With his friendly grasp of the hand, and his kindly smile, he started for home. It proved to him Home indeed. A week later the country was startled by intelligence of his sudden death. He, who for forty-eight years had braved the hardships of campaigning and the perils of battle, until he seemed to have a charmed life, was abruptly cut down by disease under his own roof, surrounded by those he loved.
"The breast that trampling Death could spare, His noiseless shafts assail."
For almost half a century, Sumner had belonged to the Army of the United States; but he steadfastly refused to be put on the retired list. Entering the service from civil life, he was free from professional traditions and narrowness. Senator Wade once asked him, "How long were you at the Military Academy?" He replied, "I was never there in my life."
The bluff Ohioan sprang up and shook him fervidly by the hand, exclaiming, "Thank God for one general of the regular Army, who was never at West Point!"
His Conduct in Kansas.
During the early Kansas troubles, Sumner, then a colonel, was stationed in the Territory with his regiment of dragoons. Unscrupulous as were the Administrations of Pierce and Buchanan in their efforts to force Slavery upon Kansas, embittered as were the people against the troops,—generally mere tools of Missouri ruffians—their feelings toward Sumner were kindly and grateful. They knew he was a just man, who would not willingly harass or oppress them, and who sympathized with them in their fiery trial.
From the outbreak of the Slaveholders' Rebellion his name was one of the brightest in that noble but unfortunate army which illustrated Northern discipline and valor on so many bloody fields, but had never yet gathered the fruits of victory. He was always in the deadliest of the fighting. He had the true soldierly temperament. He snuffed the battle afar off. He felt "the rapture of the strife," and went into it with boyish enthusiasm.
A Thrilling Scene in Battle.
In exposing himself, he was Imprudence personified. It was the chronic wonder of his friends that he ever came out of battle alive. At last they began to believe, with him, that he was invincible. He would receive bullets in his hat, coat, boots, saddle, horse, and sometimes have his person scratched, but without serious injury. His soldiers related, with great relish, that in the Mexican War a ball which struck him square in the forehead fell flattened to the ground without breaking the skin, as the bullet glances from the forehead of the buffalo. This anecdote won for him the soubriquet of "Old Buffalo."
At Fair Oaks, his troops were trembling under a pitiless storm of bullets, when he galloped up and down the advance line, more exposed than any private in the ranks.