This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[196]
having said them; but it is the greatest of his orations, and Webster's reply to Hayne is the only Congressional address with which it can be compared.
One is in fact the sequence of the other; Webster's is the flower, and Sumner's the fruit; the former directed against the active principle of sedition, and the latter against its consequences; and both were directed against South Carolina, where the war originated.
Sumner's speech has not the finely sculptured character of Webster's, but its architectural structure is grand and impressive.
His Baconian division of the various excuses that were made for the Kansas outrages into “the apology tyrannical, the apology imbecile, the apology absurd, and the apology infamous,” was original and pertinent.
Preston S. Brooks only lived about six months after his assault on Sumner, and some of the abolitionists thought he died of a guilty conscience.
Both in feature and expression he bore a decided likeness to J. Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Lincoln.
It might have proved the death of Sumner, but for the devotion of his Boston physician, Dr. Marshall S. Perry, who went to him without waiting to be telegraphed for. It was also fortunate for him that his brother George, a very intelligent man, happened to be in America instead of Europe, where he lived the greater part of his life.
1905. E. P. DUtton and Co. Boston,.
Tufts University. provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.