“So many people will thank you for your timely, noble, and courageous speech that my thanks will hardly reach your ear; yet I must thank you for my own sake. Our family here spent the last three evenings in reading it out aloud, my son Henry being the reader, and you ought to know how sure we are now that you _are_ well, and how thankful we are for it, and how much good this greatest of all your efforts will do.” Daniel L. Eaton, journalist, wrote from Pittsburg, Pennsylvania:-- “You must permit me, a perfect stranger, to express my cordial thanks to you for the noble, scathing speech on the ‘sum of villanies’ with which you enriched our literature on Monday last in the Senate. This contest is no holiday battle, but the irrepressible conflict between Right and Wrong. I thank my God that he has spared your life to tell the world that the bludgeon of Barbarism did not silence your tongue nor subdue your spirit. ‘Let the Heathen rage.’ Behind you stand a million of your fellow-citizens in whose hearts your speech finds an echo. After reading it through with scrupulous care, I could not resist the impulse to tell you what I have.” Thomas MacConnell, lawyer, wrote from Pittsburg:-- “I hold Slavery to be a curse and a disgrace to our country and to mankind; and I rejoice to know that we have one man who is not afraid to denounce it as such, in plain Anglo-Saxon, on the floor of the Senate, and in the face of the Slaveholders.” C. B. M. Smith, another lawyer, wrote from Pittsburg:-- “Will you permit a private in the Republican ranks to thank you for your great speech on the Barbarism of Slavery? I do not believe that it was ill-timed, or too severe. It was just what the occasion and the times called for.” Rev. N. Warren Everett wrote from Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania:-- “I have just been reading your masterly and unanswerable speech of the fourth instant with thrills of delight. Massachusetts can afford to let one of her Senatorial chairs remain vacant, if we can have such a speech as that once in four years. I feel like thanking God from the bottom of my heart that you have been restored to health, and have the nerve, or, as you once expressed yourself, the ‘backbone,’ to stand as one of God’s noblemen and give utterance to truth.” Edward Corner wrote from Columbus, Ohio:--