Xiii.
Among the most eloquent of tributes from the pulpit was the one which fell from Rev. Dr. E. H. Chapin, whose lips when speaking in behalf of humanity always seem to be touched with a live coal from the celestial altar. We caught but a single flaming passage:—That man, the announcement of whose death has come upon us so suddenly, and which has startled us like the vanishing of some conspicuous [543] landmark, with the associations of the most exciting period of our national history clinging around it, was one in whom large gifts and rich acquirements were fused into the condensed energy and solid splendor of moral purpose. He has died in his harness, with the dents of many conflicts upon his shield, and the serene light of victory on his crest. But while among the great men who have fallen so thickly around us, there may have been those who matched him in ability, and excelled him in genius, we must look far and wide through our land, and through our age, to find any who have equalled him in this loyalty of conviction,—this sublime tenacity of righteousness. For this, as he lies to-day in the Capitol of his grand old State, he is mourned and honored. For this, to-morrow, the overshadowing regret of a nation, and the tears of an emancipated race, will follow to the grave of Charles Sumner.
Rev. O. B. Frothingham—the author of that noble Biography of a noble life—Theodore Parker's:
Charles Sumner was a statesman who knew what statesmanship was meant for. He kept before him all the time the idea of the State. He did not wish to put his hand into the treasury; he did not seek or ask to be sent to the Senate because he might have an independent fortune, for the reputation of a public man, complimented and flattered by his countrymen. He felt himself a servant of the public. He was a man who carried his consciousness so far that he seemed to be visionary, a man who so perpetually clung to the ideal that men said he was a man of one idea. He was. He believed in God in government. He sometimes erred; of course he did; he was a man. He cherished a profound and personal interest in the ideal of law, the ideal of government, and worked to bring about the time, if it ever could be brought about, when war should cease and slavery of all kinds be done away and the different conditions of men equalized, and justice, simple justice, should be done to the smallest man, the meanest man and woman in the land, and that these privileges should be extended over all the earth. That was Charles Sumner. He was a man who had the heart of a little child, but it was the heart of a little child of God.
Some of the most soul-stirring eloquence of this generation came from the lips of Charles Sumner. His utterances commanded a willing ear in two hemispheres. He must be regarded as the impersonation of patriotism. No soldier ever gave his life more willingly, nor did his [544] country more service than did Charles Sumner. His incorruptibility was never impeached. No one ever dared offer him a bribe. He was always on the side of justice, and did not care what the consequences might be; to give the largest freedom to every man of every color was the polar star on Charles Sumner's horizon which never set. The type of manhood of which Charles Sumner was a representative, is growing scarcer every year. When his body was taken from the Senate chamber last Friday he did not leave his peer behind him. He stood preeminent as a scholar, as a statesman, and in general culture. He was a fine model for our American youth to emulate. He was a splendid example for the advancement of those principles which make true patriots.
The genial Washington correspondent of Mr. Beecher's ,Christian Union—
This house of his was as wonderful and as curious as the man himself. It was so crowded with all things rare and beautiful, and so many of them bore on their faces or carried in their hands a story they seemed longing to tell, that he must have little of feeling or culture who did not find the very walls an inspiration. Over the mantel in his dining-room, hung the painting he has singled out from the rest and willed to his friend, Mr. Smith, of Boston. It is called ‘The Miracle of the Slave.’ Mr. Sumner's own words, as nearly as I can remember them, will tell its story better than I can. Said he, at a breakfast party one morning, ‘I suppose that picture, or its original, did more than any one thing toward my first election. I saw it first on my first trip to Europe, but it made no great impression on me. Still the picture remained in my mind, though I thought no more about it. When I was a candidate for the Senate, they wanted me to speak in Faneuil Hall, and at last they persuaded me to. It was at the time of the Fugitive Slave excitement in Boston, and while I was speaking I remembered that picture. So I said to the audience: ‘There is in Venice a picture of a slave brought before the judge to be remanded to his owner. On the one side are the soldiers who have brought him there, on the other the men from whom he has fled. Just as the judge is about to give him back to their tyranny, St. Mark appears from the heavens and strikes off the fetters from the hands and feet of the trembling man. So, if ever Massachusetts remands to his master a slave who has sought protection in her borders, I pray God that the holy angels may themselves appear and strike the fetters from his hands and feet.’ The next time I went to Venice, in rummaging around the print-shops, I found this picture, and was told [545] that it was either a very old copy, or possibly the original sketch from which Tintoretto painted the larger picture. I determined to have it at any price, and before I left the shop it belonged to me.’
