C. Edwards Lester, Life and public services of Charles Sumner: Born Jan. 6, 1811. Died March 11, 1874.

[222] torrent, and flows in the river, till at last, swollen with accumulated waters, it presses onward, forever onward, in irresistible beneficent current, fertilizing and uniting the spaces which it traverses, washing the feet of cities, and wooing states to repose upon its banks.

Our party has its origin in the exigencies of the hour. Vowing ourselves against Slavery wherever it exists, whether enforced by the Russian knout, the Turkish bastinado, or the lash of the Carolina planter, we do not seek to interfere with it at Petersburg, Constantinople, or Charleston; nor does any such grave duty rest upon us. Our political duties are properly limited by our political responsibilities; and we are in no just sense responsible for the local law or usage by which human bondage in these places is upheld. But wherever we are responsible for the wrong, there our duty begins. The object to which, as a party, we are pledged, is all contained in the acceptance of the issue which the Slave Oligarchy tenders. To its repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and its imperious demand that Kansas shall be surrendered to Slavery, we reply, that Freedom shall be made the universal law of all the national domain, without compromise, and that hereafter no Slave State shall be admitted into the Union. To its tyrannical assumption of supremacy in the National Government, we reply that the Slave Oligarchy shall be overthrown. Such is the practical purpose of the Republican Party.

It is to uphold and advance this cause, that we have come together, leaving the parties to which we have been respectively attached. Now, in the course of human events, it becomes our duty to dissolve the political bands which bound us to the old organizations, and to assume a separate existence. Our Declaration of Independence has been made. Let us, in the spirit of our Fathers, pledge ourselves to sustain it with our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. In thus associating and harmonizing from opposite quarters, in order to promote a common cause, we have learned to forget former differences, and to appreciate the motives of each other. We have learned how trivial are the matters on which we may disagree, compared with the Great Issue on which we all agree. Old prejudices have vanished. Even the rancors of political antagonism have been changed and dissolved, as in a potent alembic, by the natural irresistible affinities of Freedom. In our union we have ceased to wear the badges of either of the old organizations. We have become a new party, distinct, independent, permanent, under a new name, with Liberty as our watchword, and our flag inscribed, ‘By this sign conquer.’

Again, it is objected that the Republican party is against the Union,