Year: 1874

summer ana FllmOres


The grave has just closed over one American
statesman and is about to close upon another
upon one whose career was beginning as the
others ended. Millard Fillmore and Charles
Sumner, not unlike in many respects-in
their generous love of culture and that ease Of
manner, wanting in too many Of our leading
men, which gave to their lives the beauty OF
repose-were yet so different that there was
only retirement for the one and battle for
the other. Fillmore was the apostle of con-
ciliation Sumner the embodiment of irrecon-
cilability. The former for twenty years repre-
sented the compromising spirit of the North.
But that he was man of compromises the
whig party would have been an anti-slavery
party from its advent to power. 1t had in it
the anti-slavery spirit deeply grounded and
without this it was as mere inchoate
organization. Mr. Fillmore crushed this
spirit out, and by the compromises of his ad-
ministration handed it completely bound to
its enemies He was at heart perhaps as
much OF an anti-slavery man as MIR. Sumner
but his temper was different, and to the widely
divergent temperaments Of the two men the
difference in their careers was attributable.
If Fillmore, as the leader of the House in the
Twenty-seventh Congress, had made his party
ant-slavery, he might never have been Presi-
dent, but he would have made Summers career
impossible. AS it happened, Summers genius
fitted the sphere which Fillmore's temper
made for him. AS we said before, the career
Of yhor tbot of ofhar
ended. The era of compromises was succeeded
by the sterner era of antagonism. Charles
Sumner buckled on his armor to overthrow
the work to which Millard Fillmore had given
all his public career, and now, when the ma
ton mourns these two men, laid in their
graves almost at the same time, each of them
spotless in his fame, it sees in the story Of
their lives the feelings which swayed the
American people in the decade preceding and
the decade following the repeal of the Mis-
souri, Compromise.


Now that the era of compromises and the
away the country ought to find perfect peace.
What is most needed now is rest. That rest
comes not after all these fifty years of diverse
politics, dating from the Missouri Compromise,
is explained by that state of facts which left
both Sumner and Fillmore after the war with
field, thrown upon the surface by the Rebel
lion as the sea throws up debris after storm.
The generals in Congress and IN the custom
houses and in the other places of civil admin
istration are mostly bad men, the fruits of the
war. Though they fought on one side or the
other in the civil strife they had no part in
those nobler contests which Sumner and Fill
more shared, and which led to the strife. Un-
like the statesmen we mourn to-day, they
went into the battles without convictions
and came out of them without principles
There is no peace or rest because the de-
moralization and corruption incident to the
war have not yet passed away. But there is
ground for hope for the future in the heartfelt
tributes everywhere paid to the memory of the
two dead statesmen. That these men differed
SO widely in the spirit that animated them in
their public conduct there is all the more rea-
son to be hopeful Representing the dominat-
ing craftsmanship of two epochs, both within
the experience of the generation of states
men now passing away. they were blameless
in their lives and are honored in their deaths.
But while we have no blame for Fillmore the
concliatory or Sumner the irreconcilable, we
find, in the study of their careers, in the pas
sions which swayed them and the motives
which prompted them, a lesson which
the country greatly needs to learn.
Though posterity will fix to which belongs the
greater glory and fix it in Mr.. Summers favor,
they are each, as men, held blameless. What
they did is in the past and belongs to history;
but the lessons of all history are the legacies
Of the present. If we carefully study the dec
ades in which these men exerted their great
est influence we shall see how dead is the dead
past, and that the method of each has some
thing for imitation. In both Sumner and
Fillmore are worthy models, and if the beauty
of their lives is impressed upon the country;
if their integrity, their earnestness and their
honor exert the power these ought to exert
we shall soon be freed from the unworthy men
who have usurped public positions and dis
graced and dishonored the American name.