Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and letters of Charles Sumner: volume 3

[415] of an address on ‘The necessity, practicability, and dignity of the Antislavery enterprise, with glances at the special duties of the North.’¹ This address concluded, March 29, the antislavery course² in Tremont Temple, which he had been, on account of a cold, prevented from opening in the previous November. The public interest in the address was so keen that he repeated it in the same hall the next evening. Afterwards he delivered it during the same and the next month in several towns and cities of Massachusetts and New York.³ At Auburn he was the guest of Mr. Seward, who introduced him to the audience with generous praise.⁴ Such was the interest in the address and in the orator which prevailed in New York city that under the pressure of the public demand he gave it in the Metropolitan Theatre, May 9, and repeated it in Niblo's Theatre and in Brooklyn. He had not spoken before in the metropolis, and the halls where he spoke were crowded with enthusiastic audiences. He was introduced on the different evenings by William Jay, Henry Ward Beecher, and Joseph Blunt. An invitation to speak in Philadelphia was pressed on him, but he declined it. Similar invitations came during the summer from most of the free States. The address was warmly praised in the newspapers, and it was printed in full in the New York Tribune and the ‘National Era.’ As Sumner came, later on, to care chiefly for the effect of his popular addresses as they were read by the public, he never after appeared to so much advantage on the platform as in the delivery of this address. It treated the antislavery movement largely and comprehensively in its moral and political aspects, laying emphasis on the practical duties which it imposed, and answering the objections and sophistries urged against it.⁵ In passages it is