“Will you accept my hearty thanks for your speech? Exciting, as it must, a rage of hatred in some, proportionate to the love and gratitude it secures from others, I am sure your life is in danger; but with you, the greater the danger, the greater the courage,—and courage is preservative. No need to bid you be of good cheer: one in your place cannot help being so.”
Rev. George B. Cheever, whose soul was in the Antislavery cause, wrote from New York:—
“I bless you from the bottom of my heart, and praise God for his goodness in sparing you and returning you to your place in the Senate for that great work. It is a mighty blow, struck just at the right time, with a severity, pungency, and hearty earnestness that it does one’s very soul good to witness. God bless you, and keep you, my dear friend and brother!—for you must allow me to use this language, since you have endeared yourself to every lover of freedom and justice, of truth and righteousness, and to every friend of the slave, more than ever; and your noble course might justify even a personal stranger in addressing you thus. You are very dear to us all.”
Rev. William H. Furness, the Unitarian preacher, whose gentle nature was always aroused by Slavery, wrote from Philadelphia:—
“I have just read the telegram of your speech, and I must tell you that I have no words to express my admiration, gratitude, love. It is a grand justification of your non-resignation of your seat. The grace of God is on you,—his special favor, in that you have had the will and the opportunity for so faithful, so noble an utterance. It is a planetary space beyond and above the Republican party.”
In another letter he wrote further:
“I have no words to describe the blessed work you have done. Never for one instant mind the ‘cold-shoulderism’ of the Tribune, or the heartlessness around you; but rest assured that you have sent the truth into the inmost being of the Southern men who heard you. They may affect contempt by their silence, or they may rail and foam like Chesnut, but they know that you have spoken the bitter and biting truth without bitterness and without fear, as became a Christian gentleman. I declare to you that I consider that you are paid for the inaction and suffering of the last four years, and so are we. You cannot, no one can, begin to estimate the substantial work that you have done, both in regard to the essential truth, which you have demonstrated, and more to the perfect spirit and manner of the work.”
Rev. O. B. Frothingham, the courageous clergyman and reformer, wrote from New York:—
“Expressing my satisfaction and delight with your recent speech in the Senate, I do not know which most to be thankful for,—the complete restoration of your physical and mental power indicated by it, or the unabated courage it manifests, or the undazzled moral vision it displays in every sentence. To read it is like inhaling a draught of air in midsummer from the cliffs of Nahant or the hills of New Hampshire. It gives a conscience to legislation, and sets us all back upon the everlasting truth and rectitude.”