.

His eulogy on Calhoun, with whom in general he sympathized,
was a masterpiece of eloquence, but his eulogy on Charles
Sumner, which probably no other man in the South could have
uttered without political death, was greater still. It was
a good omen for the country. At the moment he uttered it,
I suppose Charles Sumner was hated throughout the South with
an intensity which in this day of reconciliation it is almost
impossible to conceive. Yet Mr. Lamar in his place in the
House of Representatives dared to utter these sentences:

"Charles Sumner was born with an instinctive love of freedom,
and was educated from his earliest infancy to the belief that
freedom is the natural and indefeasible right of every intelligent
being having the outward form of man. In him, in fact, this
creed seems to have been something more than a doctrine imbibed
from teachers, or a result of education. To him it was a
grand intuitive truth, inscribed in blazing letters upon the
tablet of his inner consciousness, to deny which would have
been for him to deny that he himself existed. And along with
the all-controlling love of freedom he possessed a moral sensibility
keenly intense and vivid, a conscientiousness which would
never permit him to swerve by the breadth of a hair from what
he pictured to himself as the path of duty. Thus were combined
in him the characteristics which have in all ages given to
religion her martyrs, and to patriotism her self-sacrificing
heroes."

After speaking of the kindness of Mr. Sumner to the South,
and his spirit of magnanimity, he added:

"It was my misfortune, perhaps my fault, personally never
to have known this eminent philanthropist and statesman.
The impulse was often strong upon me to go to him and offer
him my hand, and my heart with it, and to express to him my
thanks for his kind and considerate course toward the people
with whom I am identified. If I did not yield to that impulse,
it was because the thought occurred that other days were coming
in which such a demonstration might be more opportune and less
liable to misconstruction. Suddenly and without premonition,
a day as come at last to which, for such a purpose, there
is no to-morrow. My regret is therefore intensified by the
thought that I failed to speak of him out of the fulness of
my heart while there was yet time."

That Mr. Lamar well understood what was to be the effect
of this wonderful speech upon the whole country is