“What assiduity and perseverance, what courage and determination, what devotion and inflexible purpose you have shown, through fiery trials and at the risk of martyrdom, ‘in season and out of season,’ to effect the downfall of the atrocious slave system, and thereby elevate and save the Republic! If to this extent the year of jubilee has come, you have done much towards ushering it in, and have a right to be specially glad and grateful that Heaven has been pleased to make you so potential an instrumentality in bringing about its beneficent designs.” Wendell Phillips, who never failed to sympathize with efforts for Human Rights, wrote from Boston:-- “We are all inexpressibly grateful for your brave position and words. You and half a dozen others redeem Congress. Your arguments have been grand and exhaustive. You never linked so many hearts to you as during the last two months.” Elizur Wright, the veteran Abolitionist, wrote from Boston:-- “Your speech and vote on the Blaine Amendment ought to produce a thrill of life and joy and hope through every spinal column that supports a loyal soul. We can’t afford any of the old nonsense. We took our sable friends into our boat when it was _bulleting_; and if we allow them to be thrown overboard by the traitors now it is _balloting_, we sink, in short.” George Bemis, the eminent lawyer and publicist, wrote from Boston:-- “I think that you may justly rank it among your greatest efforts, and that it will go into history as the great statement of the Freedman’s claim to participate in the government of the country of which he makes part. The general student of governmental law and civil polity will also constantly refer to it as a new and important development of the connection between representation and executive sovereignty, and as a powerful _exposé_ of the true basis of republican institutions. You have done a great service to the colored race, to the science of statesmanship, and to your country, all at once.” Hon. Charles P. Huntington, for some time an able Judge of the Superior Court, wrote from Boston:-- “If your opposition does not just now reflect the feeling of New England Republicans, it anticipates their sober judgment. Theoretically, at least, it deprives the black race of representation, and punishes them for acts of legislation in which they have no voice.” Hon. Theophilus P. Chandler, able lawyer and Assistant Treasurer, wrote from the United States Treasury, Boston:-- “Eloquent, exhaustive, unanswerable.”