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

[450] Wilson, whose term in the Senate was near its expiration. He spoke good words for the integrity of the national debt and the work of reconstruction. ‘Stand by the Republican party’ was his exhortation. He introduced, with a warm tribute, as principal speaker, Governor Hawley of Connecticut. In what he said there was no hint of differences with the President.¹

Immediately after the meeting he started on a lecturing tour, which filled the interval until the session in December. After the labors and vexations of the last session, almost any one else would have insisted on repose; but he was anxious to meet expenses in Washington without incurring debt or diminishing his capital. He appeared thirty-eight times before audiences in the States of Massachusetts, Rode Island, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Illinois. He spoke twice in each of the three cities,—Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Chicago. His fees ranged from two hundred dollars to four hundred dollars an evenining, and the net result above expenses exceeded seven thousand dollars. He used sometimes, with his audiences, his address on ‘Lafayette,’ which he had delivered ten years before; but generally he gave a lecture prepared in the autumn on the war between France and Prussia, in which he treated the opening events, and passed a heavy judgment on Louis Napoleon, with a plea for sympathy for France now that her usurper was overthrown, and a protest against her dismemberment.² The address pointed as its moral that the war-system should be discarded, and the nations should disarm themselves.³ In 1870 he was still enforcing the truths which he announced twenty-five years before, in his celebrated oration of July 4, 1845. On his route he enjoyed the hospitality of friends,—of Judge Harris at Albany, Gerrit Smith at Peterborough, and Senator Fenton at Jamestown. While at a hotel in Chicago, during a call from Mr. Arnold, biographer of Lincoln, a newspaper reporter, without disclosing his purpose, happened to be present, and the next day gave to a journal of the city what purported to be an account of Sumner's conversation on the President and on