By Hon. George Frisbie Hoar, LL.D.

The speeches of Charles Sumner have many titles to endure in the memory of mankind. They contain the reasons on which the American people acted in taking the successive steps in the revolution which overthrew slavery, and made of a race of slaves, freemen, citizens, voters. They have a high place in literature. They are not only full of historical learning, set forth in an attractive way, but each of the more important of them was itself an historical event. They afford a picture of a noble public character. They are an example of the application of the loftiest morality to the conduct of the State. They are an arsenal of weapons ready for the friends of Freedom in all the great battles when she may be in peril hereafter. They will not be forgotten unless the world shall attain to such height of virtue that no stimulant to virtue shall be needed, or to a depth of baseness from which no stimulant can arouse it.

Mr. Sumner held the office of Justice of the Peace, and that of Commissioner of the Circuit Court, to which he was appointed by his friend and teacher, Judge Story. He was a member of the convention held in 1853 to revise the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. With these exceptions, his only official service was as Senator in Congress from Massachusetts, from the 4th of March, 1851, when he was just past forty years of age, until his death, March 9, 1874.

If his career could have been predicted in his earliest childhood, he could have had no better training for his great duties than that he in fact received. He was one of the best scholars in the public Latin School in Boston. He received the Franklin medal from the hands of Daniel Webster, who told him that "the state had a pledge of him." His school life was followed by four years in Harvard College, and a course at the Harvard Law School, where he was the favorite pupil of Judge Story. He was an eager student of the Greek and Roman classics. But his special delight was in history and international law. After his admission to the bar he was reporter of the decisions of his beloved master, and edited twenty volumes of the equity reports of Vesey, Jr., which he enriched with copious and learned notes. A little later, when he was twenty-six years old, he spent a month in Washington, tarrying a short time in New York on his way. In that brief period he made life-long friendships with some famous men, including Chancellor Kent, Judge Marshall, and Francis Lieber. He had a rare gift for making friendships with men, especially with great men, and with women. With him in those days an acquaintance with any person worth knowing soon ripened into an indissoluble friendship.

A few years later he spent a little more than two years in Europe, coming home when he was just past twenty-nine years old. That time was spent in attending courts, lectures of eminent professors, and in society. No house which he desired to enter seems to have been closed to him. Statesmen, judges, scholars, beautiful women, leaders of fashionable society, welcomed to the closest intimacy this young American of humble birth, with no passport other than his own character and attainment. It is hardly too much to say that the youth of twenty-nine had a larger and more brilliant circle of friendship than any other man on either continent. The list of his friends and correspondents would fill many pages. He says in a letter to Judge Story, what would seem like boasting in other men, but with him was modest and far within the truth:—

"I have a thousand things to say to you about the law, circuit life, and the English judges. I have seen more of all than probably ever fell to the lot of a foreigner. I have had the friendship and confidence of judges, and of the leaders of the bar. Not a day passes without my being five or six hours in company with men of this stamp. My tour is no vulgar holiday affair, merely to spend money and to get the fashions. It is to see men, institutions, and laws; and, if it would not seem vain in me, I would venture to say that I have not discredited my country. I have called the attention of the judges and the profession to the state of the law in our country, and have shown them, by my conversation (I will say this), that I understand their jurisprudence."

He returned from Europe bringing his sheaves with him. He resolved to devote himself to the study and practice of jurisprudence, to avoid political strife and political office, hoping that he might, perhaps, at some future time, succeed to the chair of Judge Story at Harvard. He kept up his habit of incessant labor. He contributed to the reviews and newspapers a few essays on literature and jurisprudence, and some obituary notices of deceased friends. He became interested in prison discipline and in the cause of peace. In January, 1846, he engaged in an earnest debate in the Prison Discipline Society, in which he favored the system of separate imprisonment for criminals, and maintained his side with great power. July 4, 1845, he delivered in Boston the oration printed in these volumes entitled, "The True Grandeur of Nations," which was declared by Richard Cobden to be the most powerful contribution to the cause of peace made by any modern writer. August 27, 1846, he delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Harvard, his oration entitled, "The Scholar, The Jurist, The Artist, The Philanthropist," in which, in the form of eulogies of his four friends, Pickering, Story, Allston, and Channing, he set forth with masterly eloquence the beauties of the virtues of which they were shining examples.

But he could not remain an indifferent spectator of the great contest then going on between freedom and slavery for the possession of the vast territory between the Mississippi and the Pacific. His first public speech against slavery, printed in these volumes, was delivered November 4, 1845. June 28, 1848, he was present at the meeting in Worcester, where the Free Soil party, afterward the Republican party, was founded, and from that time was recognized in Massachusetts, and very largely throughout the country, as the most eloquent leader and champion of the political movement against slavery. He was elected to the seat of Daniel Webster, in the Senate of the United States, April 24, 1851, and took the oath of office December 1, 1851. The history of his career from that time to his death, the history of the great party he helped to found, the history of liberty in the United States, are almost identical.

