“‘Every man in a state of Nature is an independent sovereign, subject to no law but the law written upon his heart and revealed to him by his Maker. His right to his life, his liberty, and his property no created being can rightfully contest; these rights are inherent and inalienable.’
“We watch the effect of his indignant words. They convince and awe, and yet the royal tribunal dare not decide. It prevaricates and postpones; but the victory is won, the odious measure is abandoned forever, and the orator’s utterances have lighted up a flame which Independence alone can ever quench.
“We go with him from this first theatre of triumph, through many long years of toil and anxiety in shaping the measures which led to the great conflict with the mother country, to the General Court guided by his skill and political sagacity, to the popular assembly alike aroused to turbulence and hushed to repose by his burning eloquence. We see him hurling defiance at the minions of power who with secret malevolence assailed his reputation. We witness their malignant hatred, and their deadly assault upon his person, when alone and unarmed. We see him fall, covered with wounds, and carried bleeding to his home.
“Thenceforward, to the actual opening of the Revolutionary drama, and during its progress, this act of regal barbarism obscured, but did not wholly extinguish, the light of the great intellect which it sought to destroy; but all that remained was a wreck, reminding only of the glories of the past. The crime against the person added to its atrocity a greater crime against the soul, dooming it to pursue its earthly career in sadness and gloom. Conscious of being only a monument of decay, well might the gradually expiring patriot wish, that, when God, in his righteous Providence, should call him from time into eternity, it might be by a flash of lightning. We may rejoice that his prayer was answered, and that, too noble to be permitted to die a common death, in a manner equally affecting and sublime, James Otis [applause] was removed to the mansions of eternal felicity.
“It is the necessary result of barbarism, in all its phases, to furnish historic parallels by reproducing itself in viler forms. Not a century elapsed, and a similar atrocity is enacted in the Senate Chamber of the United States. The ruffians were actuated by as deadly a hate, their malice was as foul and murderous, their defiance of law was as manifest, their victim was also the friend and advocate of universal freedom, and as much distinguished and feared, and he also fell beneath the blows of assassins in heart and conduct.
“But here the parallel ends. This outrage did not impair the intellect which it sought to destroy; that survived the trial, enlarged, strengthened, purified, to set forward in a new and more glorious career in the cause of Freedom and Humanity. Instead of the lightning’s flash to remove it to heaven, a divine influence, equal in potency, has emanated thence, inspiring it with a larger love of freedom, more zeal in the cause of the oppressed, and a more earnest conviction that human slavery produces only evil, and that it should be forever eradicated. [Enthusiastic applause.]
“Happy, then, for us, and for our country, has been the suffering of these martyrs in the cause of Freedom. The name of James Otis has descended to posterity on the brightest pages of our history, associated with those of Hancock, and Adams, and Jay, and Jefferson, and Henry, and Rutledge, and there it will remain forever.
“The name of that other martyr in the cause of Truth and Justice will find equal distinction, in future ages, on the roll of philanthropists, with those of Howard and Clarkson and Wilberforce, and others of that glorious company, ‘of whom the world was not worthy.’
“But history has also its retributions. The infamous actors in these tragedies passed away under the scorn and contempt of mankind, their names only searched for and remembered among the persecutors and slayers of their race. They who countenanced and approved the last, by a fitting gradation, became the betrayers and assassins of their country, and two of these, the highest in station and basest in conduct, are now awaiting the punishment due to their crimes in a prison within the shadow of Bunker Hill Monument, [applause,] which indignantly frowns upon them from base to summit.
“In the reality of the present behold the promise of the future, when all traitors like them shall meet a similar doom. Still devoting himself to the cause of his country and to the freedom of the oppressed, the advocate and friend of all, of whatever rank or condition or color, the scholar, the philanthropist, the martyr, the statesman has come again among us, and it is with equal pride and pleasure that I present to you the Hon. Charles Sumner, not of Massachusetts, but of the United States of America, one and indivisible.”