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will be more grateful still as the herald of that better day, near at hand, when freedom shall be installed everywhere under the national government; when the national flag, whereever it floats, on sea or land, within the national jurisdiction, will not cover a single slave; and when the Declaration of Independence, now reviled in the name of slavery, will once again be reverenced as the American Magna Charta of human rights.
Nor is this all. Such an act will be the first stage in those triumphs by which the Republic — lifted in character so as to become an example to mankind — will enter at last upon its noble “prerogative of teaching the nations how to live.”
This magnificent speech was unanswerable except by menace and vituperation.
It struck the heart of the barbarous system, and was in respect to argument a death-blow.
As soon as
Mr. Sumner resumed his seat,
Mr. Chestnut of
South Carolina rose, and in the bitter spirit of the doomed institution said,--
After ranging over Europe, crawling through the back doors to whine at the feet of British aristocracy, craving pity, and reaping a rich harvest of contempt, the slanderer of States and men re-appears in the Senate.
We had hoped to be relieved from the outpourings of such vulgar malice.
We had hoped that one who had felt, though ignominiously he failed to meet, the consequences of a former insolence, would have become wiser, if not better, by experience. . . .
It has been left for this day, for this country, for the abolitionists of Massachusetts, to deify the incarnation of malice,
