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Street, Jan. 10, 1857, to his friend James Redpath, Esq., who was heroically laboring on behalf of freedom in Kansas, he said, “I cannot believe that Massachusetts will hesitate.
Her people have already opened their hearts to Kansas; and the public treasury should be opened as wide as their hearts.”
On the thirteenth day of January, 1857, he was almost unanimously re-elected to another six-years term of office; the Senate casting for him every vote; the house having already given him 333 out of the 345 votes thrown.
“It is not too much to say,” justly remarked “The New-York Tribune,” “that Mr. Sumner is at this moment the most popular man in the State, the opinions of which he so truly represents.”
In his acceptance of the trust, Jan. 22, Mr. Sumner said, “Alike by sympathy with the slave, and by determination to save ourselves from wretched thraldom, we are all summoned to the effort now organized for the emancipation of the national government from a degrading influence, hostile to civilization, which, whenever it shows itself even at a distance, is brutal, vulgar, and mean; an unnatural tyranny, calculated to arouse the generous indignation of good men. Of course no person, unless ready to say in his heart that there is no God, can doubt the certain result.”
His health continuing to decline, he was advised by his physicians
B. B. Russell, 1874.
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