Read Ebook: Senatorial Character A Sermon in West Church Boston Sunday 15th of March After the Decease of Charles Sumner. by Bartol C A Cyrus Augustus

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From those early debates to which I listened, on prison discipline, thirty years ago, to his latest speech on the Centennial Exhibition, this candor, amounting to generosity and magnanimity, was plain as the sun.

He had no tricks, no management, no intrigue. He showed his hand.

Could he not prevail by openness and sincerity, he would not prevail at all.

If he started no new ideas or measures that have been adopted precisely in the way he conceived, or shape he gave, he mightily sustained all good ones, and of their goodness he would not abate a tithe.

Of this rectitude benignity was the crown. Sternly exposing what he thought mean or unworthy in any proceeding or adversary, his severity was in his argument and rhetoric rather than in the feeling of his soul. Without a sweet disposition no man could have had such a smile. Without some grandeur of design no man ever displayed such a countenance and port, handsome and sublime. In his intentness and earnestness, he did not suspect the liability of his expressions to the charge of a vindictiveness he was unconscious of in his own breast. It was like a philippic of Demosthenes; it was a Ciceronian oration against some Catiline, real or supposed. A poetic sort of revenge was all he meant to take, although his language to opponents, whom perhaps he sometimes mistook, may be subject to blame. Pity he was so devoid of humor to recommend or soften his strokes!

His old peace doctrine, doubtless, mainly prompted his battle-flag resolution, while the time of offering it and his nearly contemporaneous break with his party seemed to betray an unfair and personal bias of which he was unaware.

Sensible of his great and long importance to the government, an egoistic, assuming, imperious, irascible inclination may to some have appeared to be disclosed; but he ingenuously felt he had a title to be consulted and that it was a slight and insult to set him aside. Let the administration that refused him as an instrument beware lest it become a hammer in the hands of inferior men, whose success will be suicide, and itself the tool! This may an inspiration from his coffin prevent! Massachusetts has honored herself at least as much as she did her son, and cast from yonder halls one ray of comfort on his seat in the Senate and on his death-bed in rescinding the censure on his course; for his memory is among her trophies,--no banner more so that hangs beneath the cupola above the marble floor,--and she is the inheritor of his renown; for if "Providence made Washington childless that the country might call him father," Sumner is without offspring that the State may be his mourner.

This freedom from all selfish heat or hate, one distinction of the statesman from the politician, is a trait too rare to pass without emphasis and applause.

An example, indeed, to the ordinary run of village contrivers, caucus packers, and municipal aspirants, of a man who never pulled a wire, rolled a log, laid a pipe, listened in a lobby, whispered in the ear what might not be proclaimed on the house-top, held a man by the button, or blew any trumpet but of the public good, however in his magnificent self-respect he might be falsely accused of wishing to blow only his own!

If a jealous personal honor ever had apology or excuse, it was how ample and entire in the case of a man--the only one in our annals--appointed to wear the shining crown of martyrdom before his translation, to get up out of his own blood and recover from the foul assassin's bludgeon after medical tortures of the surgeon's moxa in combustion on his disabled spine, such as Sequard says he never applied to any other living creature.

So he rose to bear the same unflinching testimony, no more groaning under the fire of reproach than of the burning cotton; and if proud of his position, with perfect consistency modest too.

I did not and at this distance of cooling time do not approve all the phraseology he employed on that senatorial occasion; but his weapons were words, and, however rough and affronting, for the right: those of his foes, equally gross and injurious, were for the wrong; and the assault of brutal force came to disturb the equation, in violation of all parliamentary privilege, with Douglas and his piratical compeers, with ill-disguised pleasure and half-pretended unconcern, looking on their own ignominy, crime, and shame, while the martyr that all but, yet not quite, expired, after years of suffering comes back, a resurrection witness not disposed of, and the assailant and would-be executioner dies long first, in Northern and Southern disgrace and his own remorse.

At the same height with Milton in his blindness, Sumner, with his torn and aching nerves, like a soldier who will not leave the field for loss of blood, resumed the conflict, struggling with disappointment and sorrow in age and loneliness, still moving ever immediately against all the powers of evil and works of the devil, his white plume, like that of the French Prince he quoted, floating ever ahead to follow; like ex-President, Representative Adams, in his armor to the very edge and last of earth, like Buckle, talking in his agony of his book, and commending to survivors in Congress his beloved Civil Rights' Bill, dealing out well-directed blows for his race of every color and tribe till the instant the final stroke came to cut body and spirit apart. Truly, the halo of angelic glory hangs not only around the heads of dead saints! Such a man might be tempted to claim the honor of his fellow-men, and a lofty self-esteem and aspiration to the highest dignities hardly misbecame him, who, like Cato, was wrapped in conscious integrity, and established in the respect of all praiseworthy persons such a place. After the famous eulogy in his Phi Beta Kappa oration, of Pickering, Story, Allston, and Channing, the toast of John Quincy Adams was: "The memory of the scholar, jurist, artist, and divine,--and not the memory, but the long life of the kindred genius that has embalmed them all." Yet it has come for him also to a memory, and a noble one now.

As a humble cotemporary I copy not others' impressions, but simply set down my own. Among his associates, the fault commonly found with Sumner is not that he was implacable--none easier to propitiate--but impracticable; not an idealist, but ideologist and doctrinary dreamer of a peace and freedom on earth which he put into no effective and satisfactory form; for ten thousand besides him recommended the Emancipation, which John Quincy Adams held justifiable as a war measure, and Lincoln proclaimed.

