The Caning

by Stephen Puleo

  Sumner's assessment of the South's goals for Kansas was no exaggeration. Still stung by the admission of California as a free state in 1850, but buoyed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act and President Pierce's support of slavery in Kansas, the South viewed any attempt to prevent slavery in the new territory as a direct assault on the region and its way of life. Southerners warned that any decision in favor of antislavery forces would mean the defeat of the Democrats in the 1856 November elections. One Georgia man warned his senator that if Kansas came into the Union as a free state, Southern masses would turn on their leaders in fury.

  Congressman Preston Brooks and Senator Andrew Butler, both of South Carolina, the South's most ardent proslavery state (South Carolina candidates needed to own ten slaves just to run for Congress), issued warnings themselves as Congress readied to debate Kansas.

  Brooks wrote a letter to a newspaper in which he first lamented that his state had not imposed a dollar-a-head tax on slaves and used the proceeds to send emigrants to Kansas. Brooks argued practically that if Kansas was to become free, the value of slaves in adjacent Missouri would drop by 50 percent. “Then abolitionism will become the prevailing sentiment. So with Arkansas; so with upper Texas.” But his larger argument was far more solemn and momentous: “The admission of Kansas into the Union as a slave state is now a point of honor with the South,” Brooks acknowledged. “It is my deliberate conviction that the fate of the South is to be decided with the Kansas issue.”

  Senator Butler, Brooks's second cousin, warned that “one drop of blood shed in civil strife” in Kansas territory “may not only dissolve this Union, but may do worse.”

  * * *

  The stakes were so great, that at first, Charles Sumner was not sure how to proceed. Rock-solid in his antislavery convictions, his unwillingness to compromise left him less sure of what political steps he could take to bring the Kansas debate to a favorable conclusion. Fellow abolitionist Theodore Parker had urged him that the time had come “to strike a great blow. The North is ready—if you err at all, let it be on the side of going too fast & too far, not the other.” But it was not immediately clear to Sumner exactly what form that great blow would take. It was one thing to speak forcibly, another to accomplish his goal of a free Kansas.

  He sought the advice of orator, friend, and Unitarian clergy-man Edward Everett Hale, who was then also vice president of the New England Emigrant Aid Company. Sumner asked Hale for a face-to-face “brief hour” conversation to discuss the numerous tentacles of the Kansas debate, whose complexity made it difficult to determine where to start. Should he ask for Congressional aid to bolster the free-state cause? How should free-state proponents handle the eventual Kansas application for statehood? What, if anything, should Congress do about the bogus proslavery legislature? Sumner was full of questions to Hale, and concluded in exasperation: “How shall these matters be dealt with? What next? Pray let me have yr counsels.”

  Hale crafted a cautionary and unsatisfying response to Sumner, urging him to remain patient, to “keep up a bold face” and to recognize that the Kansas issue would be decided—one way or another—within a few months. Hale was not upset at the delay in securing a government for the new territory, claiming that it was simply a matter of time, and he predicted that the question “would be settled in the valley of Kansas & not in Washington.” He expected a continuance of antislavery emigration to Kansas, and fully believed that Kansas would enter the Union as a free state, pointing out that few slaveholders had actually picked up and relocated their farms or plantation operations to the territory. “No man carries any Negroes there, and you cannot make a Slave State without slaves,” Hale declared to Sumner.

  Frustrated by Hale's lack of outrage or even urgency on Kansas, Sumner suggested he at least respond directly to the Senate report that criticized the Emigrant Aid Company, lest “your company be gibbeted before the country as a criminal.” In Sumner's opinion, Hale's calm reticence mirrored Washington's. “It is clear that this Congress will do nothing for the benefit of Kansas,” he concluded. So he would do it on his own.

