[229]
may pursue his human prey, employ his congenial bloodhounds, and exult in his successful game; but into Massachusetts he must not come.
Again, let me be understood: I counsel no violence; I would not touch his person.
Not with whips and thongs would I scourge him from the land.
The contempt, the indignation, the abhorrence of the community shall be our weapons of offence; wherever he moves he shall find no house to receive him, no table spread to nourish him, no welcome to cheer him. The dismal lot of the Roman exile shall be his; he shall be a wanderer, without roof, fire, or water.
Men shall point at him in the streets and on the highways.
Villages, towns, and cities shall refuse to receive the monster; they shall vomit him forth, never again to disturb the repose of our community.
The feelings with which we regard the slave-hunter will be extended soon to all the mercenary agents and heartless minions who, without any positive obligation of law, become part of his pack.
They are volunteers, and, as such, must share the ignominy of the chief hunter. . . . We are told that the slavery question is settled.
Yes, settled, settled,—that is the word.
Nothing, sir, can be settled which is not right. Nothing can be settled which is against freedom.
Nothing can be settled which is against the divine law. God, nature, and all the holy sentiments of the, heart repudiate any such false seeming settlement.
The speech placed
Sumner foremost among the
Free Soilers as a candidate for senator.
Others had discussed carefully and earnestly the political issues, but no one had stirred so deeply the people.
It was often said to have made him senator.
In his sanction of the unions with the Democrats, he spoke the sentiments of the great body of his party, and showed a practical sense and sympathy with popular inspirations which, in appearance at least, the other Free Soil leaders with whom he was most in association did not exhibit.
1 This made him also more acceptable to the Democrats.
He was in the popular mind as the candidate likely to be selected even before the speech was made.
Whittier met him at
Lynn in the summer, and in view of the probability that the
Free Soilers and Democrats would carry the
State, told him that he would be the senator.
Sumner replied that it would not be so; that others were better fitted, and that his own tastes lay elsewhere; that he preferred literature, and had thought of writing an historical work.
The poet, in his ode ‘To C. S.’
written in 1856, referred to ‘that night-scene by the sea prophetical,’ and—
Rejoiced to see thy actual life agree
With the large future which I shaped for thee
When, years ago, beside the summer sea,
White in the moon, we saw the long waves fall.
