from the beginning a sincere and active sympathy for me.  Some complaints were made against him in some anti-slavery papers, because he did not present to the senate some petitions in my behalf, which had been forwarded to his care.  But Mr. Sumner was of opinion, and I entirely agreed with him, that if the object was to obtain my discharge from prison, that object was to be accomplished, not by agitating the matter in the senate, but by private appeals to the equity and the conscience of the President; nor did he think, nor I either, that my interests ought to be sacrificed for the opportunity to make an anti-slavery speech.  There is reason in everything; and I thought, and he thought too, that I had been made enough of a martyr of already.

The case having been brought to the notice of the President, he, being no longer a candidate for reelection, could not fail to recognize the claim of Sayres and myself to a discharge.  We had already been kept in jail upwards of four years, for an offence which the laws had intended to punish by a trifling pecuniary fine Nor was this all.  The earlier part of our confinement had been exceedingly rigorous, and it had only been by the untiring efforts of our friends, and at a great expense to them, that we had been saved from falling victims to the conspiracy, between the District Attorney and Judge Crawford, to send us to the penitentiary.  Although my able and indefatigable counsel, Mr. Mann, whose arduous labors and efforts in my behalf I shall never forget, and still less his friendly counsels and kind personal attentions, had received nothing, except, I believe, the partial reimbursement of his travelling expenses, and although there was much other service gratuitously rendered in our cases, yet it had been necessary to pay pretty roundly for the services of Mr. Carlisle; and, altogether, the expenditures which had been incurred to shield us from the effects of the conspiracy above mentioned far exceeded any amount of fine which might have been reasonably imposed under the indictments upon which we had been found guilty.  Was not the enormous sum which Judge Crawford sentenced us to pay a gross violation of the provision in the constitution of the United States against excessive fines?  Any fine utterly beyond a man’s ability to pay, and which operates to keep him a prisoner for life, must be excessive, or else that word has no meaning.

But, though our case was a strong one, there still remained a serious obstacle in the way, in the idea that, because half the fines was to go to the owners of the slaves, the President could not remit that half.  Here was a point upon which Mr. Sumner was able to assist us much more effectually than by making speeches in the senate.  It was a point, too, involved in a good deal of difficulty; for there were some English cases which denied the power of pardon under such circumstances.  Mr. Sumner found, however, by a laborious examination of the American cases, that a different view had been taken in this country; and he drew up and submitted to the President an elaborate legal opinion, in which the right of the executive to pardon us was very clearly made out.