DELIVERED IN THE.ASSEMBLY CHAMBER OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
T~1W AXL(  IT     I I  L iW9  1 R 7 4L9
BY HON. CHARLES S. SPENCER,
OF TILE 13TM  ASSEIMBLY DISTRICT OF NEw  YORIc CITY.
THE ARGUS- COMPANY, PRINTERS.
1874.








F11*  g' Q on TharXs  utmucn.
"Art is long and time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still like muffled drums are beating,
Funeral marches to the grave."
CHARLES SUMNER, a ripe scholar, a profound
statesman, an honest, earnest defender in the
darkest hour, as well as at mid-day of freedom,
justice and right, has put on immortality.
At his post of duty he died. His last thoughts
were of the enfranchised race for which he had
labored so long and suffered so much.  "Take
care of my civil rights bill."
In his last moments true friends were with him.
No wife, no child stood by his pillow  as earth
faded from his sight, and soothed him with a
touch, cheered him with a word, or in affliction
wept; but he has gone to a better world than
this, deeply mourned by tens of thousands of his
own race, while hundreds of thousands of black
men and women, in whose lowly cabins his name
is a household word and upon whose hearts it is
written, are flooding the land with their tears.




4          (91doop Oil OUtar 1ftlltfr.
Cities are draped in black; the public grief
burdens the air; the sad paraphernalia of mourning clothes the nation. In sorrow and in honor
his body has been borne from  Washington to
Mount Auburn, and upon its coffin the broken
column, the cross, the anchor, the crown, the
tube rose, the calla lily with the violet resting
upon its white bosom, the immortelles have made
beautiful its passage to the grave.
It was the good fortune of CHARLES SUMNER to
spend his earlier years in the commonwealth of
Massachusetts, in that grand State whose record,
from  the time when  it was e colony to the
present day, is so proud and great. There he
enjoyed and fully improved the advantages of a
ripe education.  Years of foreign travel and intimate association with cultured men added rich
stores to his mind.  He returned to Boston and
entered upon the practice of the law, but he was
not destined to give his life work to struggle for
riches or fame in that profession.  The conflict
with and triumph over American slavery was to
be his opportunity and his glory. For weary years
all over the southern portion of the land, "How.
long, 0, Lord! how longS" had prayed the
beaten and bruised slaves, and, by the hands of
great, richly-endowed, strongly-armed servants like




SUMNER, God proposed to work out their salvation, after prayer, after struggle, after obloquy,
after violence, after war, at immense price of
suffering, disease and death. Providence provides
for every great crisis men equal to meet it.
SUMNER early saw clearly that slavery or the
nation must die. He signed his name to the roll
of an abolition society; he acted with the Freesoil party in 1848 and supported Van Buren and
Adams and the platform  of the Buffalo convention; he sustained the Wilmot proviso; he pronounced several public, powerful and able addresses
against slavery, and became known and honored
as an advocate of emancipation.
The seat of Daniel Webster in the Senate of the
United States was vacant. He had accepted office
in the cabinet of Fillmore. For many years idolized by Massachusetts, of a giant intellect, the
mighty defender of the Constitution had not, in
the later period of his service as Senator, fulfilled
the expectations of many sincere and devoted
friends.  In a prominent newspaper of New York
had appeared the advertisement:
"WANTED.-IDaniel Webster in the Senate of
the United States to fight for Freedom,"And the advertisement had not been answered.




6         (9tlogm oix TI5lt rIet tunutle.
To succeed the great expounder Massachusetts
chose CHARLES SUMNER, and he took his seat in
the Senate chamber to battle, almost alone, against
the infamy of the nation. Of a fine presence, with
a rich, sonorous voice, through ripe culture polished, with immense stores of knowledge and a
capacity to command them for use, of an elegant
elocution, of a wonderful command of language,
of a profound conviction and plainly evidencing
it, he was a champion fitted for the conflict in
which his part was to be so prominent and efficient.
The history of his senatorial career is well known
to the people of the civilized world. The hydra
of slavery writhed beneath his blows, as year after
year, fearless and earnest, lie delivered them. But
he was to suffer as well as to fight. On the 19th
and 20th of May, in the year 1856, in the debate
upon the admission of Kansas as a State, he made
against the slave power and the institution which
supported it an able, severe and exhaustive speech.
On the twenty-first of May, while sitting in his
seat in the Senate chamber, after the adjournment
of the Senate, and engaged in writing, Preston S.
Brooks, a member of the House of Representatives from South Carolina, made upon him with a,
heavy cane, a sudden, cowardly, dastardly attack,




Q1tt#yj om (!UatTes  tnnuezr.     7
felled him, unconscious and bleeding, to the floor,
and, while another South Carolina representative
named Keitt stood by, pistol in hand, to prevent
interference, beat him cruelly and brutally as he
lay. Every blow Brooks struck drove one more
nail into the coffin of slavery. This outrage made
more intense the indignation of freedom-loving people, and gave additional energy to the will and
strength to the arm of that party at whose organization in Faneuil Hall, in Boston, in November,
1855, CHARLES SUMNER had said: "We found
now a new party; its corner-stone is freedom; its
broad, all-sustaining arches are truth, justice and
humanity.  Like the ancient Roman capitol, at
once a temple and a citadel, it shall be the fit
shrine for the genius of American institutions."
From the consequences of this attack SUMNER
never recovered. He lived suffering, and suffering
died. Brooks, soon with sure and deadly step
Nemesis overtook. On the 27th of January, 1857,
eight months afterward, Preston S. Brooks died
in Washington, of laryngitis — choked to death,
and attempting in his dying moments to tear his
throat with his nails.
For a long time SUMNER was not able to resume
his place in the Senate.  His tortures were terrible. He submitted to most extraordinary and




8                   n(ftl   Xt vhJaro  lltrrne.
excruciatingly painful operations, but he had not
yet fully performed the office of his life. There
was work yet for him to do; and he was finally
permitted to return to his high duties.
The republican party triumphed. Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States.
Fort Sumter was fired upon.  The conflict with
slavery was transferred from the ballot-box and
legislative hall to the field of battle, and the voice
of the cannon spoke instead of that of the legislator.
Liberty won the fight.  Throughout the war of
the rebellion, CHARLES SUMNER sustained the government with pen, with voice, with untiring energy
and zeal; and when peace came, devoted his time,
his abilities and his best energies to the benefit of
an emancipated race. He labored to elevate them
to a higher plane, to lift them from darkness way
up into the brightest light, to make them equal
with all other men before the law, how faithfully,
how earnestly, how devotedly this generation well
knows and history, with eulogistic pen, will tell.
Hie has gone from among us!
Thou art gone to the grave and whole nations bemoan thee,
Thou art gone to the grave, but thy work shall not perish.
A friend when dead is but removed from sight;
Hid in the lustre of eternal light.




oilM 1t (!1dTarlto 0ISttn t.         (3
His deeds have been those which will
"Keep his name enrolled past his that shines,
In gilded marble or in brazen leaves."
His sun has set, but it has left "a  track of
glory  in  the skies."   Through  the ages to the
remotest generation, his memory will be loved and
respected by the better of mankind.  To-night, in
a world where there is no night, with John Brown
and Abraham Lincoln, with Kearney and Sedgwick, with Union soldiers stricken dead on the
battle fields, with untold thousands who have died
for the right, CHARLES  SUMNER, to  the sound of
an angel's trumpet, is falling into the long and
shadowy line of the vast army of martyrs above
the clouds.
He has his reward, for of him  it can be truly
said, his has been
"A life well spent, whose early care it was,
His riper years should not upbraid his green."