In "The Crime against Kansas" there are two or three sentences which
Sumner afterwards expunged, and this shows that he regretted having said
them; but it is the greatest of his orations, and Webster's reply to
Hayne is the only Congressional address with which it can be compared.
One is in fact the sequence of the other; Webster's is the flower, and
Sumner's the fruit; the former directed against the active principle of
sedition, and the latter against its consequences; and both were directed
against South Carolina, where the war originated. Sumner's speech has not
the finely sculptured character of Webster's, but its architectural
structure is grand and impressive. His Baconian division of the various
excuses that were made for the Kansas outrages into "the apology
_tyrannical_, the apology _imbecile_, the apology _absurd_, and the apology
_infamous_," was original and pertinent.
Preston S. Brooks only lived about six months after his assault on
Sumner, and some of the abolitionists thought he died of a guilty
conscience. Both in feature and expression he bore a decided likeness to
J. Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Lincoln. It might have proved
the death of Sumner, but for the devotion of his Boston physician, Dr.
Marshall S.
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