osition to slavery. Garrison, Phillips, Frederick
Douglass and Theodore D. Weld appealed against slavery to a common
humanity, to the primary moral instincts of mankind in condemnation of its
villanies. The appeal carried them above and beyond constitutions and
codes to the unwritten and eternal right. Sumner appealed against it to
the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence, to the spirit
and letter of the Constitution, to the sentiments and hopes of the
fathers, and to the early history and policy of the Country which they
had founded. All were for freedom and against slavery. The reverse of all
this, he contended, was error. Public opinion was error-bound, the North
was error-bound, so was the South, parties and politicians were
error-bound. Freedom is the heritage of the nation. Slavery had robbed it
of its birthright. Slavery must be dispossessed, its extension must be
resisted.

As it was in the beginning so it hath ever been, the world needs light.
The great want of the times was light. So Sumner believed. This speech of
his was but a repetition in a world of wrong of the fiat: "Let there be
light." With it light did indeed break on the national darkness, such
light as a thunderbolt flashes, shrivelling and shivering the deep-rooted
and ramified lie of the century. That speech struck a new note and a new
hour on the slavery agitation in America. Never before in the Government
had freedom touched so high a level. Heretofore the slave power had been
arrogant and exacting. A keen observer might have then foreseen that
freedom would also some day become exacting and aggressive. For its
advancing billows had broken in the resounding periods and passion of its
eloquent champion.

The manner of the orator on this occasion, a manner which marked all of
his utterances, was that of a man who defers to no one, prefers no one to
himself--the imperious manner of a man, conscious of the possession of
great powers and of ability to use them. Such a man the crisis demanded.
God made one American statesman without moral joints when he made Charles
Sumner. He could not bend the supple hinges of the knee to the slave
power, for he had none to bend. He must needs stand erect, inflexible,
uncompromising, an image of Puritan intolerance and Puritan grandeur.
Against his granite-like character and convictions the insolence of the
South flung itself in vain.

Orator and oration revealed as in a magic mirror some things