An annoyed Sumner felt he had nothing to prove and asserted that his antislavery credentials were as strong as any man's. He urged patience and, despite being a political neophyte, argued that his approach made the most political sense. “With pain I learn the impatience of some of my friends because I have not spoken on slavery,” Sumner wrote. “This subject is always in my mind and heart, and I shall never be happy until I have expressed myself fully upon it.” But, Sumner said, his silence had been “deliberate” and his plan was to speak about slavery “late—very late” in the session.
Finally, on July 27, under enormous pressure from his constituents, Sumner made a motion to repeal the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. But when he asked for permission to speak under Senate rules, his fellow senators denied him. South Carolina's Butler said his resolution was purely political, “merely a pretense to give him the opportunity to make an oratorical display before the Senate,” and perhaps worse, “to wash deeper and deeper the channel through which flow the angry waters of agitation.” Another Southern senator said Sumner's motion was “equivalent to…a resolution to dissolve the Union.” Even Northern Democrats opposed him. Stephen Douglas said he would not extend the courtesy to speak to “any gentleman to fan the flames of discord that have so recently divided this great people.”
Sumner's request to speak was denied by a vote of thirty-two to ten. It was a stunning defeat on a routine procedural vote that left Sumner “mortified and dejected.” Afterward, Virginia Senator James M. Mason told Sumner: “You may speak next term.” When Sumner said he must speak in the current term, Mason said: “By God, you shan't.”
In August, Sumner finally did get to address his colleagues, through a circuitous parliamentary route. When a budget bill was put forth to cover the expenses of executing the Fugitive Slave Act, Sumner quickly proffered an amendment asking that the money not be appropriated and calling again for repeal of the act. Because his amendment was tied to the original bill, he was allowed to speak. He launched into his nearly four-hour “Freedom National” speech, in which he reiterated his argument that slavery was a sectional institution, but freedom was national in scope, a concept embodied in the country's founding and the Constitution, and one that epitomized the very heart and soul of America.
“Slavery…is not mentioned in the Constitution,” he argued. “No ‘positive’ language gives to Congress any power to make a slave or to hunt a slave.” During his speech, spectators crowded the gallery and Daniel Webster, ill and within two months of his death, also came to listen. Sumner later crowed that he, not the secretary of state, was now the spokesman for Massachusetts. In the fiery speech, Sumner spoke of the “unutterable wrong and woe of slavery,” an institution “I must condemn with my whole soul.” He told his colleagues that God's law and the Constitution made him “bound to disobey this [Fugitive Slave] Act. Never, in any capacity, can I render voluntary aid in its execution. Pains and penalties I will endure, but this great wrong I will not do.” He concluded by urging his fellow senators: “Repeal this enactment. Let its terrors no longer rage through the land.”
When Sumner finished, irate members responded. Stephen Douglas said Sumner was not attacking the Fugitive Slave Law, he was assaulting the Constitution. Senator John Weller of California said that while Sumner's speech was eloquent, he saw no purpose to it unless it was to incite riots in Northern states. Senator Jeremiah Clemens of Alabama urged his colleagues to simply ignore Sumner's remarks and not reply at all. “The ravings of a maniac may sometimes be dangerous, but the barking of a puppy never did any harm,” he said. The Senate considered the Fugitive Slave Act a finished topic, part of a compromise designed to preserve the Union; Sumner's arguments bordered on treason.
Finally the vote was taken. Sumner's motion to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act was defeated by an overwhelming margin, 47 to 4.
While Sumner believed his speech was a triumph (“I am satisfied to labor in the cause and not in vain”), in one summer he had suffered two indignities in the U.S. Senate. First, his colleagues humiliated him by denying him permission to even speak on the slavery issue. Then, when he finally got the floor, his motion went down to a defeat perhaps more crushing than even he could have imagined. Charles Sumner would not forget either slight.
* * *
“The threats to put a bullet through my head and hang me—and mob me—have been frequent,” Charles Sumner wrote in mid-June 1854. “I have always said: ‘let them come: they will find me at my post.’”
