken out at any time when they chanced to be brought together in close contact. The two men were by nature different, and a clash was inevitable.
It was not so with Fish. If I understand Fish s character correctly, he had a good deal of that Dutch element in him which is now cropping out so strongly in South Africa. He was a quiet and easy-going man; but, when aroused, by being, as he
