Howells, William Dean, 1837-1920 -- Childhood and youth
judged the oratory of such a man as Charles Sumner, to whom he told me
he had said of a speech of his, "It's all very well, Sumner, but it has
no bones in it."
Wade was supposed by his more ill-advised admirers to lend especial
effect to his righteous convictions by a free flow of profanity, but I
have to bear witness that I never heard any profanity from him, though
profanity must have been the common parlance of the new country and the
rude conditions he grew up in. He was personally a man of silent
dignity, as we saw him in the village, going and coming at the
post-office, for he seldom seemed to pass the gate of his house yard on
any other errand, in the long summer vacations between the sessions of
the many Congresses when he sojourned among us. I have the sense of him
in a back room of the office which stood apart from his house, after the
old-fashioned use of country lawyers' and doctors' offices; and I can be
sure of his visiting the students in the front room only that once when
he catechized me in Blackstone, but I cannot say whether I stood in awe
of him as a great lawyer, or quite realized his importance as United
States Senator from the State of Ohio for eighteen years. Historically
it has been thought his misfortune to outlive the period when the
political struggle with slavery passed into the Civil War, and to carry
into that the spirit of the earlier time, with his fierce alienation
from the patient policy of Lincoln, and his espousal of the
exaggerations of the Reconstruction. But it would be easy to do
injustice to this part of his valiant career, and not easy to do justice
to that part of it where he stood with the very few in his defiance of
the pro-slavery aggression.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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