Mr. Sumner spoke for two days. As soon as he took his seat, the storm which had been preparing broke forth. Mr. Cass was the first to speak. He began by saying that he had “listened with equal regret and surprise” to the speech of Mr. Sumner, which he characterized as “the most un-American and unpatriotic that ever grated on the ears of the members of this high body.” Mr. Douglas followed in a tirade of personality, in which he renewed the old assault of two years before, charging Mr. Sumner with defying the Constitution, when he exclaimed with regard to the rendition of a fugitive slave, “Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?”[139] The speech of Mr. Sumner was characterized in the most offensive terms. “He seems to get up a speech as in Yankee-land they get up a bed-quilt.” Then again: “Is it his object to provoke some of us to kick him as we would a dog in the street, that he may get sympathy upon the just chastisement?” Then again: “We have had another dish of the classics served up,—classic allusions, each one only distinguished for its lasciviousness and obscenity,—each one drawn from those portions of the classics which all decent professors in respectable colleges cause to be suppressed, as unfit for decent young men to read. Sir, I cannot repeat the words. I should be condemned as unworthy of entering decent society, if I repeated those obscene, vulgar terms which have been used at least a hundred times in that speech.” Then, further, he said that “the Senator from Massachusetts had his speech written, printed, committed to memory, practised every night before the glass, with a negro boy to hold the candle and watch the gestures, and annoying the boarders in the adjoining rooms until they were forced to quit the house.” All this was uttered with the sympathy of the slave-masters about him.
Mr. Mason followed with a bitterness which seemed a prolongation of the debate two years before. The tone of his speech appears in these words:—
“The necessities of our political position bring us into relations and associations upon this floor, which, in obedience to a common government, we are forced to admit. They bring us into relations and associations which beyond the walls of this Chamber we are enabled to avoid,—associations here whose presence elsewhere is dishonor, and the touch of whose hand would be a disgrace.…
“I have said that the necessity of political position alone brings me into relations with men upon this floor who elsewhere I cannot acknowledge as possessing manhood in any form. I am constrained to hear here depravity, vice in its most odious form uncoiled in this presence, exhibiting its loathsome deformities in accusation and vilification against the quarter of the country from which I come; and I must listen to it because it is a necessity of my position, under a common government, to recognize as an equal politically one whom to see elsewhere is to shun and despise.”
This debate, which was much in harmony with that of June, 1854, showed a state of feeling bordering on violence. The language of Mr. Douglas seemed to invite it, especially when he asked, “Is it his object to provoke some of us to kick him as we would a dog in the street, that he may get sympathy upon the just chastisement?” It came soon.
Mr. Sumner followed in unpremeditated remarks, replying to the only point of argument, and giving expression to the indignant sentiments inspired by the attack. These are preserved here as belonging to the history of this occasion.
MR. PRESIDENT,—Three Senators have spoken: one venerable in years, with whom I have had associations of personal regard longer than with anybody now within the sound of my voice,—the Senator from Michigan [Mr. Cass]; another, the Senator from Illinois [Mr. Douglas]; and a third, the Senator from Virginia [Mr. Mason].
The Senator from Michigan knows well that nothing I say can have anything but kindness for him. He has declared on this floor to-day that he listened with regret to my speech. I have never avowed on this floor how often, with heart brimming full of friendship for him, I have listened with regret to what has fallen from his lips. I have never said that he stood here to utter sentiments which seemed beyond all question disloyal to the character of the Fathers and to the true spirit of the Constitution; but this, with his permission, and in all kindness, I do now say to him.
The Senator proceeded very briefly and in a cursory manner to criticise my statement of the Michigan case. Sir, my statement was founded on the actual documents. No word was mine: it was all from Jackson, from Grundy, from Buchanan, from Benton, from the Democratic leaders of that day. When the Senator criticised me, his shaft did not touch me, but fell upon them. And here I leave the Senator from Michigan.