Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 10.djvu/87

 LAMAR

ON SUMNER AND THE SOUTH ^

(1874)

Born in 1825, died in 1893 ; elected to Congress from Mississippi in 1857;

served in the Confederacy in the Civil War; elected to Congress in

J873; a United States Senator, 1877-85; Secretary of the Interior

in 1885; Justice of the Supreme Court in 1888.

It was certainly a gracious act on the part of Charles Sumner toward the South, tho un- happily it jarred on the sensibilities of the peo- ple at the other extreme of the Union, to pro- pose to erase from the banners of the national army the mementoes of the bloody internal struggle which might be regarded as assailing the pride or wounding the sensibilities of the Southern people. The proposal will never be forgotten by that people so long as the name of Charles Sumner lives in the memory of man.

But while it touched the heart and elicited her profound gratitude, her people would not have asked of the North such an act of self- renunciation. Conscious that they themselves were animated by devotion to constitutional lib- erty, and that the brightest pages of history are replete with evidences of the depth and sincerity of that devotion, they can but cherish the recol-

> From a speech in the House of Representatives on April 28, 1874— soon after the death of Sumner.

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