Volume 9 — THE PROCLAMATION OF EMANCIPATION: ITS POLICY AND NECESSITY AS A WAR MEASURE FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF THE REBELLION. (continued 2)

Horace Greeley, in an article under his own name in the New York Independent, and entitled, “Charles Sumner as a Statesman,” united with the Republicans of Massachusetts.

“For the first time in our political history, a party has been organized and a State ticket nominated for the sole purpose of defeating the reëlection of one who is not a State officer, and never aspired to be. Governor Andrew is regarded with a hostility intensified by the fewness of those who feel it; but the bitterness with which Mr. Sumner is hated insists on the gratification of a canvass, even though a hopeless one; and, since there was no existing party by which this could be attempted without manifest futility, one was organized for the purpose. And it was best that this should be. Let us have a census of the friends and the enemies of Mr. Sumner in the State which he has so honored.

“I have said, that, while other Senators have shared his convictions, none has seemed so emphatically, so eminently, as he to embody and represent the growing, deepening Antislavery sentiment of the country. None has seemed so invariably to realize that a public wrong is a public danger, that injustice to the humblest and weakest is peril to the well-being of all. Others have seemed to regard the recent developments of disunion and treason with surprise and alarm: he has esteemed them the bitter, but natural, fruit of the deadly tree we have so long been watering and cherishing. The profound, yet simple truth, that ‘Righteousness exalteth a nation,’—that nothing else is so baleful as injustice,—that the country which gains a large accession of territory or of wealth at the cost of violating the least tittle of the canons of eternal rectitude has therein made a ruinous mistake,—that nothing else can be so important or so profitable as stern uprightness: such is the key-note of his lofty and beneficent career. May it be vouchsafed him to announce from his seat in the Senate the final overthrow of the demon he has so faithfully, so nobly resisted, and that from Greenland to Panama, from the St. John to the Pacific, the sun in his daily course looks down on no master and no slave!”

A single incident will illustrate the interest excited throughout the Commonwealth. A venerable citizen of New Bedford, seventy-nine years of age and very feeble, was assisted to the polls, saying, “Here goes a dying vote for Charles Sumner!”

The triumphant result of the election was known at once. It was declared officially on the meeting of the Legislature.

January 15, 1863, at twelve o’clock, each branch of the Legislature proceeded, by special assignment, to vote for a Senator to represent Massachusetts for six years from March 4th next ensuing. The vote in each branch was vivâ voce, the roll bring called and each member pronouncing the name of the candidate he voted for.

In the Senate, the vote was,—

Charles Sumner, of Boston33

Josiah G. Abbott, of Boston5

Charles Francis Adams, of Quincy1

In the House of Representatives, the vote was,—

Charles Sumner194

Josiah G. Abbott38

Caleb Gushing2

Charles Francis Adams1

In the House there were slight manifestations of applause when the result was announced, but they were promptly checked by the Speaker.

The result was noticed by the press throughout the country. The venerable National Intelligencer, at Washington, which had been opposed to the principles and policies of Mr. Sumner, employed the following generous terms.

“This is the third time that this gentleman has been thus honored by the Legislature of Massachusetts. Such repeated tokens of confidence would seem sufficiently to indicate, that, whatever dissent from the views of Mr. Sumner may elsewhere exist, he is the favorite, as he is admitted by all to be the able, representative of the opinions entertained by a majority of the people of this great and influential State. And these views now predominate in the conduct of the present Administration, which may be said to have adopted, reluctantly and at a late day, the political and military policy early commended to its favor by Mr. Sumner.

“If we are not able to concur with Mr. Sumner in certain of his opinions on questions of domestic politics, it gives us only the greater pleasure to bear our cheerful and candid testimony to the enlightened judgment and peculiar qualifications he brings to the discharge of the important duties devolved on him as Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations in the Senate. In this capacity he has deservedly won the confidence of the whole country.”

Such testimony from a political opponent attested the change that had occurred in public policy and private feeling.

The Tribune exhibited the change in yet stronger light.

“By a vote of nearly six to one, Massachusetts again declares her confidence in her long-tried Senator, and, on an issue defined with unmistakable clearness, for the third time returns him to his seat.

“The contrast between his present position and that which he held on first entering the Senate is instructive. Then an arrogant Democratic majority with unequalled effrontery declared him outside of any healthy political organization, excluded him from the Committees, denied him parliamentary courtesies, and withheld the common civilities of social intercourse and acquaintance. There were hardly three or four Senators in Congress who were in any degree identified with his opinions. He declared them none the less boldly, and his speeches for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act, on the Nebraska Bill, and on the Crime against Kansas finally exasperated the slaveholding oligarchy into personal violence, and for words spoken in orderly debate he was brutally assaulted on the floor of the Senate and seriously injured. This outrage, and the enthusiastic approval with which it was received throughout the South, were largely instrumental in rousing the North to a right estimate of the system and the political power which sought such means of defence.”

The Liberator, by the pen of its faithful and able editor, William Lloyd Garrison, gave expression to the sentiments of those most enlisted against Slavery.

“Thus has Massachusetts nobly vindicated her name and fame as the foremost State of all the world in the cause of free institutions, and trampled beneath her feet the malignant aspersions cast upon the political reputation of her gifted Senator by the minions of a traitorous Slave Oligarchy. The vote is an overwhelming one, notwithstanding the desperate efforts of Mr. Sumner’s enemies to make his defeat a sure event. Such enemies only serve to prove his personal worth and public usefulness, and their factious and profligate character.

“Mr. Sumner’s friends in Washington proposed, last week, to give him a serenade in honor of his reëlection to the Senate; but, hearing of their intention, he declared that the compliment was not in accordance with the present condition of public affairs, and intimated that he preferred that the funds subscribed for the music should be donated to the Massachusetts Soldiers’ Relief Association, which was done.”

In Mr. Sumner’s reëlection the cause of Emancipation triumphed, and Massachusetts was fixed irrevocably on that side.