The Caning

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by Stephen Puleo


  As for slavery itself, while Sumner personally favored its eradication, he initially argued publicly that it was a local institution—governed by local and municipal laws—that must be contained within the states that already allowed it. He argued that slavery laws only held sway in those areas in which slavery was currently legal. He added that, while the Constitution did not prohibit a state from inflicting “injustice” upon its own citizens, a state was not permitted to extend that injustice to citizens of another state. In Sumner's view, this protected free Northern blacks anywhere in the country—the slavery issue was not unique to race, per se, but to the race within the boundaries of a particular state. “The free negro, born in Massachusetts, & still retaining his domicile there, wherever he finds himself, may invoke the protection of his native state,” Sumner wrote.

  Sumner believed the best way to stop slavery was to “surround the Southern States with a moral blockade,” in which people in all walks of life—the “moralist, the statesman, the orator, and the poet”—all expressed their disapproval of slavery. In addition, while the national government could not constitutionally reach into a slave state to abolish the institution, it could establish antislavery laws within the District of Columbia, in territories, and as part of interstate commerce and coastal trade.

  There was also one other possibility, Sumner argued, a position that would one day send a chill through slave-owners and the Southern states. “The Constitution may be amended,” he wrote, “so that it shall cease to render any sanction to slavery.”

  Up to this point, the evolution of Sumner's beliefs and his writings were almost academic in nature—certainly important in his own development as an antislavery voice, but circulating only on the periphery of the national slavery debate. He put forth his opinions in letters to friends, associates, and newspapers, but he remained largely on the sidelines of the political battle; he was relegated even more so to spectator status when he suffered a debilitating illness due to exhaustion in 1844.

  But then came Tyler's strategy—later continued by President James K. Polk after his election in 1844—to annex Texas, which would almost certainly lead to war with Mexico. Sumner viewed this as a national emergency and crisis. It violated both his anti-war and antislavery principles, and, in the words of Sumner's biographer years later, “shocked him out of his complacency and brought him actively into politics.” In May 1844 a despondent Charles Sumner wrote in response to President John Tyler's plan “Folly, dementia & vulgar weakness now rule the country.” Sumner viewed the move as nothing more than a power grab by the proslavery Tyler to extend human bondage hundreds of miles west. “By welcoming Texas as a slave state we make slavery our own original sin,” Charles Sumner admonished a huge anti-Texas crowd that had gathered at Boston's Faneuil Hall on a stormy November night in 1845. “Let us wash our hands of this great guilt.”

  As his views about blacks and slavery evolved, Sumner's increasing militancy often placed him at odds with Massachusetts Democrats, who depended on good relations with the South for business and trade reasons, and even with antislavery Whigs, who had eyes on the White House in 1848 and would need Southern support to be successful. Conservative Massachusetts merchants, for example, were leery of overly strident anti-Texas-annexation voices for fear of alienating Southern congressmen at precisely the time President Polk was proposing a reduction in a trade tariff that was hindering New England manufacturing.

  Sumner, the political amateur, cared nothing for these arguments; for him, it was enough that the annexation of Texas was wrong. And in his Faneuil Hall speech—the first political oration of his career—he argued that to admit slaveholding Texas to the Union would implicate Massachusetts in that wrong. On that November night in 1845, he employed the rhetoric and passion that would become the hallmark of his career, language that would frighten his opponents and even cause uneasiness among his allies.

  “God forbid that the votes and voices of Northern freemen should help to bind anew the fetters of the slave,” he thundered. “God forbid that the lash of the slave-dealer should descend by any sanction from New England. God forbid that the blood which spurts from the lacerated, quivering flesh of the slave should soil the hem of the white garments of Massachusetts.”

  His pleas were in vain. In December, Texas was admitted to the Union as a slaveholding state. In April 1846, General Zachary Taylor's men, marching through territory claimed by both the United States and Mexico, were fired upon. President Polk had announced that war with Mexico was under way.

