“The fact is, Sumner has spoken but too truly. His is the spirit in which the South is regarded by the party to which he belongs. He is its mouthpiece. His is the tongue to the Abolition lyre, giving it utterance, bringing out its genuine tones. Greeley and Raymond are afraid, just at this moment, to speak the whole truth. They dare not let the conservative portion of the people at the North know that it is the design of the party with which they are associated to make uncompromising war upon the South,—to destroy its institutions at any cost of blood, to hunt down its people even to the extremity of death, if it be necessary. The South ought to feel obliged to Sumner for betraying the designs of the party. His speech is a godsend.”
The Indianapolis Daily Journal wrote:—
“We have read as much of Senator Sumner’s speech on the Barbarism of Slavery as we have had time to read, and must bear witness that it is one of the ablest, most exasperating, and most useless speeches we ever read. It shows all through the genius, the learning, and the hate of its gifted and abused author. It is manifestly the revenge of the orator on the institution that through Brooks’s arm struck him down so brutally. It is intended less to check the growth of Slavery than to gall Slaveholders. It is a scalding, excoriating invective, almost without parallel in the annals of oratory.… As a vengeance for the orator’s own wrongs, it is ample and admirable. As an implement to aid the great work of repressing Slavery extension, it is simply worthless, or worse. Slavery is all that he charges. But slaveholders are not as barbarous as their system.”
The Boston Daily Advertiser begins by saying of the speech, that “its denunciation, although strong, is not hot; its profuse learning and reference to history show elaboration and study; and the whole mass of reasoning, of rhetoric, and of authority is brought together and wielded with such skill and power as the greatest masters of oratory might well envy”; and then the journal proceeds:—
“We confess that in our judgment the argument upon Slavery itself need be neither long nor elaborate. The Golden Rule has exhausted the subject, both upon principle and authority. The testimony of one enlightened slaveholder like Jefferson, who ‘trembled for his country, when he remembered that God was just,’ tells us as much of the actual workings of the institution as all the hideous narratives which its opponents have culled in such appalling profusion from its current history. The subject is one which is governed by principles which are essentially and peculiarly elementary, and we confess that we see not how any powers of eloquence or reasoning could turn him who is not convinced by the simple statement of these few original principles.…
“If the majority of the people are already right upon the main subject,—and we should otherwise despair of the Republic,—we must conclude that our efforts will be much more efficacious, if directed at those constitutional heresies by means of which this giant evil is at present carrying on its attack. It is in this way, chiefly, that, within those limits of duty which the Republican party is ever careful to affirm and observe, we can hope to act efficiently upon this great question.”
The tone of the Democratic papers appears in the Albany Atlas and Argus.
“No one can rise from a perusal of this speech without a contempt for the author, and a conviction of his unfitness for the place.”
Also in the Boston Post.