“I have read with great pleasure your discourse on the ‘Origin and Mainspring of the Rebellion.’ It is conclusive, and powerfully so, and does you infinite credit. I see you are afraid of some attempt at compromise. I am very much afraid of it. There must be no compromise. The battle must be fought out, and we must settle the question once and forever, whether we are a nation or are not. Everything, I fear, depends on the vigilance, firmness, and patriotism of Congress.”
Henry C. Wright, the veteran of Abolition, wrote:—
“I am sixty-four years old. Thirty of those years have been almost exclusively spent in a war of ideas against Slavery, as a Garrisonian Abolitionist. Conquer by suffering! Victory or death! Resistance to tyrants, obedience to God! Such have been the watchwords of the battle. You know what it has cost those who have waged this war of ideas. But I felt fully rewarded last evening in seeing that audience so earnestly listening to such sentiments as fell from your lips. What a revolution in thought and feeling in twenty-five years! Never again let man be discouraged in a conflict between humanity and its incidents.”
A citizen of Washington confessed the change in his mind from this speech.
“I have through all my life been a Democrat, and I confess I have had no great love for you, or what I thought to be your principles. But a cardinal principle in my ethics is, that men should always be ‘open to conviction.’ I am happy to confess that I have been doubly deceived: first, in the principles and intentions of the Democratic party; and, second, in the principles and intentions of the Republicans,—or Abolitionists, as we call them. A friend handed me your great oration delivered in New York, and I am so favorably struck with its logic and patriotism that I am completely proselyted. Mr. Sumner, I want my children and my children’s children to know that I am a ‘Sumner man.’”
These expressions from different parts of the country show the wakeful sympathy which prevailed.
WELCOME TO FUGITIVE SLAVES.
Remarks in the Senate, on a Military Order in Missouri, December 4, 1861.