“Mr. Sumner is a man of whom Massachusetts might well be proud. His great abilities, his lofty spirit, his spotless public life, mark him as a man standing apart, not to be confounded with the crowd of selfish politicians that besiege the avenues of power in America. He has stood forward in evil days to encounter with an undaunted mien the obloquy and the peril attaching to the avowal of thorough Antislavery principles, and has been not the champion merely, but the martyr of the cause.”
After this presentation, it goes on to ask, “Well, and what was the reception which Mr. Sumner’s proposal met from the Republican Convention of the State of Massachusetts?” It finds an answer in the refusal to act on the resolutions of Mr. Clarke, and then says:—
“After all this, we sincerely hope we shall hear no more of this war as a war for the liberation of the slave, as a ‘sublime uprising’ of the men of the North for the cause of Human Freedom.”
The London Post, which did not sympathize with the National cause, said:—
“If the Federal Government are in want of an ex parte defender, they will certainly find one in Mr. Charles Sumner. When he tells the Republican State Convention at Worcester, that Rebellion never assumed such a front since Satan made war upon the Almighty, he used first the hyperbolical language which the most abject courtier of an absolute monarch in the Middle Ages could have suggested in condemnation of some insurrection that had broken out in one of his provinces.… Mr. Sumner narrows the question now dividing the North and South distinctly into a war of Slavery. Hence he appeals to European sympathies in behalf of the North. Now this view is in great part true, yet it is not wholly true.… It is not simply in respect of Slavery, as Mr. Sumner represents it, that the South differs from the North. The leading men of the South were commonly of different extraction from the leading men of the North. That difference has developed a broad distinction in social habits, in political ideas, in consent to authority, and in other characteristics which constitute the idiosyncrasy of a nation.… We cannot, therefore, agree with Mr. Sumner, that the question is essentially and wholly a slave question, any more than we can regard the secession as a rebellion against quasi-Divine authority.”
But the National cause was not without defenders abroad, nor the speech without sympathy.
The London Daily News, in an elaborate leader, with an abstract of the speech, said:—
“The most remarkable circumstance which we have yet chronicled is the speech of Mr. Charles Sumner in defence of the war.… We regard Mr. Sumner’s speech as most important in every point of view. It is the best answer which has been yet made on American ground to those who complain that hitherto the cause of the North has not met with the sympathy it deserved in Britain. But passing this, it shows to the Northerners themselves what it is that paralyzes their arms, what it is that places them so generally on the defensive and prevents their success. Let Mr. Sumner’s policy be adopted, and it would not only strike terror into the hearts of the Rebels, but would animate the masses of volunteers in the North with a ‘spirit which would render them still more formidable.’”
A London commercial paper, The Floating Cargoes Evening List, published a considerable extract, with a line from the speech as its caption, “Look at the war as you will, and you always see Slavery,” and the following notice:—
“The present American war exercises so powerful an influence upon commercial affairs in general, that the expression of an opinion on this subject by one of the most eminent American statesmen deserves special notice.”