Record Data
Transcription
Mr. Marcy on the Sumner Assault.
From the New York Examiner.
Governor MARCY was always true to his convictions on the Slavery question. “Slavery is yours,” he said to a Southern gentleman, who was endeavoring to commend the institution to his favor, “and you have the political right to retain it as long as you please, and to estimate it as a blessing: but we of the North want none of it: to us it would be an unmitigated curse.”
Two weeks before he died, Governor MARCY had attended the Second Baptist Church in Rochester, and had listened to the preaching of Rev. GEORGE DANA BOARDMAN. He was greatly interested in the sermon, and was strikingly impressed by the preacher himself. From the sermon and the preacher our conversation turned to the occasion of Mr. BOARDMAN’s leaving South Carolina and to the assault of Mr. BROOKS upon Mr. SUMNER. “You can tell me nothing,” said he, “of the sensitiveness of Southern gentlemen on that subject. But,” he added, “I do not hesitate to give them my views in full.” Alluding to an interview with one of them, who justified the assault, he paused – stopped – (we were walking in the street) – and turning full towards me, he said, with emphasis, ‘I told him that if another man was a blackguard, it gave me no right to be a bully. You say that Mr. SUMNER’S speech was a studied, elaborate insult. I have not read it. I don’t know about that. But I tell you that all the scenes in Kansas will not so much disgrace us among the Governments and people of Europe as this assault in the Senate Chamber of the United States. It will be accounted, and justly, an invasion of the freedom of debate. And I tell you further, that I would be glad to be let off with the loss of two hundred thousand votes in the next election in consequence of this affair. And’ continued the Governor, ‘I was right. The State Department brought me the journals of all Europe. We were more disgraced by this transaction than by the troubles in Kansas, and, as for the election, nothing saved us but the opposing candidate. Once I thought the election lost, as it was: and if Judge McLEAN had been the candidate, it would have been lost irreparably.’”
The same writer says that
“The Governor did not regard the Kansas troubles as settled. Governor WALKER had then just reached Kansas, and published his promises of the sacredness of the doctrine of Squatter Sovereignty. He expressed himself in the strongest terms as without confidence in Governor WALKER’S pacification. The event has justified his apprehensions, and the grounds on which they rested.”
