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288 LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

been the scene, where the strongest efforts of the most popular orators of
Massachusetts have been made. Here Webster the great "expounder"
addressed the "sea of upturned faces." Here Choate, the wonderful Boston
barrister, by his weird, electric eloquence, enchained his thousands; here
Everett charmed with his classic periods the flower of Boston aristocracy;
and here, too, Charles Sumner, Horace Mann, John A. Andrew, and Wendell
Phillips, the last superior to most, and equal to any, have for forty years spoken
their great words for justice, liberty, and humanity, sometimes in the
calm and sunshine of unruffled peace, but oftener in the tempest and whirlwind
of mobocratic violence. It was here that Mr. Phillips made his famous
speech in denunciation of the murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy in 1837, which
changed the whole current of his life and made him pre-eminently the leader
of anti-slavery thought in New England. Here too Theodore Parker, whose
early death not only Boston, but the lovers of liberty throughout the world,
still mourn, gave utterance to his deep and life-giving thoughts in words of
fullness and power. But I set out to speak of the meeting which was held
there, in celebration of the fall of Richmond, for it was a meeting as remarkable
for its composition, as for its occasion . Among the speakers by whom it
was addressed, and who gave voice to the patriotic sentiments which filled
and overflowed each loyal heart, were Hon. Henry Wilson, and Hon. Robert
C. Winthrop. It would be difficult to find two public men more distinctly
opposite than these. If any one may properly boast an aristocratic descent, or
if there be any value or worth in that boast, Robert C. Winthrop may without
undue presumption, avail himself of it. He was born in the midst of wealth
and luxury, and never felt the flint of hardship or the grip of poverty. Just the
opposite to this was the experience of Henry Wilson. The son of common
people, wealth and education had done little for him; but he had in him a true
heart, and a world of common sense; and these with industry, good habits,
and perseverance, had carried him further and lifted him higher, than the
brilliant man with whom he formed such striking contrast. Winthrop, before
the war, like many others of his class, had sided largely with the demands of
the slave power, had abandoned many of his old whig friends, when they
went for free soil and free men in 1848, and gone into the democratic
party.

When the war broke out he was found to be too good to be a rebel sympathizer,
and he became as Wilson also did — a power in the Union cause. I
regret that I had imagined him capable of taking sides, or seeming to do so
with the enemies of the Republic in the hour of its peril. For, when the Union
needed him, and all others, as the slaveholding rebellion was raising its defi-