And of him Mr. Beecher himself said, in one of his glowing discourses—
The greatest gift of God to a nation is upright men for magistrates, statesmen, and rulers. That republic is poor, although every wind may waft to it the richest stores, that is not governed by noble men. Signs of Government decay show themselves sooner than anywhere else in the men who govern. When rulers seek the furtherance of their own ends, when laws and the whole framework of Government are only so many instruments of wrong, the nation cannot be far from decadence.Sumner's love of justice and truth made him essentially a Democrat. Personally, he was not one, but he became one in the times in which he lived. By the force of circumstances he became the leader of his party. He came forward at the time when Webster, Choate, and Holt were the heroes—in Massachusetts, when it was almost worth a man's life to say a word against any of them. Now, how is it? By nature Sumner was endowed with a manly person, of an admirable cast of mind; yet he was a made — up man. He fell lately from the blow he received in his earlier career, and neither Brown nor Lincoln was a greater martyr for liberty than Charles Sumner. How beautiful to die so! The club that struck him was better than knighting him. It brought him to honor and immortality. No son possesses his name. No child shall carry it down to posterity. He is cut off from that. But the State of Massachusetts shall carve his name so deep that no hand can rub it out. No son or daughter wept at his bier, but down a million dusky cheeks the tears stream; and they feel that a father and protector has gone from among them, and I would rather have the honor of the smitten than the honor of the high. He joined himself to the best things of his time, and now he is with God. Nothing can speak better for his principles than the fact that corrupt men dared not approach him. He made this remark to me once: ‘People think Washington such a corrupt place, but I don't believe a word of it; I have lived here a long time, and I have never seen any of it!’ And he never did. His was not a belligerent statesmanship. He was an advocate for peace, although he demanded justice. Everywhere his views were against violence, and his preference for peace based upon justice, and for the defence of the poor and the needy. He was a statesman, indeed, and the more to be honored because his tastes did not lead him to the common people. His [546] was an example of personal integrity, much misunderstood—partly from his own fault, and partly from circumstances. All the gathered treasures of ages were his, and these he employed to build better huts for the lowly. No man has surpassed him in his service to the poor and the needy. When any disability has been removed, every poor and honest man will be made to participate in the bounty he gave his life to preserve.
His only feeling toward those who had wronged him was that of forgiveness and pity; his noble effort at extending the olive branch of peace by proposing in Congress that the names of battles with fellow-citizens should not be continued on the Army Register, or placed on the regimental colors of the United States, ‘perhaps,’ said the speaker, “the purest and most beautiful act which Mr. Sumner ever performed, and one which will be more and more remembered to his honor and glory in all the hereafter. Massachusetts and the vote of censure regarding the measure was here touched upon in the following words:” Dear Old Massachusetts! how could she have been betrayed into conduct like that? Bitterly indeed will she rue the day when she discarded her chivalrous leader of years ago, and sold herself to one who really never knew her or loved, and who now, from his exalted seat of power and patronage, rewards her devotion by appointments which are an insult, and by tyranny which a free people will not long bear. The State will yet right itself. Her heart has soundness in it still, and in that better time which is to come, she will revere Charles Sumner as the noblest of all her sons.
We have never had a better lesson concerning the hollowness and uncertainty of worldly honors than we have had in the life and death of Charles Sumner. Now the land uncovers its head as a silent body goes through to its burial-place. Independence Hall is offered for the reception of the remains. The flags are at half-mast. Funeral eulogiums are sounded through the land, and the minute guns on Boston Common throb, now that his heart has ceased to beat. But while he lived, how pursued he was; how maltreated, how censured by legislative resolutions, how caricatured in the pictorials, how charged with every ambitious and impure motive! his domestic life assailed, and all the urns of scorn, and hatred, and billingsgate and falsehood emptied on his head! And when Brooks' club struck him down in the Senate Chamber, there were hundreds of thousands to cry, ‘Good [547] for him—served him right!’ When the speaker saw such a man as Charles Sumner, pursued for a lifetime by all the hounds of the political kennels, buried under a mountain of flowers and amid a great national requiem, he saw what a hypocritical thing was human favor! We take a quarter of a century in trying to pull down his fame, and the next quarter of a century in attempting to build his monument. Either we were wrong then, or are wrong now.
