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with Mrs. Lincoln.
If Don Piatt is to be trusted, Mrs. Lincoln came to Washington with a strong feeling of antipathy towards Seward and “those eastern abolitionists.”
She was born in a slave state and had remained pro-slavery, --a fact which did not trouble her husband because he did not allow it to trouble him. Fifteen months in Washington brought a decided change in her opinions, and Sumner would seem to have been instrumental in this conversion.
It is well known that she preferred his society to that of others.
She had studied French somewhat, and he encouraged her to talk it with him, --which was looked upon, of course, as an affectation on both sides.
At the time of General McClellan's removal, October, 1862, Mrs. Lincoln was at the Parker House in Boston.
Sumner called on her in the forenoon, and she said at once: “I suppose you have heard the news, and that you are glad of it. So am I.
Mr. Lincoln told me he expected to remove him before I left Washington.”
Sumner resembled Charles XII.
of Sweden in this: there is no evidence that he ever was in love.
His devotion to the law in early life, surrounded as he was by interesting friends, may have been antagonistic to matrimony.
The woman he ought to have married was the noble daughter of his old friend, Cornelius Felton, whom he often met, but whose worth he never
1905. E. P. DUtton and Co. Boston,.
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