Painfully for him, one of his longtime friends, Richard Henry Dana, spearheaded the effort to replace him with a Republican centrist, such as his rival Charles Francis Adams. Sumner’s friend turned rival William Seward also seemed to be yearning for Sumner’s downfall. Seward’s closest ally, the powerful newspaperman Thurlow Weed, publicly called on politicians in the Bay State to oust Sumner. “Massachusetts should choose as Senator, in this hour of peril, a man of practical sense,” Weed wrote in an editorial. “In this quality, Mr. Sumner is eminently deficient.”
