I.
Compared with the narrow field where he had hitherto carried on the battle, the arena that was to witness his future struggles was as the two days skirmishing of Ligny and Quatre Bras, to the final overthrow at Waterloo.The scene and its surroundings Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe has so finely sketched, it were a pity not to let the reader carry it on his fancy as he goes with the champions into the heat of the conflict: [111]
And now came the great battle of the Fugitive Slave Law. The sorceress slavery meditated a grand coup daetat that should found a Southern slave empire, and shake off the troublesome North, and to that intent her agents concocted a statute so insulting to Northern honor, so needlessly offensive in its provisions, so derisive of what were understood to be its religious convictions and humane sentiments, that it was thought verily, ‘The North never will submit to this, and we shall make here the breaking point.’ Then arose Daniel Webster, that lost Archangel of New England—he who had won her confidence by his knowledge of and reverence for all that was most sacred in her, and moved over to the side of evil! It was as if a great constellation had changed sides in the heavens, drawing after it a third part of the stars.The North, perplexed, silenced, troubled, yielded for a moment. For a brief space all seemed to go down before that mighty influence, and all listened, as if spell-bound, to the serpent voice with which he scoffed at the idea that there was a law of God higher than any law or constitution of the United States.
But that moment of degradation was the last. Back came the healthy blood, the re-awakened pulse of moral feeling in New England, and there were found voices on all sides to speak for the right, and hearts to respond, and on this side of re-awakened moral feeling Sumner was carried into the United States Senate, to take the seat vacated by Webster. The right was not yet victorious, but the battle had turned so far that its champion had a place to stand on in the midst of the fray.
And what a battle was that! What an ordeal! What a gauntlet to run was that of the man in Washington who in those days set himself against the will of the great sorceress! Plied with temptation on the right hand and on the left, studied, mapped out like a fortress to be attacked and taken, was every Northern man who entered the arena. Could he be bought, bribed, cajoled, flattered, terrified? Which, or all? So planned the conspirators in their secret conclaves.
The gigantic Giddings——he who brought to the strife nerves toughened by backwoods toil and frontier fights with Indians—once said of [112] this warfare: ‘I've seen hard fighting with clubs and bullets; I've seen men falling all around me; but I tell you it takes more courage to stand up in one's seat in Congress and say the right thing, than to walk up to the cannon's mouth. There's no such courage as that of the anti-slavery men there.’
Now, Sumner's superb vitality, that hardy yeoman blood which his ancestors brought from England, stood him in excellent stead. His strong and active brain was based on a body muscular, vigorous, and healthy, incapable of nervous tremor, bearing him with a steady aplomb through much that would be confusing and weakening to men of less physical force. Sumner had not the character of a ready debater; not a light-armed skirmisher was he; he resembled rather one of the mailed warriors of ancient tourney. When he had deliberately put on his armor, all polished and finished down to buckle and shoe-latchet, and engraved with whatnot of classic, or Venetian, or Genoese device; when he put down his visor, steadied his lance, took sure aim, and went man and horse against his antagonist, all went down before him, as went down all before the lance of Coeur-de-Lion.
Such a charge into the enemy was his first great speech, ‘Freedom National, Slavery Sectional,’ which he directed against the Fugitive Slave Law. It was a perfect land-slide of history and argument; an avalanche under which the opposing party were logically buried, and it has been a magazine from which catapults have been taken to beat down their fortresses ever since.
