TO THE READER.
This statement was prepared in March, shortly after the debate in the Senate, but was withheld at that time, from unwillingness to take part in the controversy, while able friends regarded the question of principle involved as above every personal issue. Yielding at last to various pressure, Mr. Sumner concluded to present it at the recent called session of the Senate, but the Treaty with Great Britain and the case of the Newspaper Correspondents were so engrossing as to leave no time for anything else.
Washington, June, 1871.
NOTE.
With the failure of an opportunity for the presentation of the proposed statement in the Senate Mr. Sumner’s indisposition to appeal to the public returned with increased strength, manifested, after printing, by limiting the communication of copies to personal friends, with the inscription, “Unpublished,—private and confidential,—not to go out of Mr. ——’s hands.”
Says one to whom it was thus confided: “I frequently urged him afterwards to make it public. His reply was, in substance, that he should not do it for personal vindication merely; that, so far as Mr. Motley was concerned, he thought the matter stood well enough before the public; but if the time should come when the ends of justice required its publication, he should remove the injunction of secrecy. While he lived I respected his injunction. After his death I felt that justice to his memory not only justified, but required me to make the ‘Explanation’ public.… Accordingly, after conferring with Mr. Whitelaw Reid, of the ‘New York Tribune,’ I sent it to him, and it was published in that journal of April 6, 1874.”—F. W. Bird, Introductory to his pamphlet edition, Boston and New York, 1878.
The seal having been thus broken, there can obviously no longer be question as to the propriety of including an article of such high interest and importance in a collection of Mr. Sumner’s Works; and it accordingly here follows in due course.