With the failure of an opportunity for the presentation of the
proposed statement in the Senate Mr. Sumner’s indisposition
to appeal to the public returned with increased strength,
manifested, after printing, by limiting the communication
of copies to personal friends, with the inscription,
“Unpublished,--private and confidential,--not to go out of Mr.
----’s hands.”
Says one to whom it was thus confided: “I frequently urged him
afterwards to make it public. His reply was, in substance, that
he should not do it for personal vindication merely; that, so
far as Mr. Motley was concerned, he thought the matter stood
well enough before the public; but if the time should come when
the ends of justice required its publication, he should remove
the injunction of secrecy. While he lived I respected his
injunction. After his death I felt that justice to his memory
not only justified, but required me to make the ‘Explanation’
public.… Accordingly, after conferring with Mr. Whitelaw
Reid, of the ‘New York Tribune,’ I sent it to him, and it was
published in that journal of April 6, 1874.”--F. W. BIRD,
_Introductory_ to his pamphlet edition, Boston and New York,
1878.
The seal having been thus broken, there can obviously no longer
be question as to the propriety of including an article of such
high interest and importance in a collection of Mr. Sumner’s
Works; and it accordingly here follows in due course.
* * * * *
As one consequence of the leading part taken by Mr. Sumner in
opposition to the scheme for the annexation of San Domingo
to the United States, the friends of that scheme formed the
determination to depose him from the influential position long
held by him as Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations.
In pursuance of this determination, at the opening of the
Session of 1871, on a vote, March 10th, to proceed to the
election of the Standing Committees, Mr. Howe, of Wisconsin, as
the organ of a Senatorial Caucus on the subject, sent to the
Chair a list which had been agreed upon, with the name of Mr.
Cameron, of Pennsylvania, substituted for that of Mr. Sumner,
at the head of the Committee in question,--alleging, as the
reason for this change, “that the personal relations existing
between the Senator from Massachusetts and the President of the
United States and the head of the State Department were such
as precluded all social intercourse between them.” Thereupon
ensued the debate referred to in the prefatory note to the
following paper, and characterized in the text as Mr. Sumner’s
“trial before the Senate on articles of impeachment.”[94]