“It appears that in the State of Massachusetts public views
are divided as to the means to be employed for joining the
pieces of the American Union. The most violent, represented
by Senator Sumner, preach war to the knife, and the
emancipation of the blacks. They propose to give liberty to
all the slaves in the Union, with indemnities to loyalists
only. Thus, then, if we are to believe Senator Sumner, the
surest way of establishing peace in North America will be
to let loose several millions of blacks, and incite them to
murder and incendiarism.”
On the other hand, in France was the testimony of Count Agénor
de Gasparin, noble friend of the national cause, who, in a
powerful work, cited the speech at Worcester, and adopted its
conclusion,[199]--also of M. Édouard Laboulaye, who, at a
later day, when presiding over the Antislavery Conference at
Paris, surrounded by the Abolitionists of all countries, paid a
flattering tribute to Mr. Sumner, winding up with allusion to
this speech:--
“Charles Sumner, a man who in his turn took up this cause
and defended it with the most admirable eloquence, which,
as you probably all know, was the occasion of his being
nearly killed in his place in the Senate,--an act for which
the assassin was rewarded by his Southern friends. They
gave him a cane, gold-mounted, bearing the inscription,
‘_Hit him again._’ Mr. Sumner came to France, and we made
his acquaintance at that time. The object of his journey
was the reëstablishment of his health,--and he recovered
it; for he it was, who, during the whole of the war, was
the real adviser of America: he felt, and he said, more
boldly than any one, that the war could be terminated only
by the Abolition of Slavery.”[200]
The position accorded to Mr. Sumner in Europe, beginning
especially with this speech, was attested at a still later
day in an article by M. Michel Chevalier, a Senator of France
under the Empire, renowned for various writings, especially
in Political Economy. In a sympathetic review of the address
on the “Duel between France and Germany,” this authority thus
expresses himself:--
“The opinion embodied in the writing which I am about to
analyze, and which is a mixture of sympathetic words and
of severe counsels for France, is not that of one or many
assemblies, of one or many popular meetings, of one group
or of many groups of journals; it is that of one man. But
this man is one of the most distinguished citizens of his
country; he has exercised a supreme influence in the events
of which the great Republic has been the theatre since the
moment when, in 1861, the South declared that it broke the
Union, and at the mouth of the cannon seized Fort Sumter,
situated in the harbor of Charleston. Mr. Charles Sumner
has not figured on the battle-field; he was elsewhere, in
the Senate of the United States, from which place, it can
be said, he was the political director of the conflict.…
But the thought of extirpating Slavery, of obliging the
Slave States to modify their internal system so as to
render impossible the reëstablishment of servitude under
another name, the idea of assimilating by law the black
and mulatto with the white,--assimilation to which until
then their habits were as repugnant as their laws,--these
have belonged to Mr. Charles Sumner more than to any other
person, and were the basis of a plan which has triumphed by
the indomitable will and the ever-ready eloquence of this
statesman. It can therefore be said of Mr. Charles Sumner,
that he is in himself a public opinion.”[201]