New national era. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1870-1874, 1874-03-19

itionS tilrcc OF louf uiSCluCC SUBJECTS under
the powerful command of his sweeping rhet
| argument until one could anticipate the con.
! clusion to which his logic, his illustrations
and his descriptions were leading. AS ali
roads led to Rome, so did each of the Ipath.
ways along which he marshaled his intellect.
ual forces lead to freedom, and as thew went
every troop Of his well disciplined sentences
were plumed and made to glitter with the
decorations of his learning, while irony, sar-
casm and satire gave briskness to the march.
No wonder the slave power trembled in the
face of such an enemy. No wonder it con-
ceived the purpose of assassinating our
champion preliminary to its plan for the
b"tchery of our race. But the compensations
OF justice are always exact. The slave
power failed in its murderous work, and the
suflerings which it entailed upon its great
enemy made it forever impossible that Charles
Sumner should be anything but an uncondi-
tiOnal aboltionist. We all remember how.
after four years of suffering, he returned to
his seat in the Senate, and delivered that
matchless Grafton on the "Barbarism of
Slavery'-an effort which thrilled Christen-
dom.
The poetry of his marvellous career .culmi-
mated in the glorious evidences of his renew
ed conservation to our cause which were
given in that speech. He had communed
for four years with history and gathered her
most precious secrets, her most startling
episodes, her most curious phases, and her
subtlest teachings to find two sets of features :;
the one to show slavery as ugly as the heart
OF Satan, and the other to depict freedom as
glorious in the presence of God. And from
that blessed hour, when the secessionists
were scattered by that Grafton, which they
ielt expressed the unalterable convictions of
the North, to the secret conclaves, i'm which
10y some moral jugSlerythcy expected to cheat
justice and deity lust, Charles Sumner has
stood the champion of our cause in the SEN
ate, guarding it with vigilance which no
pro-siavery sOphisms or negro-hatng purpo-
ses could elude, defending it with fidelity
and energy which no black man has surpassed.
and pushing it forward with such zeal and
ability that he lived to see the race he worked
for redeemed and disenthralled by the
irresistible genius of universal emancipa-
tom
His keen sense of Justice, his great natural
abilities, and his splendid attachments were
devoted to the securement of those great
objects -individual rights, personal indepen-
dence and the supremacy of principle.
lie was a strong advocate of the rights of
men as against the sanctions of parchments.
The loving, yearning heart of his species
always throbbed with aspirations which de-
manded sympathy from his own heart, while
the hoary writings of past generation were
to him too often but the monuments of a
consecrated lie or dcfled wrong. The in
dlvldual who could feel wrong or understand
right was more to him than the army which
might conquer territory and establish an
empire, because when justice knocks at the
door OF an interrupted heart she has thou
mi TO, H.
chance ofrccOgnition when her presence in the
Interpretation ola written document is solemn
~ invoked. lie knew that in the great strug-
giles OF mankind against constitutions, the
attempt has always been made on the side
OF power TO make authority substitute for
conscience; to give precedent the command
over reason; to allow interest to domineer
over right, and in our time especially Charles
Sumner saw that individual rights were not
only buried under mountain of statutes, but
he found that the statutes themselves could
be interpreted by and applied to only par
tlcniar class OF the race which originally
adopted them to the detriment of the negro.
The white man that held his conscience sa-
cred to the anti-slavery teachinhs ofhis father
or mother was stricken down more remorse-
lessly than the negro against whom the tyran-
ny OF legislation was originally directed.
Garrison had been well nigh sullocatcd with
the hangman's cord in his own town. Love-
joys blood had stained the waters or the Mis-
souri, river ;Fairbank had languished for score
OF years in Kentucky prison, and Nat. Tur-
ner had died upon Virginia gibbet because
they believedin saying to men what God had
put in their hearts to say, or because they did
what humanity prompted them to do in the
vlndication of their manhood against the
despotlsm ofmerccnary and aristocratic enact
ments.
Personal independence was naturally allied
in his well-ordered mind with individual rights.
In his estimation there could be no such thing
as moral monopoly of political conduct.
Parties are good within the legitimate sphere
OF their activities, but parties are no more
than the cObwebs of single nights industry
by spider when the breath of an honest
leadership is turned against them. He had
seen the old Wing party, under the captancy
OF the only man who could measure intellect
with him, wrecked on the water of refluent
public opinion while Daniel Webster himself
was at the helm
lie had seen the old Democratic ship burned
to a cinder by this public sentiment which
turned its focal heat upon the convention at
Baltimore in 1850: and both these distinctions
had taken place through the independence of
men like himself and Vice President Wilson,
John l.. Hale, Garrison, Philips, Frederick
Douglass and others, who began by proclaim
ing their independence Of party, and ended in
making party which, in the freshness of its
power, made personal independence its chief
cornerstone.
Mr.. Sumner knew that mankind is ALWAYS
safe with liberty, and that man who has
got sense enough to be independent will
nearly always have conscience enough to do
right: and he knew also that the keynote of
every revolution against an established iniUui-
ty has been struck by some refOrmer whose
abilities and courage rendered him indepen-
dent of the patronage of any one set of men.
What does his own life teach us if it does not
convey the value of this personal indepen-
dence? Beginning his career in the Senate
when he had but two men to stand by him in
his moral attitudes he bore the fierce oppose
ton Of the party which had aided in his cleo
ton, all Indifferent as to whether he was
reelected or not in his answering devotion
to his own conviction.
Inseparable from his love of freedom and
personal independence was his devotion to
principle. He studied only those masters
who had swept through history in the STAIN
less garments and with the FURNISHED
weapons of chivalrous devotion and courage
in the cause of the right; and he fashioned
his life upon the model of such men as lam
guished in the dungeons or died at the stake
rather than betray the trust committed to
their hands. Consistency was his guiding
star, but il was not the consistency of mere
attitude it was the consistency of a holy
purpose, the coherency of moral conduct
the lofty conception Of a unity of ideas
which no expediency could invade.
To him compromise was the cardinal sin
of craftsmanship. He regarded il as the