Charles Sumner: his complete works, volume 09 (of 20)Sumner, Charles
History
Charles Sumner: his complete works, volume 09 (of 20)
Sumner, Charles
Slavery -- United States; Speeches, addresses, etc., American
Horace Greeley, in an article under his own name in the
New York _Independent_, and entitled, “Charles Sumner as a
Statesman,” united with the Republicans of Massachusetts.
“For the first time in our political history, a party has
been organized and a State ticket nominated for the sole
purpose of defeating the reëlection of one who is not a
State officer, and never aspired to be. Governor Andrew is
regarded with a hostility intensified by the fewness of
those who feel it; but the bitterness with which Mr. Sumner
is hated insists on the gratification of a canvass, even
though a hopeless one; and, since there was no existing
party by which this could be attempted without manifest
futility, one was organized for the purpose. And it was
best that this should be. Let us have a census of the
friends and the enemies of Mr. Sumner in the State which he
has so honored.
“I have said, that, while other Senators have shared
his convictions, none has seemed so emphatically, so
eminently, as he to embody and represent the growing,
deepening Antislavery sentiment of the country. None has
seemed so invariably to realize that a public wrong is a
public danger, that injustice to the humblest and weakest
is peril to the well-being of all. Others have seemed to
regard the recent developments of disunion and treason
with surprise and alarm: he has esteemed them the bitter,
but natural, fruit of the deadly tree we have so long been
watering and cherishing. The profound, yet simple truth,
that ‘RIGHTEOUSNESS exalteth a nation,’--that nothing else
is so baleful as injustice,--that the country which gains
a large accession of territory or of wealth at the cost
of violating the least tittle of the canons of eternal
rectitude has therein made a ruinous mistake,--that
nothing else can be so important or so profitable as
stern uprightness: such is the key-note of his lofty and
beneficent career. May it be vouchsafed him to announce
from his seat in the Senate the final overthrow of the
demon he has so faithfully, so nobly resisted, and that
from Greenland to Panama, from the St. John to the Pacific,
the sun in his daily course looks down on no master and no
slave!”
A single incident will illustrate the interest excited
throughout the Commonwealth. A venerable citizen of New
Bedford, seventy-nine years of age and very feeble, was
assisted to the polls, saying, “Here goes a dying vote for
Charles Sumner!”
The triumphant result of the election was known at once. It was
declared officially on the meeting of the Legislature.
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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