“Pardon what you may perhaps consider the superfluous enthusiasm of this note; but it is written right away upon reading these oratoric odes, and I feel a little of the lava struggling even in the attempt to acknowledge receiving them.”
Hon. John Jay, afterwards Minister at Vienna, wrote from New York:—
“They are not only eloquent tributes to the dead, but powerful appeals to the living.”
Epes Sargent, the friend and writer, showed his sympathy in a letter from Boston.
“Your remarks in the Senate on Senator Baker pleased me so much that I could not forbear speaking my pleasure in print. They are level with the theme and the time, and the trumpet-note at the close is in just the right key. Oh, if it were not for Kentucky, that neither hot nor cold State, we might hope for a policy up to the height of this great argument! ‘I would she were hot or cold.’
“Our Boston papers do not yet speak out, as I would like to see them, on this question of proclaiming emancipation to the slaves of Rebels. We need another disaster to carry us forward a little further.”
William Lloyd Garrison declared himself with his accustomed directness in a letter from Boston.
“Thanks for your eloquent eulogy upon the late Senator Baker, (which I have published in the Liberator this week,) and its forcible application to Slavery as the primary cause of his untimely death, as it is of all our national woes. Be in no wise daunted, but rather strengthened and stimulated, by the abusive clamors and assaults following all your efforts, on the part of the ‘Satanic press,’ and unprincipled demagogues generally. These are surer evidences of the wisdom, goodness, and nobility of your cause than all the praises of your numerous friends and admirers. You may confidently make ‘the safe appeal of truth to time,’ and rely upon a universal verdict of approval at no distant day. To be in the right is as surely to be allied to victory as that God reigns. When there is howling in the pit, there is special rejoicing in heaven.”