sincere man who saw but one side of the question, whose thought worked in a single groove, and worked intensely. "There is no other side," he vehemently declared to a friend.'

Sumner's speech added nothing of legal or political strength to the controversy. The temperate arguments of the senators who preceded him were of greater weight. But the speech produced a powerful sensation. The bravery with which he hurled defiance towards the South and her institutions challenged admiration. Before this session, on one occasion when he was delivering a fierce invective, Douglas said to a friend: "Do you hear that man? He may be a fool, but I tell you that man has pluck. Nobody can deny that, and I wonder whether he knows himself what he is doing. I am not sure whether I should have courage to say those things to the men who are scowling around him." But Sumner knew not fear; and his sincerity was absolute. His speech was prepared with care. To write out such a philippic in the cool seclusion of the study, and deliver it without flinching, was emphasizing to the Southerners that in Sumner they had a persistent antagonist whom the fury of their threats could not frighten.

If there had been no more in Sumner's speech than the invective against the slave power, he would not have been assaulted by Preston Brooks. Nor is it probable that the bitter attack which the senator made on South Carolina would have provoked the violence, had it not been coupled with personal allusions to Senator Butler, who was a kinsman of Brooks. In order that the whole extent of the provocation may be understood, it is necessary to quote

delights the gravest and the most intelligent body that America possesses; and as such Sumner, much as he may have been ashamed of it, was perhaps justified in using it."

1 Article of George W. Curtis, Appletons' Cyclopædia of Biography. Eulogy on Sumner, Carl Schurz, Lester, p. 637; also Reminiscences, Ben: Perley Poore, vol. i. p. 461.

8 See remarks of Brooks in the House, July 14th, 1856.

Sumner's most exasperating reflections. "The senator from South Carolina [Butler]," he said, "and the senator from Illinois [Douglas], who, though unlike as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, yet, like this couple, sally forth together... in championship of human wrongs." "The senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight-I mean the harlot slavery. For her his tongue is always profuse in words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this senator. The frenzy of Don Quixote, in behalf of his wench, Dulcinea del Toboso, is all surpassed." On the second day of his speech Sumner said: "With regret I come again upon the senator from South Carolina [Butler], who, omnipresent in this debate, overflowed with rage at the simple suggestion that Kansas had applied for admission as a State; and, with incoherent phrases, discharged the loose expectoration of his speech, now upon her representative, and then upon her people. There was no extravagance of the ancient parliamentary debate which he did not repeat; nor was there any possible deviation from truth which he did not make. . . . The senator touches nothing which he does not disfigure-with error, sometimes of principle, sometimes of fact. He shows an incapacity of accuracy, whether in stating the Constitution or in stating the law, whether in the details of statistics or the diversions of scholarship. He cannot open his mouth but out there flies a blunder."'

...

The attack on South Carolina, which, for want of space, I have not ventured to quote, may be found in Appendix to Congressional Globe, vol. xxxiii., 1st column of page 543.

A careful perusal of Butler's remarks, as published in the Congressional Globe, fails to disclose the reason of this bitter personal attack. His remarks were moderate. He made no reference to Sumner.' His reply to Hale, though spirited, was dignified and did not transcend the bounds of a fastidious parliamentary taste. Yet it must be said that his defence of Atchison, which to-day reads as a tribute to a generous, though rough and misguided, man, was very galling to an ardent friend of the free-State party of Kansas, such as Sumner. Butler was a man of fine family, older in looks than his sixty years, courteous, a lover of learning, and a jurist of reputation. He was honored with the position of chairman of the Senate judiciary committee. When Sumner first came to the Senate, although he was an avowed Free-soiler, the relations between him and Butler were friendly; they were drawn together by a common love of history and literature. When he made his speech on the Kansas-Nebraska bill, Butler paid him a wellchosen compliment at which he expressed his gratification. In June, 1854, however, the two had a very warm discussion in the Senate on the Fugitive Slave law, growing out of the rendition of Burns, in which Butler replied to Sumner's forcible remarks with indignation. Afterwards Butler sent him word that their personal intercourse must be entirely cut off. The only reason which the South Carolina senator could assign for the present personal attack was that Sumner's vanity had been mortified from thinking that he did not come out of the controversy of 1854 with as much credit as he ought, and this was his opportunity for retaliation."

