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himself from the party and joined the "Free-soldiers," or the advanced spirits who favored the election of Mr. Van Buren to the Presidency in 1848. Gen Taylor, however, was elected, died, and was succeeded by Vice President Fillmore The Fugitive Slave Sill was passed, was signed by the President, and the whole North was thrown in a paroxysm of fury. One of the best speeches, severe, just, and terrible in its depth of indignation, made against this measure, was Mr. Sumner's oration before the Free-soil State Convention at Boston, in October, 1850. It produced the deepest impression on those who heard it, and tended to keep alive the strong resentment with which the Northern people always regarded the odious statute. On the 24th of April, 1851, Daniel Webster having vacated his seat in the Senate by a condition of Free-soldiers and Democrats, after a contest of extreme severity , and which was anxiously watched all over the country. The event was everywhere celebrated by the Free-soldiers as a victory for their cause, Mr. Sumner took his seat in the national councils firmly pledged "to oppose all sectionalism, whether it appeared in unconstitutional efforts by the North to carry so great a boom as freedom into the slave States, or in unconstitutional efforts by the South to curry the sectional evil of slavery into the free States, or in whatsoever efforts it may make to extend the sectional domination of slavery over the national Government." His first grand effort in the Senate was made on the 26th of August, 1852—the celebrated speech entitled "Freedom National, Slavery Sectional." Such was the jealousy and power of the Pro-slavery Party at this period that debate on the slave question was scarcely permitted by its advocates in the Senate, and Mr. Sumner bad for a long time been deprived of an opportunity to speak. But he gained it at last, and made terrible use of it, denouncing first the attempt to muzzle debate, and then the Fugitive Slave bill, in the most scathing and severe terms. Two years after, in February, 1854, he made another great speech against the Kansas-Nebraska bill. It was in this speech he denounced the hill as at once the best and the worst measure which Congress had ever acted on; the worst in the fact that it was the triumph of slavery over every constitutional and human right; the best, in that it threw away the scabbard in the flight, made compromise impossible, and proclaimed universally that from that moment the battle between slavery and freedom must be fought till one or the other fell never