  A furious Charles Sumner declared that “an unjust war is the greatest crime a nation can commit,” and believed it was his duty to oppose it, “even if he stood alone.”

  ——

  Livid over the Texas annexation and the hostilities with Mexico, Charles Sumner became consumed with the antislavery fight by the late 1840s. “In Sumner's alphabet just now there are only two words: Slavery and the Mexican war,” wrote his friend George Hillard in 1847. “Business he utterly neglects and the only persons he sees with any interest are those with whom he is in communication on these points.” Sumner's law practice languished and his interest in law virtually disappeared.

  He continued his battles with more moderate voices from Massachusetts, joined the ardently antislavery Free-Soil Party, and campaigned for it in the 1848 elections. While the party did not win any states or a single electoral vote, Sumner found the experience satisfying, declaring that “the public mind has been stirred on the subject of slavery to depths never before reached.”

  Nonetheless, he again angered Massachusetts merchants when he accused Southern slaveholders and New England textile manufacturers—“the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom”—of conspiring to bring about the nomination of Zachary Taylor, a charge that alienated even Sumner's close friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Sumner was undeterred, writing to his brother George that the “abuse” and “bitter attacks” he had suffered from many in Boston society were the price he paid for unwavering principles. He consoled himself by recalling the words of his friend and former president John Quincy Adams: “No man is abused whose influence is not felt.”

  * * *

  If Texas and the Mexican War exacerbated sectional tensions in the 1840s, the first half of the 1850s sent shock waves through the North and South. Another series of stunning national events soon changed the political landscape in Massachusetts and across the country, pushed the political mainstream ever closer to Charles Sumner's point of view, and ultimately cleared the way for a man who had never held political office to be elected to the United States Senate.

  Ironically, it was the incumbent U.S. Senator from Massachusetts and political legend Daniel Webster who made it all possible; the seemingly unrelated discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in northern California in January 1848 provided the impetus.

  The California Gold Rush attracted tens of thousands of intrepid fortune-seekers from Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, and the East Coast of the United States to seek riches. Thousands embarked on the grueling overland journey across the American continent, battling severe weather, starvation, bandits, Indian raiding parties, loneliness, fear, and second-guessing in their quest to reach California's rivers of gold.

  By nature and definition, those who faced and overcame enormous odds on their trek, and populated California in two short years, possessed self-reliance, independence, courage, determination, and a deep reservoir of optimism and resilience—qualities that influenced their outlook and their politics. They moved quickly and decisively, virtually skipping the territory stage, ratifying a governing document, and petitioning Congress for statehood in early 1850.

  But controversy swirled almost immediately, for California sought admission to the Union as a free state. By itself, this request would have been objectionable enough to the South, but the impact was exacerbated by simple mathematics. As Congress considered California's request, the American Union consisted of thirty states—fifteen slave and fiftee
n free—a delicate balance that both sides had worked to achieve. If and when California joined the Union as the thirty-first state, Northern antislavery elements—abolitionists and even moderates—would rejoice, believing that slavery's future was doomed; that the newly acquired territories of New Mexico and Utah would follow suit, that Southern power would be irreparably weakened, that slave-owners would become further isolated, and that the peculiar institution, unlikely to spread further, would eventually wither and die. Southerners believed all of the same things; thus, they viewed with a sense of foreboding the admittance of a free California.

  The nation was at a crossroads. Whatever Congress did with California's petition would have profound consequences. The admittance of the far-western state threatened to shake both North and South.

  With the stakes so high, the nation looked to the Senate, and three men in particular for answers: Henry Clay of Kentucky, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and—the senator whose remarks and opinion would generate the greatest interest among Boston's abolitionists and merchants (and Charles Sumner)—Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. The trio had worked together before on sectional compromises, and though aging (all three would be dead within two years), each commanded the respect of his colleagues and the population at large. These three giants in the Senate, men whose reputations transcended politics and defined them as statesmen, assumed familiar leadership roles in what would become the Compromise of 1850. Debate on the momentous measure began in March—Webster made a passionate and famous plea for its passage on March 7—and several components made up the compromise, including, of course, California's admittance as a free state.

