the unjust. There were, though he was unwilling to admit
it, and was perhaps unaware of it, vindictive feelings, venom, and
revenge in his resolutions and in his whole treatment of the States and
the white people of the South. From the time that he had been stricken
down by the bludgeon of Brooks in the Senate, Mr. Sumner waged
unrelenting war on the whites in the Southern States, and seemed to
suppose it was his special mission--he certainly made it the great
object of his life--to elevate the negro race--to give them at least
equal rights and privileges with the educated and refined class--and did
not conceal his intention and expectation to bring them in as
auxiliaries to the Republican party, and thereby give it permanent
ascendancy. All this was done in the name of humanity, and with apparent
self-convinced sincerity. He was unwilling to acknowledge that he was
governed or influenced by personal resentments in his revolutionary
plans to degrade the intelligent white and exalt the ignorant black
population by tearing down the constitutional edifice. In frequent
interviews which I held with him then and at later periods, when he
found it impossible to hold his positions under the Constitution, he
claimed that he occupied higher ground, and that his authority for these
violent measures was the Declaration of Independence, which declared all
men were born equal, etc. Mr. Sumner was an idealist--neither a
constitutionalist nor a practical statesman. He could pull down, but he
could not construct--could declare what he considered humane, right, and
proper, and act upon it regardless of constitutional compromises or
conventional regulations which were the framework of the Government. No
man connected with the Administration, or in either branch of Congress,
was more thoroughly acquainted with our treaties, so familiar with the
traditions of the Government, or better informed on international law
than Charles Sumner; but on almost all other Governmental questions he
was impulsive and unreliable, and when his feelings were enlisted,
imperious, dogmatical, and often unjust.

Why innocent persons who were loyal to the Government and the Union
should be disfranchised and proscribed because their neighbors and
fellow citizens had engaged in a conspiracy, he could not explain or
defend. By what authority whole communities and States should be
deprived of the local governments which their fathers had framed, under
which they were