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

“ [129] that you may welcome it! Do this, and your words will be a ‘charter and freehold of rejoicing’ to a race which, by much suffering, has earned a title to much regard. Your judgment will become a sacred landmark, not in jurisprudence only, but in the history of freedom, giving precious encouragement to all the weary and heavy-laden wayfarers in this great cause. Massachusetts will then, through you, have a fresh title to regard, and be once more, as in times past, an example to the whole land.”

The South was steadily pressing for dominion; the Whig party of the North, weakened by the desertion from its ranks of many of the advocates of freedom, step by step gave way; and Daniel Webster, led on by a hope which dotage only could have entertained, of rising to the chief executive chair, in his fatal senatorial speech of March 7, 1850, bowed in most abject submission to the slaveholding interest. Keenly it was said by an honest farmer, as this mighty leader of the Whigs went down, “The masters never pay their slaves;” and never, after that false play for power, could his. words, once so grandly eloquent, reach the Northern heart.

By the death of President Taylor, July 9 of the same year, the executive power devolved on Millard Fillmore, who called Mr. Webster from the Senate to his cabinet. On the 18th of September following Mr.