Charles Sumner, who was to the Senate much what Stevens was to the House, although a larger and better-balanced man, was a typical Bostonian and inheritor of the New England conscience, which, of course, meant that he was opposed through and through to slavery.  He was a successful lawyer, and as his sentiments were well known, he was chosen to succeed Webster when the latter wavered on the anti-slavery question, and threw some pledges of assistance to the South.  There was never any doubt about Sumner’s position, no sign of wavering or coquetting with the enemy, and in 1856, he was assaulted by a southern senator and so severely injured that three years passed before he could resume his seat.

He did so in time to oppose any compromise with slavery or the slave power, which the threatening attitude of the South had almost scared the North into considering, and urged the immediate emancipation of the slaves.  When this had been accomplished, his first thought was to make sure that the slaves would remain free, and he began the contest for negro suffrage, as the only guarantee of negro freedom, which he finally won.  In the reconstruction period following the war, he was inevitably an ally of Thaddeus Stevens, though the latter far surpassed him in vindictiveness toward the South.

Let us not forget that the South had shown itself blind to its own interests when, as soon as reconstructed by Andrew Johnson, it had, state by state, adopted laws virtually enslaving the black man again.  But for this fatuity, there would probably have been no such feeling of vindictiveness at the North as soon developed there; certainly there would have been no excuse for such severity as was afterwards exhibited.  So it is true in a sense that the South has itself to blame for the horrors of the reconstruction period, and for the suspicion with which its good faith toward the negro was for many years regarded.  Sumner was not a vindictive man, and in his last years, incurred a vote of censure from his own State for offering a bill to remove the names of battles of the Civil War from the Army Register and from the regimental colors of the United States.  He practically died in harness in 1874.  Looking back at him, one sees how much larger he looms than Stevens; one cannot but admire his courage and honesty of purpose; his public life was a continual struggle for the right, as he saw it, and, remembering that, his faults need not trouble us.

When Sumner arrived in the Senate, he found William H. Seward, of New York, already there.  Seward, who had been admitted to the bar in 1822, at the age of twenty-one, was carried into the New York legislature by the anti-Masonic wave of 1830.  Eight years later, he was the Whig governor of the state, and in 1849 was sent to the Senate.  There he soon rivetted attention by his rebuke of Webster for condoning the Fugitive Slave Law, and caught the reins of party leadership as they fell from Webster’s hands.  It was then that he made his famous statement that the war against slavery was waged under a “higher law than the Constitution,” and that the fall of slavery was inevitable.