This is all on that point; but I wish to make one other remark. The Senator intimated, if I understood him aright, that his propositions, at least in his own mind, were not applicable to territory hereafter acquired.
MR. CRITTENDEN. No: I do not mean to be understood as saying that.
MR. CRITTENDEN. I said I did not consider that proposition as an essential part of mine,--that I did not intend to insist upon it, if I found it would not be acceptable. I did not intend that that should be any obstacle to an adjustment, and I would propose to strike it out, if necessary.
MR. SUMNER. The Senator did not consider that an essential part; and yet in the Journal of the Senate, now before me, in the yeas and nays, I find his name recorded in the affirmative on introducing those words, “now held or hereafter to be acquired.” Here is the record,--the name of the Senator from Kentucky answering yea, when we were all asked to answer yea or nay.
This brief effort of Mr. Sumner at a critical moment found response, not only from his constituents, but from the North generally. In Massachusetts many made haste to testify that the petition praying for such a shameful surrender had been signed by large numbers without knowing its true character,--while the Common Council of Boston, then controlled by Compromisers, also made haste to censure Mr. Sumner, declaring, in formal resolution, that his assertion in the Senate with regard to the petitioners was “undignified, unbecoming a Senator and a citizen of Boston, and untrue.”
As through this remarkable petition, and the speech of Mr. Crittenden in presenting it, Massachusetts was vouched for Slavery, a few witnesses may be properly adduced to show how the signatures were obtained, and also what was the real sentiment of the people there.
William Lloyd Garrison, always watchful for Human Rights, and knowing the wiles of Compromise, wrote from Boston:--
“For one, I desire to thank you for declaring in the Senate that the petition from Boston, asking for any compromise to propitiate the South, did not represent the sentiment even of the city, but was signed by multitudes ignorantly and recklessly,--the left hand not knowing what the right hand did. I wish it were in your power to have that list of names critically examined. I am quite sure that hundreds of names would be proved to be ‘men of straw.’ I have been told that the names of Wendell Phillips, Henry Ward Beecher, Theodore Parker (!),[139] and my own, were appended to it. This is possible, but hardly credible. Still, excepting the Border-Ruffian returns in Kansas, I do not believe there was ever a petition more impudently and fraudulently presented to a legislative assembly than the one from this city.