yourself to be so dazzled by his quickness as to forget that the routed point is not, after all, the one in question, you suppose all is over with it.  Moreover, he contrives to mingle up so many stinging allusions to so many piquant personalities that by the time he has done his mystification a dozen others are ready and burning to spring on their feet to repel some direct or indirect attack, all equally wide of the point."[562]

Douglas paid dearly for some of these personal shots.  He had never forgiven Sumner for his share in “the Appeal of the Independent Democrats.”  He lost no opportunity to attribute unworthy motives to this man, whose radical views on slavery he never could comprehend.  More than once he insinuated that the Senator from Massachusetts and other Black Republicans were fabricating testimony relating to Kansas for political purposes.  When Sumner, many weeks later, rose to address the Senate on “the Crime against Kansas,” he labored under the double weight of personal wrongs and the wrongs of a people.  The veteran Cass pronounced his speech “the most un-American and unpatriotic that ever grated on the ears of the members of this high body."[563] Even Sumner’s friends listened to him with surprise and regret.  Of Douglas he had this to say: 

“As the Senator from South Carolina is the Don Quixote, the Senator from Illinois is the squire of slavery, its very Sancho Panza, ready to do all its humiliating offices.  This Senator in his labored address, vindicating his labored report—­piling one mass of elaborate error upon another mass—­constrained himself, as you will remember, to unfamiliar decencies of speech....  I will not stop to repel the imputations which he cast upon myself....  Standing on this floor, the Senator issued his rescript, requiring submission to the Usurped Power of Kansas; and this was accompanied by a manner—­all his own—­such as befits the tyrannical threat....  He is bold.  He shrinks from nothing.  Like Danton, he may cry, ’l’audace! l’audace! tonjours l’audace!’ but even his audacity cannot compass this work.  The Senator copies the British officer, who, with boastful swagger, said that with the hilt of his sword he would cram the ‘stamps’ down the throats of the American people, and he will meet a similar failure."[564]

The retort of Douglas was not calculated to turn away wrath.  He called attention to the fact that these gross insults were not uttered in the heat of indignation, but “conned over, written with cool, deliberate malignity, repeated from night to night in order to catch the appropriate grace.”  He ridiculed the excessive self-esteem of Sumner in words that moved the Senate to laughter; and then completed his vindictive assault by charging Sumner with perfidy.  Had he not sworn to obey the Constitution, and then, forsooth, refused to support the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave law?[565]