Charles Sumner to John Bigelow, of the New York Evening Post, May 22, 1850

Only a week ago, in overhauling old pamphlets, a part of my patrimony, I found the actual memorial to Congress¹ reported by the committee of which Mr. Webster was chairman, and I determined to send it to you, on reading your article this morning. I have also examined the files of Boston papers at the Athenæum, and enclose a memorandum from them which may be interesting. The memorial is reputed to be the work of Mr. Webster. The close is marked by his clear and cogent statement. Why it was not preserved in the collection of his “Opera,” which was first published ten or fifteen years later, I know not. Perhaps he had already seen that he might be obliged, in the pursuit of his ambition, to tread some steps backward, and did not wish to have a document like this, accessible to all, in perpetual memory of his early professions. If you follow him up on this point, read in this connection the latter part of his Plymouth address, the earliest of his orations in the published volume. At this time he seemed to have high purposes. I wonder that the noble passage about the Ordinance, in his first speech in the Hayne controversy, has not been used against his present tergiversation. There is another document which might be used effectively against him, the address of the Massachusetts Anti-Texas State convention in January, 1845, the first half of which was actually composed by Mr. Webster, partly written and partly dictated. In this he takes the strongest ground against the constitutionality of the resolutions of annexation. Then followed his speech, Dec. 22, 1845, in the Senate, against the admission of Texas with a slaveholding constitution. If the faith of the country was pledged, as he now says it was, by these resolutions when they were accepted by Texas, he was obliged, according to his present argument about the four States, to vote for her admission with or without slavery; but his vote stands nay. But it would be a long work to expose his shiftless course,— “everything by starts, and nothing long.” Mr. Leavitt, of the “Independent,” talks of taking him in hand, and exposing the double-dealings of his life. I wish he might do it through the “Post.” When you have done with the pamphlet, please return it. Of the committee who reported it were George Blake, now dead, who was a leading Republican; Josiah Quincy, Federalist, late President of Harvard College; James T. Austin, Republican, late Attorney-General of Massachusetts; and John Gallison, a lawyer, who died soon after, but of whom there are most grateful traditions in the profession, admired particularly the article on Webster, written shortly after the speech. It must have been done by Mr. Dix.² Aut Erasmus aut Diabolus. I cannot forbear expressing the sincere delight with which I read your paper. Its politics have such a temper from literature that they fascinate as well as convince.

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¹ of the citizens of Boston in 1819 in favor of the prohibition of slavery in territories and new States. Sumner's letter was the basis of a leader by Mr. Bigelow in the New York "Evening Post," May 23, 1850.

² John A. Dix. Sumner was probably at fault in this conjecture.

SOURCE: Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, Vol. 3, p. 215-6

Diary of to Amos A. Lawrence: April 27, 1861

The President and exPresidents of Harvard College met at Whipple's by my request, to be photographed together for the college library. Messrs. Quincy, Everett, Sparks, Walker, and Felton. We waited for Mr. Everett, who had forgotten his appointment, and had a great deal of talk. Mr. Quincy was very bright and earnest. He told me he had enjoyed his life since he was seventy-four more than any previous part of it. He is now about ninety.

SOURCE: William Lawrence, Life of Amos A. Lawrence: With Extracts from His Diary and Correspondence, p. 161

Diary of to Amos A. Lawrence: July 19, 1860

Inauguration of president at Cambridge. Heavy rain in morning. Went to Cambridge in the saddle; got to Boston from there at half past nine, wet through. Home at two and changed dress, then to Cambridge again. Went up in the pulpit where Mr. Felton was delivering his address with great earnestness. The Governor and all the dignitaries of church and state, including ex-Presidents Everett, Quincy, and Sparks. Mr. Quincy is quite feeble. I spoke to him afterwards and asked him if he was going to dinner with us, and he said “No,” he was too feeble. I fear the old gentleman has taken part for the last time in the celebration of his Alma Mater.

After the exercises in the church, we had the grand dinner in Harvard Hall; Henry Lee with his twenty marshals managing everything. I sat at the official table, next to Dr. Walton, the oldest graduate after Mr. Quincy; he is nearly ninety years old. Governor Banks spoke exceedingly well; so did Rev. Dr. Osgood. After satisfying my appetite, I went down and sat with my class.

