[
435]
threatened against the
Free State men in
Kansas, and
Sumner himself who had espoused their cause, the penalties of treason and rebellion.
He said:—
If he [Sumner] means that he is prepared to go to the country to justify treason and rebellion, let him go; and I trust he will meet the fate which the law assigns to such conduct. . . We are ready to meet the issue, and there will be no dodging.
We intend to meet it boldly; to require submission to the laws and to the constituted authorities; to reduce to subjection those who resist them, and to punish rebellion and treason.
I am glad that a defiant spirit is exhibited here; we accept the issue.
Two days later, in a controversy with his new Republican colleague
Trumbull, he revelled in personalities, and became so offensive that a Southern senator (
Crittenden) called him to order.
In this personal debate, during which the was several times on the floor, he uniformly referred to the Republicans as ‘
black Republicans,’ sometimes varying the epithet with those of ‘miserable Abolitionists and Know Nothings.’
Now, as heretofore, he attributed ‘baseness’ and ‘base purposes’ to
Sumner and his other opponents.
Trumbull met him with spirit, saying, as he finished, ‘I shall never permit him [Douglas] here or elsewhere to make an assault on me personally without meeting it with the best power that God has given me, feeble though it be.’
Douglas turned aside from his antagonist to assail
Sumner, accusing him of disingenuousness in obtaining two years before a delay of the debate on the
Nebraska bill, in order to circulate a ‘libel’
1 on him (
Douglas),—meaning the protest of the
Free Soil members which
Chase had written.
Sumner met with a flat denial his statements as to going to
Douglas's seat
2 to procure the favor of postponement, and as to the motives imputed to himself for asking for delay in open debate, as well as to the character of the protest itself.
Douglas broke forth as follows:—
Whether the address alluded to is a libel or not in the senator's judgment depends on his opinion of what a libel is. It attributed to me the base purpose of introducing the measure for personal aggrandizement, and not from a sense of duty.
It seems that the senator from Massachusetts does not consider it derogatory to the character of a gentleman to be governed by unworthy motives, by base purposes, by unpatriotic objects.
He does not deem this
