He was, in his time, I think, the ablest representative,
certainly among the ablest, of the opinions opposed to mine.
He had a delightful and original literary quality which, if
the lines of his life had been cast amid other scenes than
the tempest of a great Revolution and Civil War, might have
made him a dreamer like Montaigne; and a chivalrous quality
that might have made him a companion of Athos and D'Artagnan.
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. It was
a good omen for the country. At the moment he uttered it,
I suppose Charles Sumner was hated throughout the South with
an intensity which in this day of reconciliation it is almost
impossible to conceive. Yet Mr. Lamar in his place in the
House of Representatives dared to utter these sentences:
"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.
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