SOURCE: William Lawrence, Life of Amos A. Lawrence: With Extracts from His Diary and Correspondence, p. 154-5

Diary of Amos A. Lawrence: November 3, 1856

The newspapers advertise Mr. Sumner's reception to take place to-day: that he will be received by a committee at my house, thence taken to Boston, where he will be received at the Roxbury line by the Mayor and city authorities and a cavalcade of citizens, and an address to be made to him by Josiah Quincy, Sen. (eighty-six years old), thence to the state house, where he will be welcomed by the Governor.

I went to Boston as usual. Came out at one. Found Mr. Sumner here, with Mr. Longfellow, Rev. Dr. Huntington, Dr. Perry, his physician, and his brother George.

He lunched, conversed with a reporter for the press, and gave him his speech in manuscript, after which I sent the reporter to town. He appears well when sitting, but is feeble when standing. I gave him a parlor to himself, and shut him up to avoid fatigue and enable him to prepare his speeches. He was here an hour and a half. I gave him some wine before starting, then delivered him over to the committee, who were in barouches. They had reserved a seat for me by the side of Mr. Sumner, but I declined to go. I thought the committee were disappointed, and also at seeing a Fillmore flag flying at the side of my house. But they had told me the reception was to be without distinction of party, and I took them on their own ground. After dinner I drove to town with Sarah and the children. Saw the procession from Mr. Appleton's. A long cavalcade, music, then carriages with Mr. Sumner and his friends.

SOURCE: William Lawrence, Life of Amos A. Lawrence: With Extracts from His Diary and Correspondence, p. 142-3

Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Louisa Storrow Higginson, 1857

Dearest Mother:

I thought, when waiting for admission to President Quincy's study, that there was really nobody living, except the veteran Humboldt, before whom I should feel so much awe, as in the presence of this ancient Doge. But when finally admitted, the impression of old college times was so strong that I felt an immediate expectation of an English oration or a little good advice. The latter came in the form of his views on Disunion, which he had evidently thought over pretty thoroughly, and stated with the utmost heartiness and even vehemence. He spoke just as he used to do, with occasional pauses for a word, though not often; and with singular vigor and emphasis.

He expressed no sort of fear of Disunion; he was “perfectly willing to look over into this dark chasm which yawns in the midst of the Republic”; and as for fear of saying what he thought, “old age had made him courageous” (an unusual effect of old age, I thought). . . . He thinks that the Union may be dissolved; but that this is more likely to occur from the mere size and weight of our future nation, than from the hostilities arising from slavery, though, he says, this last “would no doubt be by far the most glorious cause of a separation.” He said some very weighty things about the general position and character of the nation, the necessity of discussing first principles, and the wrong done by any distrust of agitation. “Our fathers built our nest upon the waves, and we must not shudder at its rocking motion”; and then he quoted Fisher Ames, that our nation was not a “ship of state,” but a raft; safer, indeed, but one's feet were always in the water.

. . . He described his position very quietly, without egotism; said he felt no sensation of old age, except sometimes in walking; could work in his study from 9 A.M. to 9 P.M. without fatigue. “I am a miracle to myself,” he said. Then he told me of the memoir of J. Q. Adams on which he is now engaged and which will be out in a few weeks. “Then,” said he, with a sort of roguish pause, “I am going to school” I smiled interrogatively, and his face lit up with a perfectly boyish smile of triumph. “Yes,” said he, “to school — all existence is a school, and I hope to keep on learning here, till I pass to a higher one.” I said, to draw him out, that after this I supposed he had no new literary plans. “Ah, I won't say that!” he quickly answered with the same gleeful smile, and afterwards quietly said that he had “one or two “ projects of that kind, which would require a great deal of preliminary preparation and on that he was about to enter! Thus tranquilly does this man of eighty-six plan his life from month to month.

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 88-90

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. to John L. Motley, March 8, 1862

Boston, March 8, 1862.

My Dear Motley: I have been debating with myself whether to wait for further news from Nashville, the Burnside expedition, Savannah, or somewhere, before writing you, and came to the conclusion that I will begin this February 24, and keep my letter along a few days, adding whatever may turn up, with a reflection thereupon. Your last letter, as I told you, was of great interest in itself, and for the extracts it contained from the letters of your correspondents. I lent it to your father and your brother Edward, and a few days ago to William Amory, at his particular request. Calling on old Mr. Quincy two days ago, we talked of you. He desired me most expressly and repeatedly to send his regards and respects. I think I am pretty near the words, but they were very cordial and distinguishing ones, certainly. He takes the greatest interest in your prosperity and fame, and you know that the greatest of men have not many nonagenarian admirers. It is nine weeks, I think, since Mr. Quincy fell and fractured the neck of the thigh-bone, and he has been on his back ever since. But he is cheerful, ready to live or die; considers his later years as an appendix to the opus of his life, that he has had more than he bargained for when he accepted life.

