“This is the great speech of the day. It paints American
Slavery as it is, and as it has never been painted before.
No Republican can look upon the picture which Charles Sumner
draws of this Barbarism without feeling his heart swell with
hatred against it, and without recording a new vow to labor
unceasingly for its extinction.”
Early in the controversy _Frederick Douglass’s Paper_ bore testimony as
follows.
“At last the right word has been spoken in the Chamber of
the American Senate. Long and sadly have we waited for an
utterance like this, and were beginning at last to despair of
getting anything of the sort from the present generation of
Republican statesmen; but Senator Sumner has now exceeded all
our hopes, and filled up the full measure of all that we have
long desired in the Senatorial discussions of Slavery. He has
dared to grapple directly with the Hell-born monster itself.
It is not the unreasonableness of the demands of Slavery, not
the aggressions nor the mere arrogance of the Slave Power,
insufferable and unconstitutional as these have been, that have
now so thoroughly aroused the soul and fired the tongue of the
learned and eloquent Senator of Massachusetts, but the inherent
and brutal barbarism of Slavery itself.… His manner of assault
is, we think, faultless. It was calm, self-poised, earnest,
brave, and yet completely guarded. The network of his argument,
though wonderfully elaborate and various, is everywhere, and
in all its parts, strong as iron. The whole slaveholding
Propaganda of the Senate might dash themselves against it in a
compact body, without breaking the smallest fibre of any of its
various parts.”
The _Liberator_, in an editorial article by William Lloyd Garrison,
said:--
“Throughout, its spirit was lofty, dignified, and bold,
indicative of high moral intrepidity and a noble purpose. No
attempts were made to interrupt him, though the smothered wrath
of the Southern members must have been excessive.”
The correspondent of an Antislavery paper, with the initials W. P., in
an article entitled “Mr. Sumner’s Last and Greatest Speech,” said:--
“The Massachusetts Senator has led a column into this fortress,
which, in the name of God and Humanity, must eventually silence
all its guns and level its last stone to the ground. Neither
statesman nor philanthropist has ever, in like manner, rent
asunder the veil and exposed to the view of an outraged people
the Barbarism of Slavery. This Mr. Sumner has done, _and no man
can undo it_. ‘What is written is written.’ Slaveholders may
rave, Americans may ignore, Republicans may deplore, but the
speech and the name of Charles Sumner will live and be praised
when the death-pall of oblivion shall cover the last vestige of
these unhappy men.”