LETTER TO MRS. STOWE.

"DEAR MRS. STOWE:

211

For your very appreciative and congratulatory letter on the "marvellous work of the Lord," which the Liberator marks as finished, I proffer you my heartfelt thanks, and join with you in a song of thanksgiving to Him, who, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm has set free the captive millions in our land.

"The instrumentalities which the God of the oppressed has used for the overthrow of the slave system, have been as multifarious and extraordinary as that system has been brutal and iniquitous. Every thing that has been done, whether to break the yoke or to rivet it more strongly, has been needed to bring about the great result. The very madness of the South has worked as effectively anti-slavery-wise as the most strenuous efforts of the abolitionists.

"The outlawry of all Northern men of known hostility to slavery-the numberless pro-slavery mobs and lynchings, her defiant and awful defence of the traffic in human flesh, her increasing rigor and cruelties towards the slaves, and finally her horrible treason and rebellion to secure her independence as a vast slaveholding empire, through all time, all mightily helped to defeat her impious purpose and to hasten the year of jubilee. Thus it is that

God moves in a mysterious way,

His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.

And who but God is to be glorified?

CHAPTER IV.

CHARLES SUMNER.

Mr. Sumner an Instance of Free State High Culture-The "Brahmin Caste" of New England-The Sumner Ancestry; a Kentish Family-Governor Increase Sumner; His Revolutionary Patriotism-His Stately Presence; "a Governor that can Walk"-Charles Sumner's Father-Mr. Sumner's Education, Legal and Literary Studies-Tendency to Ideal Perfection-Sumner and the Whigs -Abolitionism Social Death-Sumner's Opposition to the Mexican War-His Peace Principles-Sumner opposes Slavery Within the Constitution, as Garrison Outside of it-Anti-Slavery and the Whigs-The Political Abolitionist Platform-Webster asked in vain to Oppose Slavery-Sumner's Rebuke of Winthrop Joins the Free Soil Party-Succeeds Webster in the Senate-Great Speech against the Fugitive Slave Law-The Constitution a Charter of Liberty-Slavery not in the Constitution-First Speech after the Brooks AssaultConsistency as to Reconstruction.

In the example of Abraham Lincoln we have shown the working-man, self-educated, rising to greatness and station, under influences purely American. It is our pride to say that in no other country of the world could a man of the working classes have had a career like that of Lincoln.

We choose now another name made famous by the great struggle for principle and right which has ended in our recent war. As Lincoln is a specimen of the facilities, means of self-education and advance in life which America gives to the working man, so Charles Sumner is a specimen of that finish, breadth, and extent of culture which could be produced by the best blood and the best educational institutions of the oldest among the free States of America.

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THE SUMNER ANCESTRY.

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We may speak properly of the blood of the Sumner family, for they belong to what Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes so happily characterizes as the "Brahmin caste of New England," that "harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy," in whom elevated notions of life, and aptitudes for learning, seem, in his own words, to be "hereditary and congenital." "Families whose names are always on college catalogues; and who break out every generation or two in some learned labor which calls them up after they seem to have died out." A glance at the Cambridge catalogue will show a long line of Sumners, from 1723 down to the graduation of our present Senator.

Like many other American families distinguished for energy and intellectual vigor, the Sumner family can trace back their lineage to the hardy physical stock of the English yeomanry. The race, afterwards emigrating to Oxfordshire, had its first origin in Kent, and it is curious to see how to this day it preserves physical traits of its origin. The Kentish men were tall, strong, long-limbed, and hardy, much relied on for archery and holding generally the front of the battle. The Sumners in America have been marked men in these same physical points; men of commanding stature and fine vital temperament, strong, athletic, and with the steady cheerfulness of good health and good digestion.

One of the early ancestors of this family, who lived in Roxbury, is thus characterized in the Antiquarian Register: "Never was there a man better calculated for the sturdy labors of a yeoman. He was of colossal size and equal strength of muscle, which was kept in