For this he toiled
strenuously all his life long. It shines in every paragraph of that
memorable speech, and of the shorter one in defence of the New England
clergy made at midnight on that black Thursday of May, which closed the
bitter struggle and consummated the demolition of the old slave wall.

From that time Sumner's position became one of constantly increasing
peril. Insulted, denounced, menaced by mob violence, his life was every
day in jeopardy. But he did not flinch nor falter. Freedom was his master,
humanity his guide. He climbed the hazardous steps to duty, heedless of
the dangers in his way.

His collisions with the slave leaders and their northern allies grew
thenceforth more frequent and ever fiercer. Every motion of his to gain
the floor, he found anticipated and opposed by a tyrannous combination and
majority, bent on depriving him of his rights as a senator. Wherever he
turned he faced growing intolerance and malignity. It was only by
exercising the utmost vigilance and firmness that he was able to snatch
for himself and cause a hearing. Under these circumstances all the powers
of the man became braced, eager, alert, determined. It was many against
one, but that one was a host in himself, aroused as he then was, not only
by the grandeur of his cause, but also by a keen sense of personal
indignity and persecution. Whoever else did, he would not submit to
senatorial insult and bondage. His rising temper began to thrust like a
rapier. Scorn he matched with scorn, and pride he pitted against pride. As
a regiment bristles with bayonets, so bristled his speech with facts,
which thrust through and through with the merciless truth of history the
arrogance and pretentions of the South. His sarcasm was terrific. His
invective had the ferocity of a panther. He upon whom it sprang had his
quivering flesh torn away. It was not in human nature to suffer such
lacerations of the feelings and forgive and forget the author of them. The
slave leaders did not forgive Sumner, nor forget their scars.

Meanwhile the plot of the national tragedy fast thickened, for as the
Government at Washington had adopted the "Squatter Sovereignty" scheme of
Douglas in settling the territorial question, the two sections
precipitated their forces at once upon the debatable land. It was then for
the first time that the two antagonistic social systems of the union came
into physical collision. Showers of bullets and blood dashed from the