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[260] has been baser than the Advertiser. Its allegation was1 absolutely false. At the West I am generally sustained. In Boston—you know.

There is a menace to displace me from the Committee on Foreign Relations, of which I have been chairman ten years. This is a sop to Cerberus. It is founded on my difference with the Administration on this question, and the character of my speech. You will receive the speech soon, and I commend it to your perusal. Consider, if you please, that documentary evidence known to me could not be used.

Gerrit Smith writes as you do. What will W. P. say?2

Ever sincerely yours,


Mr. Garrison had to take issue with his friend in the following year, when the Democracy made a final rally under Horace Greeley, and Sumner (for personal reasons and general considerations of public policy) joined a portion of the reform element in the Republican Party in opposing Grant's reelection at all hazards. A long letter by Mr. Garrison, in confutation of Sumner's letter3 to the colored voters of Washington on behalf of Greeley, was very widely copied by the press, and presumably had its effect. In another letter, addressed to the Boston4 Journal (to which he contributed frequently during the5 campaign, both editorially and in his own name), Mr. Garrison replied at length to Mr. Sumner's last appeal for Greeley on the eve of departing for Europe.

Of Mr. Greeley's course in consenting to stand as the candidate of the Democratic Party, he wrote with great6 plainness and severity, though the opinion of him which he now expressed was one he had long entertained, namely, that the editor of the Tribune was “the worst of all counsellors, the most unsteady of all leaders, the most pliant of all compromisers in times of great public emergency” Ind. Oct. 24, 1872.— a judgment since strikingly confirmed by the publication7 of Greeley's extraordinary letter to President Lincoln after the battle of Bull Run.

When, after Mr. Sumner's death in 1874, there was a deadlock in the Massachusetts Legislature over the election

1 Boston Daily Advertiser.

2 Wendell Phillips.

3 Aug. 3, 1872.

4 Sept. 5.

5 Sept. 6.

6 Ind. Sept. 12, Oct. 3, 24, 31, Dec. 15, 1872.

7 Century Magazine, June, 1888, p. 291.

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