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

‘ [225] all disabilities on account of color.’ Motions by Wade, Chandler, Howard, and Sumner to adjourn or postpone or lay on the table were voted down, and even a motion from Wilson to adjourn met the same fate. The contest went on. Trumbull pushed personalities further than before, calling Sumner to account for ‘lecturing other senators’ and ‘associating with those he had often denounced,’ for making obstructive motions and delaying the important business of the country, and for determining, in combination with other senators, to browbeat the Senate. Sumner repelled the charge of ‘browbeating’ as more appropriate to Trumbull himself, declaring his purpose and maintaining his right to employ all the instruments of parliamentary warfare to defeat a measure which he believed to be dangerous. He counselled the senator from Illinois to look at the clock and note that it was twenty-five minutes to eleven, with Sunday morning near, and that efforts to force a vote would be fruitless, like ‘sowing salt in the sand by the seashore.’ He compared Trumbull's attempt ‘to cram the resolution down the throats of the Senate’ to that of another senator from Illinois (Douglas), who brought in his Kansas-Nebraska bill in precisely the same manner—‘proudly, confidently, almost menacingly,’ with the declaration that it was to pass in twenty-four hours, ‘precisely as the senator from Illinois now speaks;’ and he invoked the Senate to devote the remnant of the session to practical measures instead of consuming it with ‘a bantling not a week old.’ Doolittle called the American people to witness the scene in the Senate, and particularly the senator from Massachusetts—one of five only among the Administration senators who had kept up a factious resistance, and usurped authority over their eighteen Republican associates, rebuking Sumner for ‘his arrogance and assumed superiority over his equals and his peers,’ and his attempt ‘to break down the right of every State to judge upon its own suffrage.’ Several passages took place between the two senators, in which each treated the other's position as hostile to freedom. Now and then a Democrat intervened briefly; and this time Hendricks, who said that ‘the senator from Massachusetts is determined that none of these States shall ever be heard in the halls of Congress until the men who speak from those States speak the voice of the negroes as well as of the white men.’ Trumbull admitted that a vote could not be reached against such ‘a factious opposition,’ and