“I say this much, before turning again to my immediate subject, for our great Senator, who has done justice to the manufacturing interests and the shipping of Massachusetts, as Webster did, and also justice to her conscience and her thought, as Webster did not. [_Applause._] I do not wish to take one leaf from the laurel of the great Defender of the Constitution; he rests at Marshfield, beneath the honors he fairly earned. But we have put in his place a man far more practical than he was; we have put in his place the hardest worker that Massachusetts ever sent to the Senate of the United States [_applause_]; we have put in his place the Stonewall Jackson of the floor of the Senate,--patient of labor, untiring in effort, boundless in resources, terribly in earnest,--the only man who, in civil affairs, is to be compared with the great terror of the Union armies, the General of the Virginia forces: both ideologists, both horsed on an idea, and both men whom a year ago the drudges of State Street denounced, or would have denounced, as unpractical and impracticable; but when the war-bugle sounded through the land, both were found to be the only men to whom Carolina and Massachusetts hasted to give the batons of the opposing hosts.” John G. Whittier, whose words of flame had done so much in the long warfare with Slavery, was aroused from his retirement to testify. In the Amesbury _Villager_, near his home, he wrote:--