“May so small an item as myself, among the millions who
are electrified by this bold and masterly exposition of
the great curse of the land, be permitted to join in the
expression of hearty admiration of the consummate ability
and unflinching fearlessness of the man who thus stands up
in the front ranks of the battle for Freedom and Humanity!
“Be assured, dear Sir, that you have gained a great many
repenting sinners from the ranks of the timid cotton-bound
apologists of Southern tyranny. Scarcely a man of
intelligence and standing within my range of observation
will now hesitate to indorse heartily your position on this
question, which was so recently in advance of the age.
‘There is a good time coming.’”
Simeon Draper, of New York, active and eminent as a political
leader, wrote:--
“I sincerely regret that you have received from the hand
of an assassin so serious a blow. I pray you may be
saved from pain, and soon be brought to your seat in the
Senate, and be long spared to defend the right and tell
the truth. In this great city of money-worshippers, thank
God, there are none to defend this act of cowardice and
meanness. Your sufferings may be great and even prolonged
by this scoundrelism, _but the life of Slavery will be much
shortened_.”
Cassius M. Clay, of Kentucky, famous for his early and constant
warfare with Slavery, afterwards Minister of the United States
at Petersburg, wrote:--
“I think your speech is far the best one delivered this
session, and will confer upon you immortality as a
parliamentary debater,--not merely a ‘maker of addresses,’
as your enemies would have it. I think it will stand
right alongside with Webster’s reply to Hayne on the Foot
resolution, which was his greatest effort in my judgment,
and will be considered equal to it in apt classical
allusion, strength of argument, bitter irony, and lofty
patriotism. Perhaps the only drawback in the comparison is
the studied arrangement of your speech, which, although
assisting the memory in the public mind, savors too much
of the pulpit, and ‘smells too much of the lamp.’ My dear
Sir, I have said thus much of your speech because I think
every orator would like to hear a candid criticism from any
source, however humble.
“The effect of your speech will be tremendous,--all the
more effective on account of the sequel.”
George W. Curtis, of New York, the elegant writer and speaker,
wrote to George Sumner:--
“While the whole free country is testifying its respect for
the statesman, and its honor for the brave defender of the
only great cause in human politics, it is a privilege upon
which I congratulate myself, that I may send my love to
your brother.
“Tell him that those of us whose pursuits are not political
postpone them to the commanding interest of the time, and
stand ready to prove our sympathy.
“I am writing an oration, to be delivered before the
societies of the Wesleyan University at Middletown,
Connecticut,--unfortunately not until August; my theme is
naturally the duty of the American scholar to politics;
and as I remember the scholar John Milton, who was the
great orator of Liberty in those days, I shall not forget,
nor allow my audience to forget, the scholar who in later
days--these very summer months, that will not then have
passed by--stood in the same way, splendid, not only by the
glory of his cause, but by the powers he consecrated to it,
and by the wrongs he suffered for it.”
Hon. E. Rockwood Hoar, afterwards Attorney-General, wrote from
Concord, Massachusetts:--
“Courage and good cheer, my noble friend! We will stand by
you in everything that head can devise or hand can execute.
“If you had been killed, no man could desire a nobler
epitaph than your speech; and you will live to say again,
in many a form, and on many a fit occasion, the stinging
home truths to which no reply could be found but this.”
Edwin P. Whipple, of Boston, admired as a writer, wrote with
the warmth of personal friendship:--
“You have been constantly in my mind and heart since the
attempt at your assassination, and I must tell you how
much I sympathize with the sentiments of your speech, how
I glory in its genius, and how impossible it is for me to
find words to express my rage and abhorrence in regard to
the outrage that followed it. I cannot account for the
course of Senator Butler, and of South Carolina, except on
the supposition, that, fearing certain charitable persons
might think you were too severe in your comments on them,
they hastened to prove they were worse than it had ever
entered your imagination to conceive them to be.
“Your speech is more than a speech: it is an event. It
would have been an event, had not your opponents answered
it in the only way they were capable of answering it.
It is much more so now. But your position, though more
glorious than that of any other living man, has great
responsibilities attached to it.”
Chauncey Clark, an earnest constituent, of Northampton, Mass.,
wrote:--
“I have carefully read your speech; I have read the
concluding retort, which some of your friends wish had not
been made; and I most fervently thank God for enabling you
to say just what you said, and to say it in the very manner
you did. And, Sir, you may well thank God, too. It required
no ordinary power. It was not the work of a day nor of a
night, nor of successive nights with lamps and ‘nigger
boys.’ Douglas knows little of the requisites necessary for
bringing up through this crooked world, and establishing
the heart and mind, in such a place as the Senate Chamber,
of _an honest man_.
“Had not God separated you early in life, and guided and
guarded and instructed you through many years, with special
reference to this very exigency, that concentration of
clear and just conception, of indignant hatred of tyranny,
and of confidence in the final triumph of justice, could
not have been called up at pleasure by you, merely to grace
a speech.”
Rev. Francis Wayland, of Providence, the able author of works
on Moral Philosophy and Political Economy, wrote:--
“I will not say that I, the whole nation, or the free
portion of it, sympathize with you,--and, what is far
better, I believe them to be solemnly moved. At least I
have seen nothing like it before. With us the wave has
reached an elevation which it never before touched. Our
ablest, best, and most influential men, men who have
been highly conservative, as it is called, have made up
their minds on this subject. They are calm, considerate,
constitutional; but they mean what they say, and they will
never go back.…
“I thank you for your speech, as I do for all the others
you have sent me. I hope you will deliver many such, and
I think you will do it henceforth without peril. Do not,
however, go out, or use your mind actively, until you are
perfectly well.”