“The bludgeon, heretofore only brandished, has at last been brought down; and now is the time for the North to fight. Charles Sumner needs not our sympathy: if he dies, his name will be immortal,—his name will be enrolled with the names of Warren, Sidney, and Russell; if he lives, he is destined to be the light of the nation.”
Hon. Edward Everett, at Taunton, opened his “Address on the Character of Washington” by allusion to the assault.
“With the satisfaction which I feel in addressing you at the present time are mingled the profoundest anxiety and grief. An irrepressible sadness takes possession of my heart at the occurrences of the past week, and the most serious apprehensions force themselves upon me that events are already in train, with an impulse too mighty to be resisted, which will cause our beloved country to weep tears of blood through all her borders for generations to come. The civil war,—for such it is,—with its horrid train of pillage, fire, and slaughter, carried on, without the slightest provocation, against the infant settlements of our brethren on the frontier of the Union,—the worse than civil war which has for months raged unrebuked at the capital of the Union, and has at length, by an act of lawless violence, of which I know no parallel in the history of Constitutional Government, stained the floor of the Senate Chamber with the blood of an unarmed, defenceless man, and he a Senator of Massachusetts,—ah, my friends, these are events which, for the good name, the peace, the safety of the country, for the cause of free institutions throughout the world, it were worth all the gold of California to blot from the record of the past week. They sicken the heart of the good citizen, of the patriot, of the Christian; they awaken a gloomy doubt whether the sacrifices and the sufferings endured by our fathers, that they might found a purer, higher, and freer civilization on this Western Continent than the world had yet seen, have not been endured in vain.”
William H. Hurlbut, of New York, the eminent journalist, wrote thus, under date of June 7, 1856.
“The newspapers, which have for so long kept the millions of the North as watchers about your bed, now gladden all our hearts with the news that you are soon to stand again upon that floor which promises to become as sacred in the annals of Freedom as is the arena of the Coliseum in the story of our faith.…
“Nothing, I am sure, could so have touched and roused every class of Northern society, nothing could so have put the terrible realities of the issue we must confront before the most unwilling and the most indifferent minds, as the atrocious deed which, imbecile as it was atrocious, makes the firmest enemy of Slavery the perpetual representative alike of Northern honor and of Northern manhood, and enlists around you, as the perpetual Senator of Massachusetts, every instinct, passion, and necessity of Northern civilization.
“It is your rare good fortune to be able to wear the martyr’s crown into the battle of life, and I really do not see how any true man can have any words for you but those of congratulation and of stern exultation. The scoundrelly simpleton who struck you fled from the recoil of his weapon; but there will be a fiercer recoil from that blow, and a flowing of blood not so easily to be stanched.
“I think, if you could have seen the meeting at the Tabernacle, you would have marked the 22d of May with white in your calendar: it is marked with red in the calendar of our country.
“I am going to England in a few weeks, but I hope, before I go, to hear that you are quite reëstablished in health, and once more face to face with the lions,—I beg the pardon of the forest-king,—with the tigers of the Senate House.