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recovery from the assassin's blow.
In no statesman's correspondence have there ever been such tributes from the heart.1
As in the Senate, so also among Republican politicians, there was anxiety as to the effect of the speech on voters who without antislavery convictions were likely to act with the Republicans in the election at hand.
Some journals professed to fear that it would hinder the admission of Kansas as a free State,2— an event altogether impossible with the Senate constituted as it then was. Others thought it better to limit the argument to an exposition of the constitutional heresies of the pro-slavery party.3 These Republican criticisms were, however, confined chiefly to the commercial centres of the Eastern States; elsewhere the Republican journals justified the speech as required by the turn which the Southern leaders had given to the discussion.4
A reception awaited the speech in England similar to that which it had met here.
The London Times, already strongly pro-slavery, condemned it; while antislavery journals, as the ‘Daily News,’ the ‘Morning Star,’ and the ‘Morning Advertiser,’ as fully approved.5 Punch gave it a hearty assent, and
1 As many as two hundred and fifty approving letters came to Sumner within a month, and were placed among his files, from some of which extracts are given in notes to the speech. (Works, vol. v. pp. 146-174.) Among the writers were S. P. Chase, J. R. Giddings, Carl Schurz, George W. Julian, John Jay, William Curtis Noyes, Hiram Barney, Rev. Joseph P. Thompson, Gerrit Smith, Rev. George B. Cheever, Prof. Benjamin Silliman. J. Miller McKim, Frederick Douglass, John G. Whittier, Josiah Quincy (the elder), Rev. R. S. Storrs (the elder), Rev. John Pierpont, Rev. Henry M. Dexter, Prof. William S. Tyler, John A. Andrew, Francis W. Bird, Henry L. Pierce, Amasa Walker, Lydia Maria Child, Henry I. Bowditch, Neal Dow, and Chief-Justice John Appleton. The Legislature of Massachusetts, then in session, formally approved the speech in a resolution, in promoting the passage of which two members of the House—J. Q. A. Griffin and H. L. Pierce—took the lead.
2 New York Times, June 6; New York Tribune, June 5; New York Evening Post, June 5. This last journal qualified its criticism two days after, and afterwards (May 1, 1812, and again April 8, 1865) thought Sumner justified by what had occurred during the Civil War. The New York Tribune printed the speech in its weekly issue, read chiefly in the country, but withheld it from the daily. The New York Herald, June 5, 6, 7, 1860, made it conspicuous by sensational headings and comments, with the apparent purpose of inflaming the Southern mind and drawing away conservative people from the Republicans.
3 Boston Advertiser, June 6.
4 John Wentworth, of Chicago, treated it in his journal as ‘the embodiment of Republicanism.’
5 The Duke and Duchess of Argyll approved it, the former ‘not thinking it a bit too strong.’ The duchess reported Tennyson as warmly approving it, and saying, ‘I thought the most eloquent thing in the speech was the unspoken thing,—the silence about his own story.’
Cambridge, MA. Press of John Wilson and Son. 1877.
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