Note 100 — Chapter XIX

This was the second time that Sumner had shunted the nation in the direction he desired it to go; the first time was when he filibustered the Louisiana Bill to death at the end of the Thirty-ninth Congress. Edward L. Pierce, his biographer and eulogist, writing in the early nineties, says rather dubiously: "For weal or woe, whether it was well or not for the black race and the country, it is to Sumner's credit or discredit as a statesman that suffrage, irrespective of race or color, became fixed and universal in the American system." (Memoir and Letters, i, 228.)