He had made a profitable political and personal issue of the Preston Brooks attack.

Brooks was an exceeding light weight, but he did for Sumner more than Sumner could ever have done for himself.
In the Charles Eames days Sumner was exceedingly disagreeable to me.
Many people, indeed, thought him so.

Many years later, in the Greeley campaign of 1872, Schurz brought us together--they had become as very brothers in the Senate--and I found him the reverse of my boyish ill conceptions.
He was a great old man.

He was a delightful old man, every inch a statesman, much of a scholar, and something of a hero.

I grew in time to be actually fond of him, passed with him entire afternoons and evenings in his library, mourned sincerely when he died, and went with Schurz to Boston, on the occasion when that great German-American delivered the memorial address in honor of the dead Abolitionist.
Of all the public men of that period Carl Schurz most captivated me.
When we first came into personal relations, at the Liberal Convention, which assembled at Cincinnati and nominated Greeley and Brown as a presidential ticket, he was just turned forty-three; I, two and thirty.
The closest intimacy followed.