George F. Hoar

He appealed eloquently to the circumstances which should stir the heart of the whole people to a new and loftier love of country.

Daniel declared the cheering and hopeful truth that great races are made of a mixture of races, and that the best and bravest blood of the world's great races is mixed in the American.

That remarkable address was full of wise counsel to his countrymen.

But he retains no bitterness or hate or desire for revenge by reason of the conflict of the Civil War.

But I have been led to form a great respect for his intellectual qualities, and for his sincere and far- sighted patriotism.

He is like some old cavalier who supported the Stuarts, who lived down into the days of the House of Hanover, but still toasted the King over the water.

I think those prejudices would long ago have melted away in the sunshine of our day of returning good feeling and affection, but for the fact that his chivalrous nature will not permit him to abandon a cause or an opinion to which he has…

Vest is a brave, sincere, spirited and straightforward man.

On some few occasions he has made speeches, always speaking without notes, and I suppose without previous preparation so far as expression and style go, which have very deeply moved the Senate, though made up of men who have been…

No list of the remarkable Senators of my time would be complete which did not contain the name of Senator Vest of Missouri.

But the fact that he came to that conclusion is enough to make me feel sure that there were strong reasons for it, which might well convince the clearest understanding, and be reconciled with the most conscientious desire to do right.

He never flinched from uttering and maintaining his opinions.

He never seemed to me to be thinking of either party or section or popular opinion, or of the opinion of other men; but only of public duty.

It was, I have been told, considered a breach of propriety to allude to party divisions in early debates in the Senate, as it would be now deemed a breach of propriety to allude to such divisions in the Supreme Court of the United States.

I have hardly known a nature better fitted, morally or intellectually, for great public trusts, either judicial or political, than his.

But he also discountenanced and condemned any lawless violence or fraud.

It is a good omen for our country that the friends and disciples of Charles Sumner unite with the people of Mississippi in their reverence for this noble and manly character.

I regret exceedingly that I could not be in my place to express my sense of the great public loss and my warm personal admiration for his great qualities of intellect and of heart.

Lamar so touched the hearts of the people of the North that they may fairly be said to have been of themselves an important influence in mitigating the estrangements of a generation.

Thus were combined in him the characteristics which have in all ages given to religion her martyrs, and to patriotism her self-sacrificing heroes.

And along with the all-controlling love of freedom he possessed a moral sensibility keenly intense and vivid, a conscientiousness which would never permit him to swerve by the breadth of a hair from what he pictured to himself as the path…

To him it was a grand intuitive truth, inscribed in blazing letters upon the tablet of his inner consciousness, to deny which would have been for him to deny that he himself existed.

In him, in fact, this creed seems to have been something more than a doctrine imbibed from teachers, or a result of education.

Charles Sumner was born with an instinctive love of freedom, and was educated from his earliest infancy to the belief that freedom is the natural and indefeasible right of every intelligent being having the outward form of man.

His eulogy on Calhoun, with whom in general he sympathized, was a masterpiece of eloquence, but his eulogy on Charles Sumner, which probably no other man in the South could have uttered without political death, was greater still.