Elias Nason, The Life and Times of Charles Sumner: His Boyhood, Education and Public Career.

[184] the best bill on which Congress ever acted; for it prepares the way for that “All hail hereafter,” when slavery must disappear. It annuls all past compromises with slavery, and makes all future compromises impossible. Thus it puts freedom and slavery face to face, and bids them grapple. Who can doubt the result? It opens wide the door of the future, when, at last, there will really be a North, and the slave-power will be broken; when this wretched despotism will cease to dominate over our government, no longer impressing itself upon every thing at home and abroad; when the national government shall be divorced in every way from slavery, and, according to the true intention of our fathers, freedom shall be established by Congress everywhere, at least beyond the local limits of the States.

Slavery will then be driven from its usurped foothold here in the District of Columbia, in the national Territories, and elsewhere beneath the national flag; the Fugitive-Slave Bill, as vile as it is unconstitutional, will become a dead-letter; and the domestic slave-trade, so far as it can be reached, but especially on the high seas, will be blasted by Congressional prohibition. Everywhere within the sphere of Congress, the great northern hammer will descend to smite the wrong; and the irresistible cry will break forth, “No more slave States!”

Thus, sir, now standing at the very grave of freedom in Kansas and Nebraska, I lift myself to the vision of that happy resurrection by which freedom will be secured hereafter, not only in these Territories, but everywhere under the national government. More clearly than ever before, I now see “the beginning of the end” of slavery. Proudly I discern the flag of my country, as it ripples in every breeze, at last become in reality, as in name, the flag of freedom, undoubted, pure,