The issue was thus presented to the people of Massachusetts, and throughout the Commonwealth the election of Senators and Representatives turned mainly upon it. If the attack was vigorous, so also was the defence. Of the latter a few illustrations will suffice. The first is from Wendell Phillips, who, in an address at Music Hall, Sunday forenoon, November 2d, said:—
“I say this much, before turning again to my immediate subject, for our great Senator, who has done justice to the manufacturing interests and the shipping of Massachusetts, as Webster did, and also justice to her conscience and her thought, as Webster did not. [Applause.] I do not wish to take one leaf from the laurel of the great Defender of the Constitution; he rests at Marshfield, beneath the honors he fairly earned. But we have put in his place a man far more practical than he was; we have put in his place the hardest worker that Massachusetts ever sent to the Senate of the United States [applause]; we have put in his place the Stonewall Jackson of the floor of the Senate,—patient of labor, untiring in effort, boundless in resources, terribly in earnest,—the only man who, in civil affairs, is to be compared with the great terror of the Union armies, the General of the Virginia forces: both ideologists, both horsed on an idea, and both men whom a year ago the drudges of State Street denounced, or would have denounced, as unpractical and impracticable; but when the war-bugle sounded through the land, both were found to be the only men to whom Carolina and Massachusetts hasted to give the batons of the opposing hosts.”
John G. Whittier, whose words of flame had done so much in the long warfare with Slavery, was aroused from his retirement to testify. In the Amesbury Villager, near his home, he wrote:—
“In looking over the speeches and newspapers of his active opponents, it really seems to me, that, if ever a man was hated and condemned for his very virtues, it is this gentleman. Nobody accuses him of making use of his high position for his own personal emolument; no shadow of suspicion rests upon the purity of his private or public character; no man can point to an instance in which he has neglected any duty properly devolving upon him; no interest of his State has been forgotten or overlooked; no citizen has appealed to him in vain for kindly offices and courteous hearing and attention. As Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Affairs, his industry and ability have never been denied by his bitterest enemies. All admit that he has rendered important service to his Government. What, then, is his crime? Simply and solely this, that he stands inflexibly by his principles,—that he is too hearty in his hatred of the monstrous Wrong which initiated and still sustains the present Rebellion,—that in advance of his contemporaries he saw the danger and proclaimed it,—that he heartily sustains the President in his Proclamation,—that he is in favor of destroying the guilty cause of all our national calamities, that red-handed murderer and traitor against whom the sighs and groans of Massachusetts wives and mothers, weeping in every town and hamlet for dear ones who are not, are rising in swift witness to God.
“This is his crime, his real offence, in the eyes of his leading opponents. I know it has been said that he is too much a man of ideas, and not a statesman. That he is not a politician, in the modern sense of the word, I admit; and if indirection, trickery, and the habit of looking upon men, parties, and principles as mere stock in trade and tools of convenience are the qualifications of statecraft, then he is not a statesman. But if a thorough comprehension of the great principles of law and political economy, of all which constitutes the true honor and glory and prosperity of a people,—if the will and ability to master every question as it arises,—if entire familiarity with the history, resources, laws, and policy of other nations, derived not merely from the study of books, but from free personal intercourse with the leading minds of Europe, are essential requisites of statesmanship, then is Charles Sumner a statesman in the noblest and truest sense. Certain it is that he is so regarded by the diplomatic representatives of European nations, and that no man in the country has so entirely the confidence and esteem of all who are really our friends in the Old World.”
Horace Greeley, in an article under his own name in the New York Independent, and entitled, “Charles Sumner as a Statesman,” united with the Republicans of Massachusetts.
“For the first time in our political history, a party has been organized and a State ticket nominated for the sole purpose of defeating the reëlection of one who is not a State officer, and never aspired to be. Governor Andrew is regarded with a hostility intensified by the fewness of those who feel it; but the bitterness with which Mr. Sumner is hated insists on the gratification of a canvass, even though a hopeless one; and, since there was no existing party by which this could be attempted without manifest futility, one was organized for the purpose. And it was best that this should be. Let us have a census of the friends and the enemies of Mr. Sumner in the State which he has so honored.
“I have said, that, while other Senators have shared his convictions, none has seemed so emphatically, so eminently, as he to embody and represent the growing, deepening Antislavery sentiment of the country. None has seemed so invariably to realize that a public wrong is a public danger, that injustice to the humblest and weakest is peril to the well-being of all. Others have seemed to regard the recent developments of disunion and treason with surprise and alarm: he has esteemed them the bitter, but natural, fruit of the deadly tree we have so long been watering and cherishing. The profound, yet simple truth, that ‘Righteousness exalteth a nation,’—that nothing else is so baleful as injustice,—that the country which gains a large accession of territory or of wealth at the cost of violating the least tittle of the canons of eternal rectitude has therein made a ruinous mistake,—that nothing else can be so important or so profitable as stern uprightness: such is the key-note of his lofty and beneficent career. May it be vouchsafed him to announce from his seat in the Senate the final overthrow of the demon he has so faithfully, so nobly resisted, and that from Greenland to Panama, from the St. John to the Pacific, the sun in his daily course looks down on no master and no slave!”
A single incident will illustrate the interest excited throughout the Commonwealth. A venerable citizen of New Bedford, seventy-nine years of age and very feeble, was assisted to the polls, saying, “Here goes a dying vote for Charles Sumner!”