In culture and in acquaintance with the works of the past and with the men of the past he stood, perhaps, without a peer in this country; but his great characteristic was fidelity to what he believed to be right. Early he came to the conclusion that his great nation possessed a pure, healthy constitution, and that the greatest evil under which the nation suffered was exceptional; that it was not an integral part of our political economy, and that properly worked, our nation could cast out that evil without a revolution and without any radical change in its organic character; and he resolved that his life should be devoted to that work; and he was successful. Had there not been some men to do the work of Charles Sumner, there never would have been the call for such a man as Abraham Lincoln, and never would this great work have been wrought out. Though he was not seemingly endowed with that wondrous, strange, magnetic power that calls out the love of individuals for himself in an extraordinary degree, he will be followed to his grave especially with the tears of that race which he was the instrument in the hands of God so greatly of blessing.
Rev. Dr. Macarthur, Colored Baptist Church, New York—
We shall not again see another Sumner in our halls of legislation. The school to which he belonged is a thing of the past. We have men now of a narrower gauge, a lower tone and a feebler grasp; men who may be sharp and shrewd, but who certainly are not broad, comprehensive and scholarly. The princely form of the great Senator we shall see no more; the fine, full, melodious voice is silent forever. One day he is in his place, a leader and king among men; the next day he is numbered among the dead. One day Canon Kingsley speaks loving words with him in Washington; the next evening Canon Kingsley in Brooklyn speaks loving words of him, and mourns him dead. He has fallen crowned with honor—an apostle of liberty—a martyr of freedom. [548] The spirit of barbarism and slavery struck him down 18 years ago. He never fully recovered.There is, too, among some of us, a sort of idea, that, to be a great man, one must have been poor, ignorant and somewhat coarse. We rejoice that the genius of our Government is such that men coming from the lowest place, may go to the highest; but we must not forget that poverty and ignorance are a great drawback, and that when men rise from these conditions, they rise in spite of these hindrances, and not because of them. Mr. Sumner's life from first to last was along a different line. He was born to position and wealth. He was born heir to a glorious inheritance. He was born of ancestors who were scholars, gentlemen, Christians. He received a fine body, a glorious intellect, and a noble heart. His leisure and his wealth might have been a curse to him; they might have taken away from him, as from many others, all ambition and desire for scholarship and promotion. They, however, quickened the desire for both, as they furnished the opportunity for the attainment of either.
He was just such a man as we can least afford to lose. American society and political life have too few such men. Who can take the place which Charles Sumner filled? The great principles of the science of political economy are not studied, far less understood, by the majority of our public men. The days of scholars and thinkers of the higher order, the days of Seward, Chase, and Sumner, seem to be numbered. A species of rowdyism, Butlerism, with an obliquity of moral vision which looks past the right, and mistakes success for honest ability, is imminent and greatly to be dreaded. A radical reform is needed here. Precisely here is Mr. Sumner's life peculiarly valuable. We need to learn the necessity of patient and untiring perseverance, if we are to accomplish great things for God or man.
The Louisville Courier-Journal, in a long and feeling notice, says—
Fifteen years ago, the news that Charles Sumner was dead, would have been received with something like rejoicing by the people of the South; ten years ago they would have hailed it as a message from Heaven, telling them that an enemy had been removed from the face of the earth. To-day, they will read it regretfully, and their comment will be, ‘He was a great man, he was an honest man; as he has forgiven us, so have we long ago forgiven him.’[549]
John G. Whittier to a personal friend—
The dear and noble Sumner! My heart is too full for words, and in deepest sympathy of sorrow I reach out my hands to thee, who loved him so well. He has died as he wished to, at his post of duty, and when the heart of his beloved Massachusetts was turned towards him with more than the old-time love and reverence. God's peace be with him.
The Chicago Times—
The death of Charles Sumner has taken away another of the very few Americans who have done honor to the name of statesmen. There is not left in the public councils his equal in political learning, in integrity, in high devotion to whatever he believed to be right. Though untrusted by time-serving partisans, he stood head and shoulders above them all, both in intellectual greatness, and in devotion to principle.
The Chicago Tribune—
No man has ever graced the American Senate, who will be remembered longer, or more gratefully than he. He walked on a higher plane than Mr. Seward. He went deeper into the merits of the anti-slavery cause than Mr. Chase. He was the most inflexible man of his time, as well as the most polished and erudite of his contemporaries. His industry was even more vast than his learning. His personal purity was so far above reproach that he was never even accused of dishonor.
The Chicago Inter-Ocean—
He was a just man, pure in private and in public life. His faults were transient, and his virtues constitute a permanent legacy to the people of the country he served with distinguished ability and unsullied honor.