  One other controversial element was seen as the counter-weight to the California decision, the component of the legislation that would most placate the South, shush the whispers of secession, and perhaps hold the Union together. Southern slave owners demanded it and Northern antislavery men dreaded it: a harsher and more stringent Fugitive Slave Law.

  “I might call him [Daniel Webster] Judas Iscariot or Benedict Arnold,” Charles Sumner wrote to his brother George in response to Webster's March 7, 1850 speech in support of the strengthened Fugitive Slave Law. “I have been glad to observe the moral indignation which has been aroused against that speech.”

  The tougher law mandated harsh summary enforcement over civil liberties, but, Sumner's outrage aside, Webster understood that its very strictness was the only way to ensure Southern support. He thought that even the most fervent proslavery lawmakers would recognize the new bill's good-faith concessions to Southern interests. The law would allow a slave owner or his agent to reclaim a fugitive slave by securing a warrant before-hand or arresting the runaway on the spot. The case for returning the slave to his master would be heard by a federal judge or a court-appointed federal commissioner, who would be paid ten dollars if the certificate of removal was issued, but only five dollars if the claim was denied. (Abolitionists would later decry this measure as virtually bribing the commissioner to return an individual to bondage.) No jury could be called during court proceedings, testimony from the fugitive was prohibited, and the commissioner's decision could not be appealed. Municipalities and local governments were mandated to work with slave-hunters to return runaways. Finally, the law called for stiff penalties—a $1,000 fine and up to six months in jail—for anyone aiding a fugitive or interfering with his or her return to slavery, a component that chilled and infuriated antislavery advocates.

  Webster, who loved the Union as much as any man, believed the Compromise would preserve it, and agreed to support the measure regardless of the consequences he might face in the North. Above all, he thought, the Fugitive Slave Law might succeed in holding together a nation that was fraying at the seams. He was fully aware that he would anger many Northerners and that his hopes for a future presidential run would evaporate. But for him, preserving the Union out-weighed any sectional loyalties.

  For weeks after his speech, Webster felt the wrath of abolitionists; radicals of every type “plied a whip with scorpions,” in the words of one historian. Abolitionists took him to task on the issue and vilified him personally with the venom reserved for traitors and turncoats. William Lloyd Garrison launched a petition drive to convince the Massachusetts legislature to censure the senator whose “degrading” betrayal ranked him beside Benedict Arnold. In his entire career, Garrison said no speech “had so powerfully shocked the moral sense, or so grievously insulted the intelligence of the people.” Ralph Waldo Emerson spat, “The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.” Charles Sumner spoke of “Webster's elaborate treason.”

  But the die had been cast. Debate continued throughout the spring and summer, but Webster's March 7 speech had put the Compromise of 1850 on a road to passage. Millard Fillmore's ascension to the presidency after President Zachary Taylor's death from typhoid fever on July 9 buoyed proponents due to Fillmore's expressed support for the Compromise.

  Fillmore also chose Webster as secretary of state in his new cabinet, meaning Webster would have to resign his Senate seat; ironically, despite a final speech in support of the measure on July 17, Webster, the Compromise's most articulate and passionate defender, would not cast a final vote on its passage in early September.

  On September 18, 1850, President Fillmore signed the Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Act into law. On October 2, Daniel Webster wrote: “We have now gone through the most important crisis that has occurred since the foundation of this government, and whatever party may prevail, hereafter, the Union stands firm.”

  Then Thomas Sims came to Boston.