For his noble affections, how we shall remember the solitary and little-related man, with no children, when he was sad, to play with in his house! His thirst for knowledge, his bent to investigate and study whatever had been said and done in the world, would have made him an antiquarian save for his patriotic and humanitarian zeal.

What a lover and knower he was of pictures, bronzes, manuscripts, old books, curious relics of the past, all memorials in all time of his fellow-men! Such research is a sort of humanity. Yet no man's sympathies were more in the present than his, or more eager to stretch after a perfected civilization in the future.

Indeed, the millennial day shone so upon him through the vista of hope as to dazzle and blind him, like Saul on the road to Damascus, to the immediate possibilities of action and direct bearings of his theme.

If there were any defect in his style, it was a certain lack of proportion, or an exceeding uniform stress, a straining forward against the leash of irrefragable circumstance, till in the ardor of pursuit the perspective of the subject was lost.

But whatever might be the lesser vices, the great virtues were in his judgment and thought.

Already he saw in faith the career for which he turned aside from every flattering offer that would divert him, conscious of superior ability to serve at the highest posts to which Democrat joined hands with Free Soiler to lead. Strange that the seemingly accidental, shall I say insincere, vote of a coalition should have furnished the most distinguished and perhaps longest continued Senator of the land!

His empty chair on the Senate floor, drew, last week, at the obsequies, the spectators' eyes.

If the shadow of no demise ever brooded over this region as a huge pall, a black sheet let down from the sky, like that of the great New-Englander; and if no public sorrow in our day and generation was ever keener than when the martyr-president gave up the ghost at the revengeful stroke of the monster of political slavery, expiring, like a leviathan, under his hand; never was a more genuine tribute than will be laid on the Senator's tomb, or a completer satisfaction in an ended testimony and finished work, whatever part he left for us to finish. Several years ago, forced by illness away from the theatre of public duties and affairs into a country refuge, as the sounds came softened by distance from the arena at the capitol where the combatants struggled together, however pleasantly fell the counsels of moderation and prudence on my ear, I recognized the clarion of Sumner, urging to absolute truth and honor, and, far or near, resounding above them all.

Here was a man that could not bend or yield, alloy or qualify, surrender or retreat. Here was an incorruptibility proof against bribes, and too original in legislatives halls, an originality, if not of suggestion yet of heroic act. Here was an obstinacy not of will, but idea; for ideas are more obstinate than any human will in the world. Here was a necessity not of whim but duty, such as was laid on the great apostle to the Gentiles to preach the Gospel, and drove Luther to the Diet of Worms. I aim at simple truth as I speak. Such stubbornness will surely accomplish great results and always fetch an echo from the human breast. I abstain from overstatement. Love must not falsify or exaggerate. It is no compliment to exalt another by belying ourselves. Our friend belongs to history now; and the offerings of a discriminating respect are part of its material. I must think of him less as hewn by the Divinity than carving himself. Like one of the straws a swallow bears to build its nest, let my poor word go to the fashioning by many hands, of the niche of his fame. His head had its limits; but there was no outside to his heart! The great man's servant, secretary, keeper of his house, farmer of his estate, has something valuable to say of him; and the humblest coeval's contribution will not be refused or despised. Voicing the feeling of no party, for him or against, I but touch the ground of that secret respect to his character and aim which not only favorers but foes are constrained, unitedly, unanimously, instinctively, to pay.

"Little heeds he what is said; They have done with all below;"

Such were the commonplaces of the old theology founded on the notion of a senseless rest of the dead, or their departure to an infinite distance from our earthly abode. But we reconsider such views. He, who was so sensitive to his fellow-citizens' regard, can hardly be insensible now, or unconscious of our sincere honor. I would speak as in his presence and to his ear! His clear voice will be no longer heard in our assemblies, or his commanding form cast its welcome shadow through our streets.

But the moral stature, with which, as in mental height, he transcended the common sons of men, shall be seen and felt.

If his forensic efforts had been to a nice taste better in some respects, the improvement might have made them in others for general effect worse or of less effect. They were at least faithfully prepared from a width of observation and stock of information seldom equalled, and set forth with a consecutive order of formal logic worthy of a master in the schools.

Twice has been his conspicuous entry into this town: first, after he was outraged for his freedom of utterance in his place; next, yesterday, in whatever connection the spirit may have with the forsaken robe which it cannot desert or lose all feeling for at once.

How, but as a man of principle, shall he stand for-ever in our memory and in the human mind? Let his name, like that of Washington, be a lasting rebuke to venality, selfish ambition, bribery, and all political intrigue! He is one more added to the band of blessed bigots which, wiser than any conformists, all our pilgrim fathers were.

"You can rest soon," he said to the familiar friend and companion in clerkly labor who was rubbing the hands fast growing cold in death. No chafing can restore what turns to the clay of which it was made. The flowers you form into his name will fade, but to cherish his honor we will never cease. Let his body be "buried in peace: his name liveth evermore."

FOOTNOTES:

"Will chloroform make the operation less beneficial?" he asked. "I could not lie," said the Doctor, "and said, Yes."--"Then I will not take it," he replied.

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