Elias Nason, The Life and Times of Charles Sumner: His Boyhood, Education and Public Career.

[185] and irresistible. Am I not right, then, in calling this bill the best on which Congress ever acted?

Sorrowfully I bend before the wrong you are about to enact: joyfully I welcome all the promises of the future.

Such was the intense excitement of the country at this time, that these bold utterances, which expressed the sober sentiment of the people of the North, threw Mr. Sumner into great personal danger. This was heightened by a tragical event which then occurred in Boston. On the day preceding this midnight speech, Anthony Burns was arrested as a fugitive slave, and held a prisoner in the Court-House. Many of the citizens were fired with indignation; and on the evening of the 26th instant, after an excited meeting in Faneuil Hall, an attack was made upon the Court-House, during which James Batchelder, acting as a guard, was killed. This resistance to the iniquitous Fugitive-Slave Law was attributed to the late speech of Mr. Sumner, in which he had said, “In passing this bill, as is now threatened, you scatter from this dark midnight-hour no seeds of harmony and good-will, but broadcast through the land dragons' teeth, which haply may not spring up in direful crops of armed men; but yet I am assured, sir, will they fructify in civil strife and feud.”

“He is a murderer!” said the organs of the administration. “Down with this fanatical abolitionist!”