The Cincinnati Commercial—
Mr. Sumner was a man of great dignity of manner. He had an imposing address, a leonine head, a sonorous voice. To the scholar he united the wisdom of the sage, and to the reformer the discretion of the statesman.
The Cincinnati Gazette—
Charles Sumner is an honor to the American name, and an example for future generations of young Americans who aspire to be statesmen. He has shown them a way to honor and fame through the highest paths [550] of rectitude, and through devotion to the cause of the oppressed and down-trodden.
The Cincinnati Times—
He goes to his grave with a character unsullied by a political career of thirty years, and carrying the gratitude of a nation, and the worship of a race freed from bondage, and elevated to the rights of citizenship.
The Indianapolis Journal—
Had he been free from faults he would have been either more or less than human; but, taking him for all in all, it cannot be denied that America has lost one of her greatest men.
The Indianapolis Sentinel—
When the proper time comes, and the story is adequately told, Charles Sumner will stand as the type of the noblest American of his generation—a Washington in purity, a Luther in fervor, a Cromwell in persistence and greatness of soul—a man beyond the loftiest ideal of public virtue.
The Detroit Free Press—
He belonged to that class of statesmen who were governed in their action by their ideas of what was just and right, and who could not be moved from their settled convictions by any considerations of policy or expediency.
The Cleveland Leader—
His death leaves a vacancy in the Senate which must long remain but imperfectly filled. The noble services of his life so far overbalance his errors, that men of all parties will forget his faults, and join sorrowfully in the reverent procession which will follow the veteran of the Senate to his grave.
The Cleveland Herald—
The principal objection to him was that he was almost all intellect. Had he been less an incarnation of intellectual greatness, and possessed more of human weakness, he would have been less isolated from the people who admired his learning, but sometimes doubted his judgment.
The Buffalo Commercial—
Those who most hotly hated Charles Sumner as a leader in the sectional strife which culminated in civil war, will surely feel their animosities [551] soften when they remember, that it was his noble effort to heal the wounds of that war, and blot out its melancholy traces, which brought upon him the censure of his own State. For Massachusetts also, this fact will not be without instructive suggestion.
The Pittsburg Despatch—
Whatever political prejudices occasionally existed against him, he was undoubtedly the highest and most commendable type of American statesmen. Intelligent, generous-hearted, of refined sensibilities, he expressed the clear truth as he saw it without regard for opposition. He was a man who could not intentionally be guilty of meanness, and who was above intrigue.
The Pittsburg Chronicle—
Brave, in days when it took bravery of the most lofty kind, to be the advocate of a lowly and down-trodden race, Sumner will live in the memory of all as a man of the most conspicuous mark.
The Richmond Journal—
The sudden passing away of this profound scholar and statesman will cause a deep feeling of sorrow to pervade the breasts of his many friends both in this country and Europe.
The Rev. Dr. H. H. Garnet, the eloquent pastor of the Colored Presbyterian Church of New York—himself a fugitive from Slavery in his boyhood—delivered a touching and beautiful address at the great Colored meeting, at Cooper Institute:
He did not know to what religious creed Mr. Sumner belonged, nor need we inquire concerning a man whose faith and life-work are so clearly exhibited; but he did know that the self-sacrificing spirit that was in Christ, the Saviour of the world, and the broad humanity of the Gospel, were as clearly illustrated in his life and public services, as in those of any other man he ever knew. The great and illustrious statesman literally resisted oppression of every form-even unto blood; and he laid down his life for his brethren. The old Anti-Slavery leaders are fast passing away. Chase and Stanton are gone, and John Brown and Lincoln are in their tombs; and to-morrow the mortal remains of Sumner will be laid in their last resting-place. But the principles of liberty [552] are imperishable. The people of Massachusetts would doubtless rear a fitting tomb to his memory, and other States would vie with them in doing honor to his noble deeds; but there was one class of American citizens who had written his name on the living monuments of their hearts. He meant that class for whose welfare he labored, suffered, and died. In the language of his life-long friend, John Greenleaf Whittier, those millions recently crowned with the blessings of liberty and enfranchisement, as they shall think of their departed friend, they will say:—We'll think of thee, O brother!
And thy sainted name shall be
In the blessings of the captive,
And the anthems of the free.
The Springfield Republican, of Springfield, Mass., that able and always illuminated journal, in a memorial issue devoted chiefly to Mr. Sumner, prints a letter from him to a personal friend, dated March 20, 1873, in which, after alluding to his sickness, which he says ‘goes back in its origin to injuries received seventeen years ago,’ he speaks as follows of his ‘battle-flag’ bill:
