Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and letters of Charles Sumner: volume 3

As the agitation went on in the summer and autumn,—the profoundest and most universal in our history,—the people of the free States, it was found, were feeling and thinking as Sumner thought and felt; and the discussion broadened beyond the precise point in issue,—the extension of slavery into the Territories,—and embraced the character and history of slavery and the supremacy of the slave-power in the national government. It came to pass that Sumner's speech was read beyond that of any other statesman; and the call for his voice in different States was most urgent, even from politicians skilled in feeling the public pulse and concerned chiefly for an immediate effect. It was seen that he had awakened the enthusiasm of the antislavery men by his effectual resistance to the tendency to lower the standard of principle for the sake of success, and by lifting the cause far above ordinary politics, where others had been too apt to place it.² Shortly after the session closed he stood before an immense audience in the city of New York, where he was received and successively interrupted with bursts of applause accorded to no orator in the campaign except perhaps to Mr. Seward, during the latter's remarkable progress in the West. The Republican managers of the State,—Thurlow Weed, Simeon Draper, and D. C. Littlejohn,—the general committee of the party as well as local committees, pleaded with him to speak in its leading cities.³ Similar applications, pressed with great urgency, were made from Illinois by E. B. Washburne, N. B. Judd, I. N. Arnold, Herman Kreissman, and Owen Lovejoy; from Maine by Mr. Hamlin, the candidate for Vice-President, and Mr. Fessenden the senator; and from Ohio by the State committee. His colleague, Wilson, who was omnipresent in the campaign, and intensely alive to all its necessities, besought him to speak several times in the States of New Jersey and New York, as also in the two congressional districts of Boston, where the union of all the opponents of the Republicans had put in peril the election of two members of the