It was impossible for Charles Sumner to keep aloof from the great contest for which he was the best equipped champion alive, or to decline to obey the voice of the beloved commonwealth commanding him to take his place in the front and heat of the battle. He had every quality of soul and intellect, every accomplishment, every equipment, needed to fit him for that lofty leadership. Emerson said of him that he had the whitest soul he ever knew. In such warfare no armor of proof is like the defence of absolute integrity, no temper of the sword is like that of perfect purity.

He was a man of absolute singleness of purpose and directness of aim. He went straight to his mark. His public life was devoted to one object, which absorbed his whole soul; that was to make righteousness and freedom controlling forces in the government of the country. He had no other ambition. He desired public office only as he could make it an instrument to that end. He cared for history only as its lessons were lessons of justice and freedom. He cared for literature only as he could draw from it persuasion, argument, or illustration which would advance that lofty purpose. He cared for art only when it taught a moral lesson.

He had a marvellous capacity for work. From the beginning to the end, his life was a life of incessant labor. He had no idle moments. Even conversation, in which he delighted, was an intellectual exercise. In college, the lonely light shone out from his study window, where he

"outwatched the Bear"

long after the gayest of youthful revellers had gone to bed. Even in the heat of summer, in Washington, his life was crowded with hard work. I have known him more than once to fix the hour of midnight for a meeting with delegations with whom he could find no time in the busy day.

The results of this incessant toil were retained in a memory from which nothing seemed to escape. As it was impossible for him to be idle, so it seemed impossible for him to forget. His mind was an encyclopÆdia of the literature and history of constitutional liberty.

He had an indomitable courage. He never flinched or hesitated. He was never troubled with doubts. He saw everything clearly, and could never understand the state of mind of a man who could not see things as he did.

His was the most hopeful nature it was ever my fortune to know. The great virtue of hope, the central figure in the mighty group which the apostle tells us are forever to abide, possessed the very depths of his soul. He came into public life when slavery controlled every department of the government; legislated through Congress; administered the law through the Executive; sat on the bench of the Supreme Court. The first years of his public service were years of signal victories of the slaveholding power. To common men the day seemed constantly growing darker and darker, and the cause of freedom more and more hopeless. Sumner never abated one jot or tittle of his sublime confidence. The close of some of his speeches in those days is a trumpet note of triumph.

When he was stricken down in the Senate-chamber by the bludgeon of an assassin, his first conscious utterance as he recovered from the stupor caused by the terrible blows upon his head was that he would renew the conflict with slavery in the Senate as soon as he could return there. In his first public speech, a few weeks afterward, he said: "You have already made allusion to the suffering which I have undergone. This is not small, but it has been incurred in the performance of duty; and how small is it compared with that tale of woe which is perpetually coming to us from the house of bondage! With you I hail the omens of final triumph. I ask no prophet to confirm this assurance. The future is not less secure than the past."

He prefixed to his own edition of his works the motto from Leibnitz:—

But there was no "fortasse" about it, to his confident and triumphant faith.

He had a gentle, affectionate, and magnanimous nature, incapable of hatred or revenge. In spite of his severity of speech, his differences with men were differences of principle, never personal. There is no nobler sentence in political history than that with which he begins his first speech after his injury, when he got back from Europe and took his place again in the Senate:—

"Mr. President: Undertaking now, after a silence of more than four years, to address the Senate on this important subject, I should suppress the emotions natural to such an occasion, if I did not declare on the threshold my gratitude to that Supreme Being through whose benign care I am enabled, after much suffering and many changes, once again to resume my duties here, and to speak for the cause so near my heart. To the honored commonwealth whose representative I am, and also to my immediate associates in this body, with whom I enjoy the fellowship which is found in thinking alike concerning the Republic, I owe thanks, which I seize the moment to express, for indulgence extended to me throughout the protracted seclusion enjoined on me by medical skill; and I trust it will not be thought unbecoming in me to put on record here, as an apology for leaving my seat so long vacant, without making way, by resignation, for a successor, that I acted under the illusion of an invalid, whose hopes for restoration to natural health continued against oft recurring disappointment.

"When last I entered into this debate, it became my duty to expose the crime against Kansas, and to insist upon the immediate admission of that territory as a state of this Union, with a constitution forbidding slavery. Time has passed, but the question remains. Resuming the discussion precisely where I left it, I am happy to avow that rule of moderation which, it is said, may venture to fix the boundaries of wisdom itself. I have no personal griefs to utter; only a vulgar egotism could intrude such into this chamber. I have no personal wrongs to avenge; only a brutish nature could attempt to wield that vengeance which belongs to the Lord. The years that have intervened and the tombs that have opened since I spoke[1] have their voices, too, which I cannot fail to hear. Besides, what am I, what is any man among the living or among the dead, compared with the question before us? It is this alone which I shall discuss, and I begin the argument with that easy victory which is found in charity."

