Rantoul proved him to be an accomplished orator. His speech on the Public Land Question evinced him besides strong in history, argument and law.

No vehemence of anti-slavery pressure, no shock of angry criticism coming from home was able to jostle him out of his fixed purpose to speak only when he was ready. Winter had gone, and spring, and still his silence remained. Summer too was almost gone before he determined to begin. Then like an August storm he burst on the Senate and the Country. “Freedom national: slavery sectional” was his theme. Like all of Mr. Sumner’s speeches, this speech was carefully written out and largely memorized. He was deficient in the qualities of the great debater, was not able usually and easily to think quickly and effectively on his feet, to give and take hard blows within the short range of extemporaneous and hand to hand encounters. Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams were pre-eminent in this species of parliamentary combat. Webster and Calhoun were powerful opponents whom it was dangerous to meet. Sumner perhaps never experienced that electric sympathy and marvellous interplay of emotion and intelligence between himself and an audience which made Wendell Phillips the unrivalled monarch of the anti-slavery platform. Sumner’s was the eloquence of industry rather than the eloquence of inspiration. What he did gave an impression of size, of length, breadth, thoroughness. He required space and he required time. These granted, he was tremendous, in many respects the most tremendous orator of the Senate and of his times.

He was tremendous on this occasion. His subject furnished the keynote and the keystone of his opposition to slavery. Garrison, Phillips, Frederick Douglass and Theodore D. Weld appealed against slavery to a common humanity, to the primary moral instincts of mankind in condemnation of its villanies. The appeal carried them above and beyond constitutions and codes to the unwritten and eternal right. Sumner appealed against it to the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence, to the spirit and letter of the Constitution, to the sentiments and hopes of the fathers, and to the early history and policy of the Country which they had founded. All were for freedom and against slavery. The reverse of all this, he contended, was error. Public opinion was error-bound, the North was error-bound, so was the South, parties and politicians were error-bound. Freedom is the heritage of the nation. Slavery had robbed it of its birthright. Slavery must be dispossessed, its extension must be resisted.

As it was in the beginning so it hath ever been, the world needs light. The great want of the times was light. So Sumner believed. This speech of his was but a repetition in a world of wrong of the fiat: “Let there be light.” With it light did indeed break on the national darkness, such light as a thunderbolt flashes, shrivelling and shivering the deep-rooted and ramified lie of the century. That speech struck a new note and a new hour on the slavery agitation in America. Never before in the Government had freedom touched so high a level. Heretofore the slave power had been arrogant and exacting. A keen observer might have then foreseen that freedom would also some day become exacting and aggressive. For its advancing billows had broken in the resounding periods and passion of its eloquent champion.

The manner of the orator on this occasion, a manner which marked all of his utterances, was that of a man who defers to no one, prefers no one to himself—the imperious manner of a man, conscious of the possession of great powers and of ability to use them. Such a man the crisis demanded. God made one American statesman without moral joints when he made Charles Sumner. He could not bend the supple hinges of the knee to the slave power, for he had none to bend. He must needs stand erect, inflexible, uncompromising, an image of Puritan