No Title.New York, Tribune [Republican](24 May 1856)
The assault on Senator Sumner reverberates
through the land, causing throughout the Free
States the intensest excitement and indignation.
Other men have been as causelessly assailed, and
as wantonly, if not as savagely, beaten; but the
knocking-down and beating to bloody blindness and
unconsciousness of an American Senator while
writing at his desk in the Senate Chamber is a
novel illustration of the ferocious Southern spirit.
It carries home to myriads of understandings a
more vivid, if not a wholly original perception, of
the degradation in which the Free States have
consented for years to exist. The degradation was
as real years ago, but never before so palpable as
now. When a citizen of a Northern State so
thoroughly subservient to the Slave Power as
Edward Everett could be opposed in the Senate
and well nigh rejected as Minister to England,
because he had once, under the pressure of a strong
local feeling, avowed, as a candidate for Congress,
some abstract opposition to Slavery, it was high
time for the North to unite in declaring that this
sort of inquisition must be stopped -- that, so long
as devotion to Slavery was not made a barrier to
Executive station, devotion to Freedom should not
be. But the North has always lacked manly
self-assertion, especially in the Senate, where a
majority of her seminal representatives voted, only a
few weeks since, to kick out the petition of Free
Kansas for admission, on some paltry pretext of
informality, and surrender her citizens to the
unchecked brutalities and inflamed indignation of the
Border Ruffians.
The beating of private citizens or the butchery
of Irish waiters by the Southern Oligarchy, have
made no impression on the public mind at all
comparable in breadth or vividness with that which
has been and will be produced by the assault of
which Mr. Sumner has been the victim. Widely
known in both hemispheres as among the first of
American scholars and orators, his career as a
Senator has conferred renown even on the glorious
commonwealth of which he is the foremost
representative. Elected as the champion of no interest,
no clique, no party, but simply of the great idea of
Impartial Freedom, he has been eminently faithful
to his high calling. Nobody could infer from his
votes or speeches that he was ever, in the party
sense, a Whig or a Democrat; but no one can
doubt that he is an earnest and fearless contemner
of Slavery. But four years in public life, he has
already done much to redeem the term Abolitionist
from the unmerited odium which an age of baseness,
self-seeking and infidelity to Revolutionary
tradition and Republican principle has contrived to
cast upon it. He has elevated the range and
widened the scope of Senatorial debate, summoning
Poetry and Literature to the elucidation of
the gravest and dryest political propositions,
while by careful preparation and a finished oratory
he has attracted thousands to hear and to consider
elemental truths with the enunciation of which
the corrupt and servile atmosphere of the Federal
metropolis has been agitated far too seldom. There
is no man now living who within the last five years
has rendered the American People greater service
or won for himself a nobler fame than Charles
Sumner.
It is high time that this People should take a
stand not only against the immediate perpetrators
of ruffian assaults but against their confederates
and apologists in public life and in the Press. As
long as words sincerely spoken can be pleaded as
an apology for blows, we shall be regarded by
impartial observers as barbarians -- and justly so
regarded. So long as our truly civilized and refined
communities succumb to the rule of the barbarian
elements in our political system, we must be judged
by the character and conduct of our accepted masters.
The youth trained to knock down his human
chattels for "insolence" -- that is, for any sort of
resistance to his good pleasure -- will thereafter
knock down and beat other human beings who
thwart his wishes -- no matter whether they be
Irish waiters or New England Senators. Once admit
the idea of the predominance of brute force --
of the right of individual appeal from words to
blows -- and human society becomes a state of war,
diversified by interludes of fitful and hollow truce.
And they who, as legislators, editors, public
speakers, or in whatever capacity, suggest apologies for
ruffian assaults, or intimate that words can excuse
them, make themselves partners in the crime and
the infamy.
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