  FOUR

  THE FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT

  Twenty-three-year-old Thomas Sims, a runaway slave from Savannah, Georgia, was captured by slave-hunters in downtown Boston on April 3, 1851, imprisoned, and after court proceedings, ordered returned to slavery. In the early-morning dampness of April 12, he stood alone at the center of a “hollow square” of federal troops and Boston police, who surrounded him, and marched him to a ship moored in Boston Harbor. As the glimmer of dawn broke across the water, and a contingent of Boston abolitionists watched in shame and humiliation, Sims was ushered aboard. At just after 5:00 A.M., the vessel set sail. Boston, the birthplace of the struggle for America's liberty seventy-five years earlier, had for the first time sent a free man in the North back to slavery.

  Distraught Boston abolitionists, who shared an abhorrence of slavery with Charles Sumner, were even more chagrined when word arrived from Georgia that, upon his arrival in Savannah, Sims was whipped in the public square. He was administered thirty-nine lashes across his bare back, the penalty for running away.

  The Sims case shook Boston to its core. It galvanized abolitionists, transforming them from speechmakers to men and women of action, and cemented Boston's reputation nationally and internationally as a leader of antislavery activity. Perhaps even more important, the Sims case began to change the thinking of moderates, who, while wincing at the uncompromising views of radical abolitionists, were uneasy with the official legal and enforcement apparatus of their city that had returned a human being to bondage. But perhaps the most stunning sign that the Fugitive Slave Law and the Sims case had changed Boston and the Commonwealth came just two weeks after the fugitive slave's departure.

  On April 24, 1851, the Massachusetts legislature, on its twenty-sixth ballot and after an exhausting political battle, elected Charles M. Sumner to the United States Senate (U.S. senators were not yet elected directly by the people). Sumner filled the vacancy left by the departed Daniel Webster, now secretary of state. The irony was not lost on Massachusetts or the nation: Webster, the consummate compromiser, had been replaced by a man who—especially on the subject of slavery—believed compromise was simply another word for weakness.

  “If you could have heard the swearing, your hair would have stood on end,” wrote Edmund Quincy on April 28, 1851, describing the reaction of Boston merchants and business leaders to S
umner's election. More than one hundred years later, historian Allan Nevins recounted the reaction this way: “On State Street, faces were long and scowls were black.” In contrast, abolitionists celebrated with bonfires, bell ringing, cannon firing, and public meetings. With half the Massachusetts population rejoicing and half embittered at Sumner's election, it was clear that it never would have happened without the Sims episode. “The election of Charles Sumner…practically followed from it [Sims's misfortune],” wrote minister and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

  Sumner traveled to Washington in November to begin his first session of Congress, one of three Free-Soil senators, a tiny minority that would face derision and ridicule for its strong antislavery views. Sumner knew the road would be difficult, and again, immodestly cast his election and his duty to serve as part of the greater good: “For myself, I do not desire public life,” he wrote to his sister Julia. “I have neither taste nor ambition for it; but Providence has marked out my career, and I follow.”

  He was dedicated and studious, dutifully walking the mile between his lodgings and the Capitol each day, and paying close attention to debates. Ironically, Sumner became close with some Southerners, including South Carolina Senator Andrew Pickens Butler, whose seat adjoined Sumner's. Butler frequently asked Sumner to verify classical quotes that he would use in his speeches, and Sumner acknowledged, with condescension for sure, that if Butler had been “a citizen of New England [he] would have been a scholar, or at least, a well educated man.”

  Sumner bided his time, declining to speak on the slavery issue right away, feeling that “by strengthening myself on other subjects,” he would be viewed as more than a one-issue senator, and ultimately, would stand on firmer ground when he was prepared to tackle slavery. This strategy alarmed his Massachusetts constituents, and some felt they had sent the wrong man to Washington. William Lloyd Garrison assaulted Sumner in his abolitionist Liberator newspaper, pointing out that after four and a half months in the Senate, Sumner had “yet to utter his first word of disapproval of slavery in general, or the Fugitive Slave Law in particular.”

 

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