  And he would do it with words. Sometime in late March 1856, Sumner concluded that the best way he could help Kansas—“that distant plundered territory”—was to deliver a major oration against both the Southern fire-eaters, and the Northern Democrats, the latter led by Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, who advocated that individual states should make decisions about slavery. On March 17, Douglas had introduced legislation focused on popular sovereignty in the Kansas Territory, authorizing the people of the region to form a constitution and state government, and determine for themselves whether slavery would be permitted. New York's William Henry Seward, an antislavery senator, countered with a substitute bill that called on Congress to admit Kansas immediately as a free state.

  The Congressional debate was officially under way at that point, and Sumner longed to be heard. “I shall speak on Kansas just as soon as I can fairly get the floor,” he wrote to friend, physician, and abolitionist Samuel Gridley Howe, “& I believe you will be content with what I shall say.”

  Northern antislavery advocates welcomed Sumner's news. Since the beginning of the year, they had been waiting for him to speak out on Kansas. Sumner's acquaintance Francis Gillette said in February that he was “impatient to hear the senior Senator for Massachusetts…for he will let fly a bomb that will scatter confusion and terror in the hostile ranks.” A Trenton, New Jersey, correspondent implored Sumner to “agitate more and more” against slavery, until the “cruel and accursed sin…shall never pollute another square foot of American soil.” From Honolulu, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Kingdom of Hawaii, William L. Lee, commended Sumner for “battling so nobly to stay the progress of human bondage!”

  Once Sumner announced his decision and word circulated, advice poured in. Unlike Hale's admonitions to remain patient, most of Sumner's correspondence urged boldness. “It is time for us to show that we mean to submit to the Southern bravado no longer,” said Boston's Dr. LeBaron Russell, a member of the Emigrant Aid Company. Russell admitted that he had always felt “humiliated” with the conciliatory, even deferential, tone expressed by Northern lawmakers on the slavery debate. Up until now they had “yielded everything…never daring to assert their rights or exercise their true power to crush these fellows into submission.” It would be up to Sumner to change that. Eli Thayer “rejoiced” that Sumner would be speaking, reminding the senator that he “had a very important mission to perform.”

  With this type of encouragement, in the midst of the grandest of debates, Sumner plunged into preparing his speech with a near religious fervor, determined to exchange the cloak of mere antislavery crusader for the mantle of freedom's messiah. He assured Theodore Parker that he would “use plain words” in his speech, but boasted—perhaps signaling the invective that would be contained in those words—that he intended to “pronounce the most thorough philippic ever uttered in a Legislative body.”

  To abolitionist William Jay, Sumner promised to “expose this whole crime at great length,” and vowed to do so “without sparing language.” It was a vow that would contain dire consequences for Sumner personally, and lead to an explosive thunderclap that would reverberate across the land.

  Two integral and essential components of Charles Sumner's character drove his preparation for his upcoming oration—one easily defined and virtuous, the other complex and dark.

  Without question, Sumner's antislavery convictions glistened with the sheen of nobility. Where others preached compromise and moderation, he never wavered in denouncing slavery's evils to all who would listen and demanding that it be wiped out of existence. Where others muttered insipid platitudes, his voice was clarion clear and strong. Where others wilted under the onslaught of political attack, he stood tall and fearless, a bulwark against the slings of Southern slaveholders who targeted him. He was beholden to no one, sought no ill-gotten gains, and had little interest in currying favor to advance his own political
fortunes. By 1856, the abolition of slavery, pure and simple, was the driving force in his public life.

  Yet Charles Sumner's dark side was every bit as influential in shaping and feeding his persona. Egotism and narcissism consumed him, and his sneering arrogance was well known to friend and foe alike. He cared little for the opinions or feelings of others, exhibited a coldness of heart even to his family, dripped with condescension when he issued advice, and was intolerant of criticism and nearly incapable of conciliation. As such, he had few close friends, and—in a profession that depended upon relationships—only tepid political alliances. Formally educated, brilliant in some ways, he possessed little in the way of street smarts and instinctual savvy, and was oblivious to the personal interactions often needed to lubricate the levers of power. Reaching across the political aisle was anathema to him; his opponents despised him—and even his allies found his elitism exasperating. Those who professed to like him often complained of his moody self-centeredness, and some could only spend short amounts of time around him. His lack of empathy rendered him uncomfortable around most people, awkward with most women, and clumsy in most relationships; and he was either irritatingly unaware or cruelly uncaring of how deeply his unfiltered words—his “unsparing language”—could wound. In short, the inspirational music of Sumner's anti-slavery message was often drowned out by the tone-deaf insolence of the messenger.