As you might suppose it would be at ninety, though he greatly rejoices at our extraordinary successes of late, he does not think we are “out of the woods,” as he has it, yet. A defeat, he thinks, would take down our spirits as rapidly as they were raised. “But I am an old man,” he says, “and, to be sure, an old man cannot help seeing the uncertainties and difficulties which the excitable public overlooks in its exaltation.”

Never was such ecstasy, such delirium of excitement, as last Monday, a week ago to-day, when we got the news from Fort Donelson. Why, — to give you an instance from my own experience, — when I, a grave college professor, went into my lecture-room, the class, which had first got the news a little before, began clapping and clapping louder and louder, then cheering, until I had to give in myself, and flourishing my wand in the air, joined with the boys in their rousing hurrahs, after which I went on with my lecture as usual. The almost universal feeling is that the rebellion is knocked on the head; that it may kick hard, even rise and stagger a few paces, but that its os frontis is beaten in.

The last new thing is the President's message, looking to gradual compensated emancipation. I don't know how it will be received here, but the effect will be good abroad. John Stuart Mill's article in “Fraser” has delighted people here more than anything for a good while. I suppose his readers to be the best class of Englishmen.

Yours always,

O. W. H.

SOURCE: George William Curtis, editor, The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley in Two Volumes, Library Edition, Volume 2, p. 246-8

Charles Eliot Norton to James Russell Lowell July 7, 1864

ASHFIELD, July 7,1864.

My Dearest James, — We are having such a pleasant quiet time that I wish you were with us. The house we are in is a good old-fashioned farmhouse, with a stretch of outhouses and barns such as one likes to see. There are no modern conveniences,  — unless a bell for the front door be considered so, — and we fall inevitably into primitive ways of life. . . .

The little village itself where we are has an air of rural comfort and pleasantness that is really delightful. It is embosomed in the hills, not crowded upon by them, but seeming to have a sweet natural sufficient shelter from them. We are within a stone's throw of the tavern, of the meeting houses, the three shops, and the post-office, — and on the other side we are as near two hills between which the road runs, and from either of which there is a wide and beautiful view.  . . . Yesterday we took a drive over hills, through hemlock and beech woods, over an upland moor, through Bear Swamp, and “Little Switzerland,” that we all agreed we must take again when you are with us. I am sure this country will delight you. To my taste it is far more attractive, and more beautiful, than the scenery in the parts of the Berkshires that I know. Many of the views remind me of scenes among the English lakes, on a smaller scale. Joined with the picturesqueness of nature, there is a charm from the evident comfort of the people. Wherever you see a habitation you see what looks like a good home. There are but three town poor, and they are very old. There is but one Irish family, they say, in the township. The little village of Tin Pot, two miles away, does, however, look as if its name were characteristic. There is a good deal of loafing and drinking there, but the loafers and drunkards are not permitted by public opinion to come up here. The line is one of positive separation between the two villages.

The air has a fine bracing quality, — 1300 feet above the sea. To-day we have a little rain. I lounge and invite my soul. The newspapers come regularly but late. We seem out of the world. Still we were glad last night at the news of the destruction of the Alabama, and not sorry for the mode of Semmes's escape. He would have been an unpleasant prisoner on our hands. We could not properly have hung him as a pirate, and to leave him unhung would not have suited our vindictive commercial classes.

I find it hard to be patient in these days, — it would be much easier were you here, but now I have no one to talk over affairs with.

I wish Mr. Quincy¹ could have lived happily a year or two longer to carry the news of the suppression of the rebellion and the extinction of slavery to the other world, so as to be able to remind Hamilton of their conversation the year before his death and convert him to trust in the people, and to confidence in the permanence of the Constitution. But now that public honours will be paid to the memory of Mr. Quincy, cannot we get the sum raised for the Statue? About $4000 is needed. $5000 would be better to cover expenses.

What a kind old man he was! ... A judicious person might make a brief memoir of him that should be full of interest, — but save us from these big Parker 8vos, these elegant Prescott 4tos.²

The July “North American” seems to me good but too heavy. How can we make it lighter? People will write on the heavy subjects; and all our authors are destitute of humour. Nobody but you knows how to say weighty things lightly; nobody but you has the art of light writing. And have you written to Motley? If not please do so before replying to this note. We really need to get him on to our staff of contributors. . . .

