Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and letters of Charles Sumner: volume 4

While catholic in his estimates of men, and desirous to introduce those of different types into the public service, he was readily enlisted in behalf of those who had served the antislavery cause; and among the appointments he promoted were those of John Pierpont, clerk in the treasury department; Professor C. I). Cleveland, consul at Cardiff; H. R. Helper, consul at Buenos Ayres; Seth Webb, consul at Port-au-Prince, William S. Thayer, consul in Egypt; and Anson Burlingame, minister to China. His influence secured a place on the Sanitary Commission for Dr. Samuel G. Howe; but though exerted from the beginning, it failed to make him minister to Greece,—a country with which Dr. Howe was identified in his youth.

Sumner, as was his habit, lingered at Washington after the close of the session; and he was still there April 13 (the day Fort Sumter was surrendered), and even later, on the 15th, when the President issued his proclamation calling for seventy-five thousand troops. He left the capital on the 18th, and stopped in Baltimore, taking a room at Barnum's Hotel. His presence in the city becoming known, a riotous crowd gathered in search of him; and the proprietor insisted that he should leave at once, as his longer stay would be perilous to his property as well as to the guest. The latter, however, claiming his rights as a traveller, was conducted to a secluded chamber, no one but the proprietor and one of his assistants knowing where he was. He left at an early hour the next morning for Philadelphia, meeting on the way the Sixth Regiment of Massachusetts volunteers. ‘It was,’ he said, ‘the first regiment of volunteers he had seen; and he was struck by the gayety of soldier life, which overflowed as the train passed.’ At Baltimore the regiment encountered a secession mob like the one which had hunted the senator, and while fighting its way through the city lost four men killed and thirty-six wounded.¹ The intelligence of this encounter, April 19, reached Philadelphia before Sumner arrived there. On the night of that day the regiment was quartered at Washington in the Senate chamber.² On the 21st Sumner visited in New York the armory of the New York Seventh, which had left