He was proud that he was an American, proud of his State, proud of his birthplace, proud of his office. To his mind the most exalted position on earth was the position of a Senator of the United States. And if he thought that to be a Massachusetts Senator was a prouder title still, who shall blame him? From the beginning he had Massachusetts behind him; when he spoke from his seat, it was the voice, not of a man, but of a commonwealth.

It seemed sometimes as if he thought everything that had been accomplished for freedom was accomplished in the Senate; that even the war was but a tumult which had disturbed the debates, somewhat. He kept his senatorial robe unstained. He seemed never to lay it aside. There was no place in his life for jesting or trifling. He had no sense of humor. The pledge which he took upon his lips when he entered upon his great office he kept religiously to the end. "To vindicate freedom and oppose slavery is the object near my heart. Others may become indifferent to these principles, bartering them for political success, vain and short-lived, or forgetting the visions of youth in the dreams of age. Whenever I forget them, whenever I become indifferent to them, whenever I cease to be constant in maintaining them through good report and evil report, then may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, may my right hand forget its cunning."

His political creed, his political Bible, his Ten Commandments, his Golden Rule, were the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States penetrated, illuminated, interpreted by the Declaration of Independence. There was not a syllable in that august document to be omitted or qualified. It was to him a permanent, perfect, universal law of national life.

On many of the great questions with which the American people had to deal for the last thirty years of his life,—from 1844 to 1874—he was the leader and guide. His speeches on these subjects, contained in these volumes, were the speeches which attracted widest public attention at the time. They contained the arguments which convinced the public mind. They are probably, in most cases, the only ones remembered now. Toward the close of his life he gave much study to the questions of finance and currency. If his life had been spared he doubtless would have been foremost in conducting the country in the path of financial safety and integrity. The titles of the following speeches, to which many others might be added, suggest the principal subjects with which he dealt.

If any one doubt the practical sagacity and consummate statesmanship of Charles Sumner let him read the speech in the Trent case. He had a most difficult task. He had to reconcile a people smarting under the sting of English disdain and dislike to meet an insolent demand to give up men we had taken from an English ship, when every man in the United States believed England would have taken them from us in a like case; and to do this not only without dishonor, but so as to turn an apparent defeat into victory. The English cabinet, as is often the case with men who act arrogantly, acted hastily. They put their demand and their menace of war on grounds which justified us and put them in the wrong on the great contention which had existed from the beginning of our government. The United States had been, till the outbreak of the civil war, and hoped to be forever after that war was over, a great neutral power. She was concerned to establish the immunity of the decks of her ships. Sumner saw and seized our opportunity. Great as was the influence of President Lincoln, it seems unlikely that even his authority would have reconciled the American people to the surrender of Mason and Slidell without the support of Sumner. It would certainly have been a terrible strain upon his administration.

None of these speeches bears the marks of haste. In general no important consideration is overlooked and no important authority fails to be cited. Several of them were addressed to the Senate at a time when in the beginning he was able to convince scarcely anybody but himself. But in the end Senate and people came to his opinion.

Let me repeat what I said in reviewing Mr. Pierce's admirable biography:—

"Let us hope that these volumes will always be a text-book for Americans. Let successive generations be brought up on the story of the noble life of Charles Sumner. Let the American youth think of these things. They are things true, honest, just, lovely, and of good report. There is virtue in them and praise, if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise. They do not belong to fiction, but to history. It is no Grecian, or Roman, or English heroism that the youth is invited to study. Charles Sumner belongs to us. His youth was spent under a humble American roof. His training was in an American school and college. He sleeps in American soil. He is ours, wholly and altogether. His figure will abide in history like that of St. Michael in art, an emblem of celestial purity, of celestial zeal, of celestial courage. It will go down to immortality with its foot upon the dragon of slavery, and with the sword of the spirit in its hand, but with a tender light in its eye, and a human love in its smile. Guido and Raphael conceived their 'inviolable saint,'

"'Invulnerable, impenetrably armed;

Such high advantages his innocence

Gave him above his foe; not to have sinned,

Not to have disobeyed; in fight he stood

Unwearied, unobnoxious, to be pained

By wounds.'

The Michael of the painters, as a critic of genius akin to their own has pointed out, rests upon his prostrate foe light as a morning cloud, no muscle strained, with unhacked sword and unruffled wings, his bright tunic and shining armor without a rent or stain. Not so with our human champion. He had to bear the bitterness and agony of a long and doubtful struggle, with common weapons and against terrible odds. He came out of it with soiled garments, and with a mortal wound, but without a regret and without a memory of hate."

Charles Sumner will always be a foremost figure in our history. His name will be a name to conjure with. Whenever freedom is in peril; whenever justice is menaced, whenever the race, whose right he vindicated, shall be trodden under foot, those lips of stone, from the stately antechamber of the Senate, will again utter their high commands. The noble form of Charles Sumner, to the vision of the lovers of liberty, will seem to take its place again in the front of the battle.

Worcester,

December, 1899.