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

It was a surprise at the time, and the mystery has never been explained, how Mr. Douglass was afterwards brought to the support of a scheme involving the extinction of one, if not two, republics founded by his race. The mystery is all the greater, since during the long period which has followed he has not again pressed it upon the attention of the country, or in any way signified that he continued to regard it with favor.

G. W. curtis admitted the reasons for Sumner's warmth found in the printed documents, but objected that he ‘criticised the Administration as a relentless enemy and not as a friend,’ at a time when it was ‘of the utmost possible importance to criticise without weakening it,’ and asking if he could not have substituted private remonstrance with the President.

The strain of the San Domingo contest had a serious effect on the senator's health. During a good part of the winter he suffered from an affection of the throat or lungs. He had come regretfully to the controversy, and the bitterness which it brought out made him unhappy. He wrote, February 5, to Dr. Brown-Sequard, who had just arrived in the country: ‘I am weary and old, and much disheartened by the course of our President, who is not the man we supposed.’ On the 14th and 15th he pressed a mass of business on the Senate from his committee, and on the 18th was seized with a severe illness, during which he suffered a violent attack of the angina pectoris, —a paroxysm on the chest, embracing heart and left arm,—the revival of his old disease, which had been dormant since 1859.¹ His illness, which kept him from his seat a week, drew cordial tributes from journals and private correspondents, even from many who had dissented from his style of treating the San Domingo proceedings of the Administration. Wendell Phillips's extract from Burke expressed the feeling of many who differed from him on this point,—‘At this exigent moment the loss of a finished man is not easily supplied.’ Widespread sympathy was felt in Massachusetts and elsewhere.² Many cautions enjoining rest and abstinence from excitement came to him. Amos A. Lawrence wrote: ‘After this last illness you must have become satisfied that your enemies are all died ’