But no one understanding Sumner's character can accept

I refer to his remarks at several different times on Kansas in this session of the Thirty-fourth Congress. Several times in the Thirty-third Congress he indulged in personalities towards Sumner. These were collected by Wilson, and stated in his speech of June 13th, 1856.

'See Butler's speech in the Senate, June 12th, 1856.

this as an explanation. There was nothing vindictive or revengeful in his nature. Besides, he was too much wrapped up in his own self-esteem to give more than a passing thought to a social slight from a slave-holding senator, even though he were a leader in the refined and cultivated society of Washington. Sumner's speech seems excessively florid to the more cultivated taste of the present; he might have made a more effective argument, and one stronger in literary quality without giving offence. The speech occasioned resentment not so much on account of severe political denunciation, as on account of the line of personally insulting metaphor. Yet he did not transgress the bounds of parliamentary decorum, for he was not called to order by the President or by any other senator. The vituperation was unworthy of him and his cause, and the allusion to Butler's condition' while speaking, ungenerous and pharisaical. The attack was especially unfair, as Butler was not in Washington, and Sumner made note of his absence. It was said that Seward, who read the speech before delivery, advised Sumner to tone down its offensive remarks, and he and Wade regretted the personal attack.' But Sumner was not fully "conscious of the stinging force of his language." To that, and because he was terribly in earnest, must be attributed the imperfections of the speech. He would annihilate the slave power, and he selected South Carolina and her senator as vulnerable points of attack.

The whole story of Sumner's philippic, and its results, cannot be told without reference to his sharp criticism of Douglas. "The senator from Illinois," he said, "is the squire of slavery, its very Sancho Panza, ready to do all its humiliating offices. This senator, in his labored address, vindicating his labored report-piling one mass of elaborate

1 The habits of the South Carolina senator were notoriously intemperate.

2

Reminiscences, Perley Poore, vol. i. p. 462; Life of Wade, Riddle, Eulogy of Schurz, Lester, p. 667.

p. 212.

...

error upon another mass-constrained himself to unfamiliar decencies of speech. . . . Standing on this floor, the senator issued his rescript, requiring submission to the usurped power of Kansas; and this was accompanied by a manner -all his own-such as befits the tyrannical threat. Very well. Let the senator try. I tell him now that he cannot enforce any such submission. The senator, with the slave power at his back, is strong; but he is not strong enough for this purpose. He is bold. He shrinks from nothing. Like Danton, he may cry: 'L'audace! l'audace! toujours l'audace! but even his audacity cannot compass this work. The senator copies the British officer who, with boastful swagger, said that with the hilt of his sword he would cram the 'stamps' down the throats of the American people, and he will meet a similar failure."

When Sumner sat down, Cass, the Nestor of the Senate, rose and said: "I have listened with equal regret and surprise to the speech of the honorable senator from Massachusetts. Such a speech-the most un-American and unpatriotic that ever grated on the ears of the members of this high body—I hope never to hear again here or elsewhere." When Cass had finished, Douglas spoke of the "depth of malignity that issued from every sentence" of Sumner's speech. "Is it his object," Douglas asked, "to provoke some of us to kick him as we would a dog in the street, that he may get sympathy upon the just chastisement?" If the senator, Douglas continued, had said harsh things on the spur of the moment, and "then apologized for them in his cooler hours, I could respect him much more than if he had never made such a departure from the rules of the Senate. But it has been the subject of conversation for weeks that the senator from Massachusetts had his speech written, printed,' committed to memory. . . . The libels, the gross

...

The speech was not printed until after delivery, but it was in the printer's hands and mainly in type before spoken in the Senate; see Wilson's speech, June 13th.