C. Edwards Lester, Life and public services of Charles Sumner: Born Jan. 6, 1811. Died March 11, 1874.

[564] President and Secretary of State. All this was trivial enough; but numerous appeals to me, from opposite parts of the country, show that good people have been diverted by these allegations from the question of principle involved. Without intending in any way to revive the heats of that debate, I am induced to make a plain statement of facts, so that the precise character of those relations shall be known. I do this with unspeakable reluctance, but in the discharge of a public duty where the claims of patriotism are above even those of self-defence. The Senate and the country have an interest in knowing the truth of this matter, and so also has the Republican party, which cannot be indifferent to pretensions in its name; nor will anything but the completest frankness be proper for the occasion.

In overcoming this reluctance I am aided by Senators who are determined to make me speak. The Senator from Wisconsin (Mr. Howe), who appears as prosecuting officer, after alleging these personal relations as the gravamen of accusation against me—making the issue pointedly on this floor, and actually challenging reply—not content with the opportunity of this Chamber, hurried to the public press, where he repeated the accusation, and now circulates it, as I am told, under his frank, crediting it in formal terms to the liberal paper in which it appeared, but without allusion to the editorial refutation which accompanied it. On still another occasion, appearing still as prosecuting officer, the same Senator volunteered out of his own invention to denounce me as leaving the Republican party; and this he did, with infinite personality of language and manner, in the very face of my speech—to which he was replying—where, in positive words, I declare that I speak ‘for the sake of the Republican party,’ which I hope to save from responsibility for wrongful acts, and then, in other words, making the whole assumption of the Senator an impossibility, I announce, that in speaking for the Republican party it is ‘because from the beginning I have been the faithful servant of that party, and aspire to see it strong and triumphant.’ In the face of this declared aspiration, in harmony with my whole life, the Senator delivered his attack, and, assuming to be nothing less than Pope, launched against me his bull of excommunication. Then, again playing Pope, he took back his thunder, with the apology that others thought so; and this alleged understanding of others, he did not hesitate to set above my positive and contemporaneous language, that I aspired to see the Republican party strong and triumphant. Then came the Senator from Ohio (Mr.