Millard Fillmore had signed the hated Fugitive Slave Bill, and Webster had made his disastrous speech of March 7, 1850, urging conformity to the demands of the bill. Sumner's hour had come. By a union of the Free-Soil and Democratic parties, he was elected to the Senate of the United States for six years, over the eloquent Robert C. Winthrop, the Whig candidate. The contest was bitter. Sumner would give no pledges, and said he would not walk across the room to secure the election. On Monday, December 1, 1851, he took his seat. Devotion to principle had gained him an exalted position. Months went by before he could possibly obtain a hearing on the slavery question, on which issue he had been elected. Finally, the long sought opportunity came by introducing an amendment that the Fugitive Slave Bill should be repealed. He spoke for four hours as only Charles Sumner could speak. Despised by the slave-holders, they listened to his burning words. In closing, he said: "Be admonished by those words of oriental piety,--'Beware of the groans of wounded souls. Oppress not to the utmost a single heart; for a solitary sigh has power to overset a whole world.'" Mr. Polk of Tennessee said to him: "If you should make that speech in Tennessee, you would compel me to emancipate my niggers." The vote on the repeal stood: Yeas, four; nays, forty-seven. Alas! how many years he wrought before the repeal came. Sumner had been heard not merely by Congress; he had been heard by two continents. Henceforward, for twenty-three years, he was to be in Congress the great leader in the cause of human freedom. In 1854 the advocates of slavery brought forward the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, by which a large territory, at the recommendation of Stephen A. Douglas, was to be left open for slavery or no slavery, as the dwellers therein should decide. On the night of the passage of this bill, Sumner made an eloquent protest. "Sir, the bill which you are now about to pass is at once the worst and the best bill on which Congress ever acted. Yes, sir, WORST and BEST at the same time. "It is the worst bill, inasmuch as it is a present victory of slavery.... It is the best, for it prepares the way for that 'All hail hereafter,' when slavery must disappear.... Thus, sir, now standing at the very grave of freedom in Kansas and Nebraska, I lift myself to the vision of that happy resurrection by which freedom will be secured hereafter, not only in these Territories but everywhere under the national government. More clearly than ever before, I now see 'the beginning of the end' of slavery. Proudly I discern the flag of my country as it ripples in every breeze, at last become in reality, as in name, the flag of freedom,--undoubted, pure, and irresistible. Am I not right, then, in calling this bill the best on which Congress ever acted? "Sorrowfully I bend before the wrong you are about to enact. Joyfully I welcome all the promises of the future."