The following were the assistant marshals: Captain I. F. Shepard, Charles H. Hawes, W. E. Webster, F. L. Chapin, O. H. Dutton, Major F. A. Heath, F. B. Fay, Julian O. Mason, A. A. Dunnels, Stephen Rhoades, H. D. Child, Leister M. Clark, Charles W. Pierce, R. F. Martin, Rufus Frost, F. A. Fuller, J. W. Wolcott, William B. Spooner, Henry D. Williams, Colonel Robert Cowdin, of Boston, and Eugene Batchelder, Charles D. Hills, D. P. Ripley, of Cambridge.
As it went up Washington Street, the cavalcade numbered, by actual count, about eight hundred horsemen; but its numbers were subsequently increased by fresh arrivals, in couples and in groups, to over a thousand.
On the head of the cavalcade reaching the borders of Roxbury, it halted, and the whole was drawn up in a long line at the upper side of Washington Street, facing the centre. For over half an hour it waited for the cortege from Brookline which was to escort Mr. Sumner, and when at last the latter appeared, it was received with hearty cheers and music from the Brigade Band. It consisted of some sixteen or eighteen barouches or carriages, containing the Committee of Arrangements and other gentlemen.
The barouche which contained Mr. Sumner was drawn by magnificent horses. With Mr. Sumner was the Rev. Professor F. D. Huntington, of Harvard University, and Dr. Perry, of this city, Mr. Sumner’s physician. Among those in the succeeding barouches were Messrs. Abbott and James Lawrence, George and Isaac Livermore, Edwin P. Whipple, George R. Russell, Charles G. Loring, J. Huntington Wolcott, Hon. E. C. Baker, President of the Senate, Dr. Beck and Rev. Dr. Francis, of Cambridge, Professor Lovering, and James Russell Lowell, the poet,—that which followed Mr. Sumner’s barouche containing Professor Longfellow, and George Sumner, the brother of the Senator.
As the carriage with Mr. Sumner touched the line between Roxbury and Boston, there was a general cheer, which was continued along far into the distance,—the Brigade Band playing “Hail Columbia.” The first division of the cavalcade wheeled to the left, and formed into an escort. The carriages of Mr. Sumner and the Committee came next in succession, and then the two remaining divisions fell into column.
A few rods north of the Roxbury line the cavalcade came to a halt, when Mr. Sumner’s carriage was driven alongside of that containing Hon. Josiah Quincy, and Hon. Alexander H. Rice, mayor of Boston. After greetings between the parties, Professor Huntington introduced Mr. Sumner to Mr. Quincy in the following brief address.
“Mr. Quincy,—The Committee of Arrangements for welcoming the Hon. Charles Sumner to his home present him here to you, Sir, a venerated representative of the city of his birth. He comes back from his public post, where he has bravely advocated the cause of all freemen, to enjoy a freeman’s privilege and discharge a freeman’s duty. He comes, a cheerful and victorious sufferer, out of great conflicts of humanity with oppression, of ideas with ignorance, of scholarship and refinement with barbarian vulgarity, of intellectual power with desperate and brutal violence, of conscience with selfish expediency, of right with wrong. Boston does well in coming out to greet him. For that ample and lofty manhood, trained under her education and consolidated in her climate, has added new dignity to her old renown. It has joined her name more inseparably than ever with the aspirations of Christian liberty, and the honors of disinterested patriotism, throughout the earth, and through all time.”
Mr. Quincy then addressed Mr. Sumner as follows.
“Mr. Sumner,—It is with inexpressible pleasure that I address you this day as the voice of the great multitude of your fellow-citizens. In their name, and by their authority, I welcome you to your home in Massachusetts, expressing their honor and thanks for the power and fidelity with which you have fulfilled your duties as their representative in the Senate of the United States, where, ‘unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,’ you kept your love, your zeal, your loyalty to Liberty,—where neither number nor example, threat nor sneer, ‘within you wrought to swerve from truth, or change your constant mind.’ [Applause.]
“You return to your country, Sir, after having given glorious evidences of intellectual power, which touched, as with the spear of Ithuriel, the evil spirit of our Union, causing it at once to develop in full proportions its gigantic deformity, compelling it to unveil to the Free States its malign design to make this land of the free a land of slaves. [Voices, ‘Never! never!’]