NOTE.
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manifested, after printing, by limiting the communication of copies to personal friends, with the inscription, “Unpublished,—private and confidential,—not to go out of Mr.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]