In the long life of our departed friend it was his brightest and most glorious moment,--beyond anything of honor or power, whether in the cabinet or on the bench.

For what is office, compared to the priceless opportunity, nobly employed, of standing as a buttress for human rights?

The President might exercise a temporary military power, but Congress must lay the foundations of permanent peace.

Let all, from President to citizen, heed its words.

In the first case it was to save an outraged people; in the other it was to vindicate the powers of the people of the United States in Congress assembled to provide guaranties and safeguards against the wickedness and perjury which had…

He is dead, but the good he has done cannot die.

And hereafter faithful Senators, struggling with executive power, will catch a new inspiration from his example.

We have a message from the President which is like the whitewashing message of Franklin Pierce with regard to the enormities in Kansas.

In my judgment the Senate cannot listen to anything of more consequence than this accurate, authentic, most authoritative report with regard to the actual condition of things in the States lately in rebellion.

PRESIDENT,--I have nothing to retract, nothing to modify, nothing to qualify.

In former days there was one Kansas suffering under illegal power; there are now eleven Kansases suffering as that one; therefore, as eleven is more than one, so is the enormity of the present time more than the enormity in the day of…

The only question, then, was on the character of the document just read; and that I exhibited, compendiously, as whitewashing; and then my honorable friends rise, one after the other, and, like two lexicographers, proceed with a definition…

Never, in public or in private, have I made any such reflection, and I do not begin now.

The marked effect of this incident shows the sensitive condition of the public mind.

The word “whitewashing” became a text for the press on opposite sides.

Glorious! just the truth, and just the time and place to speak it, was your graphic and most effective description of the President’s message.

Before I can begin my sermon, I want to send you my thanks for your noble stand in the Senate of the United States against the President and for the country.

Last Sabbath, in the great congregation, I publicly thanked God that you used the word ‘whitewashing.’ The same thing I did in Albany; the same thing I do now.

Thank God, we have one man on the watch-tower who will not slumber or sleep.

I do not know any man who is doing so much for the country, in the present crisis, as you are by your speeches and writings.

Permit me, as one of your constituents, to thank you for the noble stand you have taken in regard to Reconstruction, which I regard of quite as much importance as was the persistent prosecution of the war just brought to a successful…

We hope the whitewashing is over, and that common sense, to say nothing of justice, will resume the sway.

You are bearing yourself so bravely and faithfully in behalf of a cause very dear to me, that it is the impulse of my heart to thank and bless you.

To yourself and Thaddeus Stevens the nation is now looking as the defenders of Truth and Justice.

Thanks for your just rebuke of the President’s ‘whitewashing’ message.