I know too well the
strength and depth of your antislavery principles, and have been too recently
assured of your anxiety to utter your full views touching the Fugitive law to
the Senate and the country, to attribute your delay in doing so to any other
reason than your belief that an expedient occasion has not yet arrived. Others,
however, who confound you with common politicians, attribute your silence to
the Southern atmosphere of the Capitol, and profess to believe either that your
opinions have become essentially modified, or that you are fearful of
encountering the intellectual power of the defenders of Compromise, and
incurring the odium and contempt with which the chivalry look down upon an
abolitionist. I need not tell you, my dear Sumner, how warmly and indignantly I
have repelled, and will continue to repel, all such insinuations against your
honor and your integrity, and how confidently I have told your defamers to wait
a little while for the promised speech that would silence their croakings, and awaken
the country anew with strains of eloquence like those uttered by you in Faneuil
Hall. Mr. Webster's awful treachery and shameless apostasy have so weakened the
confidence of the people in the power of individuals to hold fast to unpopular
truths that the meanness of such lesser traitors as Stanton and John Van Buren
has excited no surprise.
SOURCE: Edward L.
Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, Vol. 3, p. 288
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