  For those who knew him, these observations would come as no surprise. His great strength had been part of Charles Sumner's core personality for nearly two decades; his weakness for most of his life.

  THREE

  THE SPREAD OF SLAVERY

  Charles Sumner was shocked, but hardly sympathetic, when he saw his first slaves in 1834 at the age of twenty-three. Fresh out of Harvard and Harvard Law School, Sumner was traveling away from Boston for the first time, and making his inaugural trip by steamboat and train, to New York, Philadelphia, and eventually, Washington D.C. He wrote breathlessly to his parents on the magnificence of modern technology and transportation, the physical vastness of the two big northeast metropolises (“Boston is but a baby compared with the size of these two places,” he wrote from Philadelphia), and a “Capitol that would look proud amidst any European palaces.”

  It was while riding by stagecoach from Baltimore, through the “barren and cheerless country,” upon the “worst roads” Sumner had ever traveled, that he spotted his first group of slaves. In the same letter in which he lamented to his parents that he wished he had brought an additional twenty dollars with him, Sumner apparently saw no irony in his belittling description of slaves, who were not only forbidden to earn or possess anything, but were owned by other men: “My worst preconception of their appearance and ignorance did not fall as low as their actual stupidity,” he wrote. “They appear to be nothing more than moving masses of flesh, unendowed with any thing of intelligence above the brutes. I have now an idea of the blight upon that part of our country in which they live.”

  Sumner learned a great deal about politics on the trip. He attended debates in Congress and the Supreme Court, heard Henry Clay deliver a “splendid and thrilling” oration, and was introduced to a number of senators by Massachusetts' own Daniel Webster. He heard the “rugged language” of South Carolina's John C. Calhoun, who made a “strong impression” on his audience. And, the more he saw and heard, the less he liked the political maneuvering. He declared that he had little interest in pursuing politics as a profession—he would become a lawyer instead, opening a practice with a friend in 1834—and predicted he would “never come to Washington again.”

  Strangely, Sumner did not write home about slaves again. If the brutality of their condition affected him, if he even gave them a second thought while witnessing the American government at work in Washington, he remained silent on the subject. But clearly he began taking a deeper interest in the subject of slavery soon afterward. Sumner's father, Charles Pinckney Sumner, had strong antislavery sentiments, and though Charles and his father were not close, the elder Sumner's convictions carried some sway over his son's thinking. In 1835, young Charles denounced proslavery mob violence in the South and he began reading William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, the first publication to which Sumner subscribed. Sumner credited Lydia Maria Child's An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, first published in 1833, with convincing him of the injustice of slavery and racial discrimination during these formative years.

  And he was outraged at the South's bullying tactics as it sought to discredit and silence antislavery voices. Early in 1836, South Carolina Governor George McDuffie described abolitionists who circulated antislavery literature as “wicked monsters and deluded fanatics” and advocated capital punishment because the agitators were “enemies of the human race.” The twenty-five-year-old Sumner wrote that the attempts by slave-state sympathizers to “abridge discussion,” the conduct of the South generally, and McDuffie's scathing remarks in particular “have caused many to think favorably of immediate emancipation who never before inclined to it.”

  Sumner was far from an antislavery champion in his mid-twenties, but he wrote a prescient letter to his friend Francis Lieber, then professor of political economy at South Carolina College and an antislavery sympathizer in the heart of slave country: “We are becoming abolitionists in the North fast,” Charles Sumner observed.

  Not fast enough, apparently, for Europeans, who watched America's ongoing slavery debate with amazement and contempt. And they let Charles Sumner know about it on his first trip to Europe in the late 1830s, a pilgrimage that accelerated his antislavery education and hardened his beliefs.

