This text is part of:
[121]
house,1 bearing a family name distinguished for business probity and honored in the history of science, with ties growing out of associations abroad as well as here, encountered the same unfriendly discrimination on account of his loyalty to the cause of humanity, and cut loose from a relation which compromised his manhood.2
Naturally, Sumner felt keenly this social restriction.
He had been a favorite in society, and had a genuine relish for the taste, luxury, and refined conversation which at the time distinguished the homes whose interior life he well knew.
This weakness—if weakness it was—was not peculiar to him; and it is to his credit that it did not keep him from the discharge of his duty; for hard as the sacrifice was, he made it without hesitation.
After all, it was best for the rupture to come when it did. Sumner could not have kept along with Boston society as then organized and inspired, and yet fulfilled the high behests of his being.
The choice of Hercules was before him, and he chose well; and unlike Hillard, who was held back from his splendid possibilities by the untoward influence, he went forward with a free and unhindered red spirit to do great service for mankind, and take his place as a permanent figure in American history.
Sumner did not cherish then or later any animosity to Winthrop.
To his brother George, arriving from Europe in 1852, he wrote: ‘To Mr. Winthrop personally I have had nothing but feelings of kindness, and I commend you to the same.’3 He was an admirer of Winthrop's finished style as a speaker, and of his general course as a public man, aside from the slavery question.
They did not, after 1846, speak to each other until the autumn of 1861, when Sumner congratulated Winthrop on Boston Common, at the close of his address to Henry Wilson's regiment as it was leaving for the seat of war. From that time, in Washington and in Boston, they exchanged civilities, as invitations to dine.
Winthrop was present in 1865 when Sumner delivered his oration on Lincoln, and gave him congratulations at its close.
Just before going to Europe in 1872, Sumner drove
1 Dr. Henry I. Bowditch, 1808-1892.
2 This social exclusion of others than Sumner came mostly later,—in 1850-1852,— when the conservative feeling in Boston was intense in favor of Mr. Webster and in support of the Compromise measures of 1850. It is referred to in Adams's ‘Biography’ of Dana, vol. i. pp. 128, 129, 177.
3 In all the writer's intercourse with Sumner the latter spoke of Winthrop only with great respect.
Cambridge, MA. Press of John Wilson and Son. 1877.
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.