Charles Sumner to Lord Morpeth, May 21, 1850

The same steamer that takes this note will carry our friend Prescott to see and enjoy English life. In long gossips together, recently, we have talked much of you, on whose friendship he counts. Our politics are full of vile. The question of opposing the extension of slavery into territories now free should have united all the North, and I would say the South, too. But one politician after another has given way to slaveholding urgency, until at last Daniel Webster gave way. His intellect is mighty, but “unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.” His excuse for waiving a prohibition of slavery in the new territories is that by a law of “physical geography,” of “the formation of the earth,” slavery cannot go there, thus arguing blindly from physical premises to moral conclusions. In his recent course he shows the same obliquity, amounting to incapacity for moral distinctions, which led him to tell me, two or three years ago, that on deliberately reviewing his correspondence with Lord Ashburton, among all those documents he was best satisfied with the Creole letter.¹ I wanted to tell him, “That letter, dying, you will wish to blot.”

_______________

¹ Ante, vol. ii. pp. 193, 194, 205.

SOURCE: Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, Vol. 3, p. 214-5