Samuel Gridley Howe to Horace Mann, Wednesday Evening, April 1851 – 10 p.m.

Wednesday Eve., April, 10 o'clock, 1851.

My Dear Mann: — I am sad and sick at heart at the probable issue to-morrow. You know I have never advocated nor consented to the coalition with the Democrats; I always condemned it as unwise and useless; I always thought that the Free-soil party might have carried the day in five years without coalescing with anybody; I go with Palfrey in his circular; and yet I have come to wish and pray that Sumner may be elected to the Senate, because no man now eligible here can so well represent the anti-slavery sentiment of the North as he.

It is useless for me to go into the causes of the defeat of the Free-soilers here. They have been mainly three, any one of which was enough. Want of skilful leaders; — bad faith on the part of Democrats; — and the prodigious outside pressure of the Union, as it were, upon the waverers. The first defeat was owing to the bungling mismanagement of Earle,¹ who allowed the election to be postponed; then the foolish trusting to Democrats by electing their Governor instead of laying him on the table — and so it has been. I do not believe that more than half the Democrats were honest; and there were some of them who even contemplated defeating Sumner, provided they could not seduce him to compromise himself by pledges. He has rather, I think, leaned over backward, in his attempt to stand erect and firm and be uncompromising. He uselessly froissait (as the French say) some of the Hunker² Democrats who waited upon him at the time when it seemed certain that he would be elected. All this is over now; the Senate has elected him, and to-morrow the House will, I forebode, reject him. Boutwell and the Speaker, and a few other leading Democrats, make a bluster, swear Sumner must and shall be put through, &c. &c. — but I mistrust them. There are all the old Hunkers at work like the devil. Old M——, the slimy snake, who has all along been crawling into Sumner's office and confidence, and telling him that he conferred with no one else on politics, — he has long been denouncing Sumner, and straining every nerve to defeat him. Cushing and Hallett et id genus omne are at work; and there has been brought to work in unison with them the governmental influence at Washington. What did B. R. C[urtis]³ go there for? his friends here said he was going south, perhaps to the West Indies, for his health. Tell that to the marines! We have little or no outside influence; Downer has done more than all the rest put together. There seems a spell on them. Bird has been for trust; Alley (a good man and true) seems utterly paralyzed and discouraged; Wilson can't do much, though he has more head than the rest at the House; Keyes has been firing and fizzing, but can't keep up at red heat long; Phillips has been much miffed; Adams and Palfrey, anti-coalitionists, will not work — and so it goes. The end of the whole matter will be that Sumner will gradually fall behind — the thing will be put off and put off — and nothing done at all. The Democrats will satisfy their consciences by seeming to try for what they know they cannot do.

I think all our friends who have taken office should resign as soon as it is certain Sumner cannot be elected. How to re-unite our broken ranks I know not. We must be honest; eschew coalitions, and get a reputation by living well in future.

Ever yours,

S. G. H.

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¹ John Milton Earle of Worcester.

²The "Hunkers" were conservative Democrats, generally supposed to have a leaning toward slavery; the same class as the “Copperheads” of the Civil War.

³ Benjamin R. Curtis.

SOURCE: Laura E. Richards, Editor, Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe, Volume 2, p. 343-5