Powerful voices in literature and the Press were heard upon the same side—­the New York Tribune, edited by Horace Greeley, acquired, as far as a paper in so large a country can, a national importance.  Broadly it may be said that the stirring intellect of America old and young was with the Republicans—­it is a pleasant trifle to note that Longfellow gave up a visit to Europe to vote for Fremont as President, and we know the views of Motley and of Lowell and of Darwin’s fellow labourer Asa Gray.  But fashion and that better and quite different influence, the tone of opinion prevailing in the pleasantest society, inclined always to the Southern view of every question, and these influences were nowhere more felt than among Washington politicians.  A strong and respectable group of Southern Senators, of whom Jefferson Davis was the strongest, were the real driving power of the administration.  Convivial President Pierce and doting President Buchanan after him were complaisant to their least scrupulous suggestions in a degree hardly credible of honourable men who were not themselves Southerners.

One famous incident of life in Congress must be told to explain the temper of the times.  In 1856, during one of the many debates that arose out of Kansas, Sumner recited in the Senate a speech conscientiously calculated to sting the slave-owning Senators to madness.  Sumner was a man with brains and with courage and rectitude beyond praise, set off by a powerful and noble frame, but he lacked every minor quality of greatness.  He would not call his opponent in debate a skunk, but he would expend great verbal ingenuity in coupling his name with repeated references to that animal’s attributes.  On this occasion he used to the full both the finer and the most exquisitely tasteless qualities of his eloquence.  This sort of thing passed the censorship of many excellent Northern men who would lament Lincoln’s lack of refinement; and though from first to last the serious provocation in their disputes lay in the set policy of the Southern leaders, it ought to be realised that they, men who for the most part were quite kind to their slaves and had long ago argued themselves out of any compunction about slavery, were often exposed to intense verbal provocation.  Nevertheless, what followed on Sumner’s speech is terribly significant of the depravation of Southern honour.

Congressman Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, had an uncle in the Senate; South Carolina, and this Senator in particular, had been specially favoured with self-righteous insolence in Sumner’s speech.  A day or so later the Senate had just risen and Sumner sat writing at his desk in the Senate chamber in a position in which he could not quickly rise.  Brooks walked in, burning with piety towards his State and his uncle, and in the presence, it seems, of Southern Senators who could have stopped him, beat Sumner on the head with a stick with all his might.  Sumner was