“Permit me to congratulate you on your late speech in the
Senate. I am not unfamiliar with your speeches, and feel
great pleasure in saying that none has ever, in my opinion,
so strengthened your position as a statesman; none has been
more happy, more effective, or more generally satisfactory
to your constituents.
“Without calling up any of those questions upon which
many of them have differed from you, you have done much
to contribute to public peace, and aided well, under
peculiarly difficult circumstances, in placing the country
in an honorable position before the world.”
Hon. Charles P. Huntington, late Judge of the Superior Court
for Suffolk County, wrote:--
“I have read your speech on the Trent affair with more
satisfaction than anything that has yet been uttered on the
subject, and as placing the merits of the question on the
most satisfactory and statesmanlike ground.”
Rev. Theodore D. Woolsey, the excellent President of Yale
College, and author of a work on International Law, wrote from
New Haven:--
“Having just read with great pleasure your speech on the
Trent case, as given in the _Tribune_ of yesterday, I feel
moved to express to you my satisfaction that you have given
the affair such a shape, and have tacitly exposed some of
Mr. Seward’s errors.”
Hon. John Jay, afterwards Minister at Vienna, wrote from New
York:--
“Accept my congratulations on your very able speech on
the Trent matter. It will rather surprise your friends in
England.”
Hon. John M. Read, a Judge of the Supreme Court of
Pennsylvania, wrote from Philadelphia:--
“I was very much gratified in reading your very able,
temperate, and forcible speech on the Trent affair.”