  From Paris to London to Rome to Munich to Vienna, Sumner toured museums, attended university lectures, debated statesmen, dined with royalty, studied foreign languages, and, in his words, “travelled with all sorts of people, gentlemen, scholars, soldiers, priests, monks, saints & devils.” And for more than two years, Europeans told him repeatedly that American slavery was a disgrace unbefitting a civilized nation.

  What gave him pause—even more than the opinions of the political, social, and academic elites in his host countries—were the things Sumner saw with his own eyes. On a freezing January day in Paris (“My hair is so cold that I hesitate to touch it with my hand,” Sumner wrote), he attended a lecture at the Sorbonne and spotted “two or three blacks” in the audience. Sumner was surprised that they had the “easy, jaunty air of men of fashion, who were well received by their fellow students,” and even more surprised that while they were standing in the midst of their classmates, “their color seemed to be no objection” to the group. While Sumner was “glad to see this,” he acknowledged that such a scenario would be unlikely in America.

  It was at that moment—in France in 1838 at the age of twenty-seven—that Sumner recognized the full import of what he was witnessing and reached the conclusion that would anchor his antislavery philosophy. In his opinion, the camaraderie displayed between students of different races at the Sorbonne could only mean one thing: “that the distance between free blacks and whites among us is derived from education, and does not exist in the nature of things.”

  Later, in Italy, Sumner spent time near Alban Lake at the Convent of Palazzuoli, whose members included an “Abyssinian very recently arrived from the heart of Africa, whose most torrid sun had burned upon him.” Nonetheless, among Italians, the man's color provoked little more than “added interest,” not bigotry. Sumner observed that “it was beautiful to witness the freedom, gentleness & equality which he mingled with his brethren,” a sharp contrast to the “prejudices of colour which prevail in America.”

  Throughout Europe, people whom Sumner admired often had strong abolitionist opinions and were not shy about expressing them. In London, the Duchess of Sutherland (whom Sumner called “the most beautiful woman in the world”) was unsurpassed among English nobility in using her position to argue against American slavery. Judge and former Parliament member Lord (T
homas) Denman, a vociferous opponent of slavery and the slave trade, impressed Sumner with his strength and “justice-like countenance,” and was “as honest as the stars.” And in Paris, Sumner met lecturer and author Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi, who talked “much and with great ardor of slavery.” Sumner declared Sismondi a “thorough abolitionist” who was “astonished that our country will not take a lesson from the ample page of the past and eradicate slavery, as has been done in the civilized parts of Europe.” Sismondi compared slaves to the serfs of the feudal system, explaining to Sumner that the system had “entirely disappeared” and English society was better for it.

  By the time he returned from Europe in 1840, Charles Sumner was unequivocally convinced that American society would also be far better if slavery were abolished. And if Southern congressmen continued their “infamous bullying” of Northern members, Sumner had an answer. “Dissolve the Union,” he wrote.

  * * *

  Since his return to the United States, Sumner had devoted himself to what he referred to as social justice issues, including peace (“For myself, I hold all wars unjust and un-Christian”), prison reform (he was appalled that the “idiots, feeble-minded, and the insane” were herded into Massachusetts jails with hardened criminals), and—ever more firmly and powerfully—the anti-slavery movement. “I think slavery a sin, individual and national,” he declared, “and think it the duty of each individual to cease committing it, and, of course, of each State to do like-wise.”

  He had begun to articulate legal and constitutional arguments that focused on the equality of all men and the moral wrong of extending slavery beyond the current states that now allowed and depended on the institution, and on refuting the notion that blacks were inherently inferior and thus could not become citizens. On the latter point, Sumner questioned how those who argued in favor of black inferiority reconciled their support for the U.S. Constitution. “If it be urged that the African cannot be a citizen of the U.S., it may be asked if the Constitution was intended to apply only to the Caucasian race,” Sumner concluded. “Is the Indian race also excluded? Is the Mongolian excluded?”