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

[41] the character of the struggle and the necessity of putting the national cause on the highest ground, and of bringing to the rescue of the country all possible moral and physical forces. This change of sentiment appeared in the debates and action of Congress on the proposition to declare free the slaves of rebels employed by them for military purposes, which passed the Senate, July 22, the day after the disaster, and became a law on the last day of the session.¹ It was the first of a series of laws against slavery, and was aptly characterized by Breckinridge, its leading opponent, as the beginning of ‘a loosing of all bonds.’ Sumner, referring a few months later to the fact that it passed the Senate the day after the defeat, said; ‘In the providence of God there are no accidents; and this seeming reverse helped to the greatest victory which can be won.’²

Sumner believed from the first that the Civil War would end slavery, and ought to end it; and as already seen, he foresaw that civil war was inevitable. In his view a policy of emancipation was an essential part of our case as it was to stand before the world, absolutely necessary to enlist foreign sympathy and prevent European intervention. With that policy left out he believed that success in the field was not possible, and that the war would be ‘a vain masquerade of battles.’ He was not impressed with the objections to the avowal of an antislavery policy which weighed on the minds of many patriotic men. He was content, however, to wait for a favorable moment, though utterly opposed in the mean time to any acts or declarations which gave or promised protection to slavery. Two days before the bombardment of Fort Sumter, when President Lincoln mentioned to him in confidence the decision to provision and hold the fort, he hinted his own conception of what was to come in the pregnant reply, ‘Then the war-power will be in motion, and with it great consequences.’ In May, when driving one evening with the President alone in the latter's carriage, he brought up the subject of slavery, telling the President that he was right then in his course, but that he must be ready to strike when the moment came. The time he thought had come when the first considerable conflict of the two forces took place at Bull Run; and he then desired the President at