L. Q. С. Lamar.
157
of breadth óf view, but of a wide range of danger to society itself, or even to civilization; or finally, that the actual state of things had been sympathy. "Charles Sumner was born with an instinctive love of freedom, and was educated from his ear liest infancy to the belief that freedom is the natural and indefeasible right of every intelligent being having the outward form of man. In him, in fact, this creed seems to have been something more than a doctrine imbibed from teachers, or a result of education. To him it was a grand intui tive truth inscribed in blazing letters upon the tablet of his inner consciousness, to deny which would have been to him to deny that he himself existed. And along with this all-controlling love of freedom, he possessed a moral sensibility keenly intense and vivid, a conscientiousness which would never permit him to swerve by the breadth of a hair from what he pictured to himself as the path of duty. Thus were combined in him character istics which have in all ages given to religion her martyrs and to patriotism her self-sacrificing heroes. "To a man thoroughly permeated and imbued with such a creed, and animated and constantly actuated by such a spirit of devotion, to behold human beings or a race of human beings restrained of their natural rights of liberty, for no crime by him or them committed, was to feel all the bellig erent instincts of his nature roused to combat. The fact was to him a wrong which no logic could justify. It mattered not how humble in the scale of rational existence the subject of this restraint might be, how dark his skin, or how dense his ignorance. Behind all that lay, to him. the great principle that liberty is the birthright of all human ity, and that every individual of every race, who has a soul to save, is entitled to the freedom which may enable him to work out his salvation. !t matters not that the slave might be contented with his lot; that his actual condition might be immeasurably more desirable than that from which it had transplanted him; that it gave him physical comfort, mental and moral elevation and religious culture not possessed by his race in any other con dition; that his bonds had not been placed upon his hands by the living generation; that the mixed social system of which he formed an element had been regarded by the fathers of the Republic, and by the ablest statesmen who had risen up after them, as too complicated to be broken up without
recognized and explicitly sanctioned by the very organic law of the Republic. Weighty as these considerations might be, formidable as the difficul ties in the way of the practical enforcement of his great principle, he held none the less that it must sooner or later be enforced, though institutions and constitutions should have to give way alike before it. But here let me do this great man the justice which, amid the excitements of the struggle between the sections now past. I may have been disposed to deny him. In this fiery zeal, and this earnest warfare against the wrong, as he viewed it, there entered no enduring personal animosity towards the men whose lot it was to be born under the system which he denounced. . . . "Though he knew very well that of his conquered fellow-citizens of the South, by far the larger por tion, even those who most heartily acquiesced in and desired the abolition of slavery, seriously questioned the expediency of investing, in a single day and without any preliminary tutelage, so vast a body of inexperienced and uninstructed men with the full right of freemen and voters, he would tolerate no half-way measures upon a point to hiiu so vital."
Referring to the olive-branch which Sum ner had sought to hold out to the vanquished, he said : — "Conscious that they themselves were animated by devotion to constitutional liberty, and that the brightest pages of history are replete with evidences of the depth and sincerity of that devotion, they can but cherish the recollection of sacrifices en dured, battles fought, and the victories won in defence of their hapless cause. And respecting, as all true and brave men respect, the martial spirit with which the men of the North vindicated the integrity of their devotion to the principles of hu man freedom, they do not ask, they do not wish. the North to strike the mementoes of her heroism and victory from either records or monuments or battle-flags. They would rather that both sections should gather up the glories won by each section, not envious, but proud of each other, and regard them a common heritage of American valor. "Let us hope that future generations, when they remember the deeds of heroism and devo tion done on both sides, will speak not of
