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Winthrop, the Whig candidate, to the Senate of the United States.
The contest, commencing on the 16th day of January, was long and acrimonious.
Mr. Winthrop had much experience in public affairs, and was an intimate friend of Daniel Webster.
Mr. Sumner would make no pledges: he had never held, nor did he desire to hold, any political office.1 He was deemed an idealist, and, as such, unsuited to the practical duties of a senatorial career.
It was, at any rate, too long a step from his private student-life to the Senate-chamber of the United States.
But the sense of Massachusetts had been outraged by the recreant course of Mr. Webster; and the farsighted saw that the aggressions of the slave-power must be squarely met. Mr. Sumner had shown himself an orator of no mean order, a statesman qualified to discuss constitutional questions from the highest stand-point, and, more than all, an invincible defender of the colored race.
Accordingly, on the 24th day of April he was elected, for six years from the 4th of March following, as the successor of Mr.
1 Mr. Sumner said in a conversation with James Redpath, written at the time, that committee after committee waited on him during the election, to get even verbal promises relative to tariff, and to “ease off on the slave question;” but he uniformly declined to satisfy them, saying that the office must seek him, and that he would not walk across the room to secure the election.
B. B. Russell, 1874.
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