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

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[13] satire of the others. Without a single exception, no man in our history has had to pass through such ordeals as Charles Sumner. Whenever a new crisis rose in the country, he was found marching way ahead of the friends who had so reluctantly just come up to the last position he had taken; and thus they were continually falling off from him, one by one, all the time; and sometimes whole battalions of them together.

But with the single exception of the Supplemental Civil Rights Bill, which caused him almost the only lingering regret he had in dying so soon, he lived to see every public measure he had proposed involving a great principle of liberty, either fully incorporated into the Amended Constitution, or fairly expressed in some statute that was never afterwards to be repealed. And yet he seldom rose on the floor of the Senate to announce for the first time a new step in advance, without finding himself nearly alone; generally without supporters; sometimes without one:—and all through this protracted struggle for principle, he was not only subject to the violent persecution of the public press, and the desertion of personal friends, but the object of official insults, and even attempts at Senatorial degradation. Thus in tracing his career, we shall mark these points as we pass by them, only indicating them now in brief, that the reader may bear in mind these strong attributes of Mr. Sumner's character, to enable him more fully to comprehend how arduous was his warfare, how immovable was his integrity, how sublime was his faith; how he, more than any other man in our history, illustrated what was so well applied to Burke, that ‘he never gave up to party what was meant for mankind.’