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¹ Josiah Quincy, president of Harvard when Norton was in college, died July 1, 1864, in his ninety-third year.

² Weiss's Theodore Parker and Ticknor's Prescott each appeared in 1864

SOURCE: Sara Norton and  M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, Volume 1, p. 269-72

John L. Motley to Josiah Quincy III, Nov. 23, 1859

WALTON ON THAMES (england), Nov. 23,1859.

MY DEAR SIR: — Very long after the date, — 29 January, 1859, — which you were so kind as to write, together with your honored name, in the blank leaf of the copy of your admirable life of John Quincy Adams, did the volume reach me. It has been in my possession, indeed, but a very few weeks; but I have already read it through carefully once, besides studying many passages of it many times.

I thank you most sincerely for your goodness in presenting me with the book. To have known and venerated its author from my earliest youth, I shall always consider one of the great privileges of my life. I esteem myself still more fortunate in being able to find sympathy with my own political views, and with my own convictions as to the tendency and aspects of the American commonwealth, in one of so large and elevated a mind, and so wide an experience, as yourself. This is an epoch in which, both in Europe and America, the despotic principle seems to be uppermost, in spite of all the struggles of the oppressed to free themselves. . . . .

At home, the battle between the Slave Power in alliance with the Mob Power, and the party which believes in the possibility of a free republic, governed by the laws of reason, and pursuing a path of progress and civilization, is soon I hope to be fought out, without any compromise. The party of despotism is, I trust, at the next Presidential election, to be fairly matched against the party of freedom, and one or the other must go down in the conflict.

I ought to apologize for making this digression from the topic of my letter; but knowing your sentiments on the great subject of liberty, it was impossible for me to say less; nor was it easy, in thinking of John Quincy Adams, the very breath of whose existence was the love of freedom, not to speak of the great object of his pure and illustrious career. I was much struck with a brief analysis which you give, on pages 374, 375, of his view of our government. ‘The Constitution neither of the United States nor of Massachusetts can, without a gross and fraudulent perversion of language, be termed a Democracy. They form a mixed government, compounded not only of the three elements of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, but with a fourth added element, confederacy. The Democrats are now the most devoted and most obsequious champions of executive power, — the very life-guard of the commander of the armies and navies of this Union. The name of Democracy was assumed because it was discovered to be very taking among the multitude; yet, after all, it is but the investment of the multitude with absolute power.’ . . . .

It seems to me that human liberty, and its result, human civilization, have not been in so great danger as now for many years. Men have grown so familiar with the ugly face of despotism, both in Europe and America, that they really begin to love it. It is for this reason that — especially at this epoch — your life of Mr. Adams is most welcome. I wish it could be made a text-book in every public school and college in the Free States of America. It is a statue of gold raised by most worthy hands to him who most deserved such an honor.

Allow me to say, that, from a literary point of view, your work seems to me remarkably artistic and satisfactory. The portraiture of the just man, with his solid, unshaken mind, tenacious of his noble purpose in the midst of the “civium prava jubentium,” is a very finished one.

I never had the honor of his personal acquaintance, but I have always felt — without being thoroughly aware of my reasons — that he was among the small band of intellectual, accomplished, virtuous, and patriotic statesmen, not only of our country, but of all countries.

There are always plenty of politicians in the world, but few statesmen; and there are sometimes eloquent patriots who are sadly deficient in culture, and others still more lamentably wanting in still more important endowments. But here was a scholar, — a ripe and rare one; a statesman trained in the school of Washington; a man familiar with foreign courts and laws and tongues; a life-long student, ever feasting on the nectared sweets of divine philosophy, and yet a busy, practical, and most sagacious administrator of political affairs; a ready debater; an impetuous and irresistible orator; and a man so perfect in his integrity that it was as impossible for him to be intimidated, as to be cajoled or bribed. The wonder is, not that such a man should have lost his re-election to the Presidency, but that he ever should by any combination have arrived at it at all.

But this is not a pleasant reflection. Would that he were to be the candidate of the Republicans in 1860. It would almost be a triumph to be defeated under such an indomitable chief.

“Et cuncta terrarum subucta

Prӕter atrocem animum Catonis.”

I must once more thank you most warmly for the noble portrait you have given us of the patriot, philosopher, and statesman; and for yourself pray accept my sincerest wishes for your health and happiness.

Believe me, my dear sir, most respectfully and truly yours,

J. Lothrop Motley.

SOURCE: Edmund Quincy, Life of Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts, p. 523-5