Many of Sumner's utterances since his arrival in the Senate could have prompted such threats, but this reference was to a midnight speech he delivered on May 25 in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, his final attempt to kill the measure. For months he had railed against it, again and again criticizing Douglas for offering it and slaveholders for adding it as the third unacceptable component in their list of sins behind the admittance of Texas as a slave state and the barbaric Fugitive Slave Act (“I will not call it ‘law,’” Sumner asserted). Castigated by the South and Northern Democrats throughout the debate, Sumner was emboldened by support from Massachusetts, even the more conservative merchants and mercantile Whigs, many of whom supported the Fugitive Slave Law, but now, four years later, felt duped by what they saw as a further power grab by the slave-holding South.
In his midnight speech, “standing at the very grave of freedom in Nebraska and Kansas,” Sumner welcomed Northern agitation and forewarned of future “civil strife and feud”—indeed, encouraged it—once Kansas-Nebraska became law. Predicting dire consequences from the bill, Sumner nonetheless recognized that it had set up a grand showdown between freedom's good and slavery's evils, calling the Kansas-Nebraska bill “at once the worst and best which Congress ever acted.” It was the worst, for obvious reasons—it provided slave-owners with yet another victory. But, Sumner added, “it is the best bill…for it…annuls past compromises with slavery and makes all future compromises impossible. Thus it puts Freedom and Slavery face to face, and bids them grapple. Who can doubt the result?”
The next day an answer came from Boston, in a celebrated episode that Northerners interpreted as an illustration that slave-owners had gone too far and Southerners blamed on Sumner. Three years after the Thomas Sims case, Boston, unbelievably, was about to send its second runaway slave back to bondage. But reactions would be different this time around.
When runaway slave Anthony Burns was arrested in Boston on May 24, 1854, on a warrant that he had escaped a Virginia master, Boston abolitionists did more than howl in protest as they had in the Thomas Sims case. Burns's incarceration occurred during debate of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, “at the most combustible moment imaginable,” one historian wrote.
On May 26, a day after Sumner's speech in Washington, militant Boston abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson led a group of rioters, armed with axes, on a courthouse assault in his city. “We hammered away at the southwest door…before it began to give way,” he wrote. A few men squeezed inside and were met by a half-dozen policemen wielding clubs, “driving us to the wall and hammering away at our heads.” A shot was fired—it was impossible to say by whom—and a guard named Batchelder was killed.
Sumner's enemies blamed him for inciting the riot and for Batchelder's homicide, ignoring the fact that telegraphic reports of his speech did not reach Boston until the day after the Burns riot. They held Sumner personally responsible for what was called an assassination of an officer of the government in the discharge of his duties. One Southern newspaper charged him with “giving the command” and the “word which encourages the assassin…in citing his constituents to resist federal laws.” The Washington Star accused Sumner of “counseling treason” to the country's laws and inciting “the ignorant to bloodshed and murder.”
New Englanders welcomed the fight. The seizure of Burns and the attempt to intimidate Sumner had unified “the good men of all parties in a common hostility to the encroachments of the slave po
wer.” Moderate Boston merchant George Livermore was even more direct, writing to Sumner: “Let the minions of the Administration and of the slaveocracy harm one hair of your head, and they will raise a whirlwind which will sweep them to destruction.”
Sumner was heartened by the support of his constituents and he paid little attention to negative newspaper coverage or Southern threats, even when Southerners insulted him in a restaurant at which he regularly dined. “The howl of the press here against me has been the best homage I ever received,” he concluded. To friends who urged him to take precautions, he replied: “I am here to do my duty and shall continue to do it without regard to personal consequences.”
After the unsuccessful riot to free him, runaway slave Anthony Burns remained imprisoned, and after his trial, he was marched down State Street to the docks in a route eerily similar to the one Sims had followed. This time, though, more than 50,000 Boston residents jammed the streets and rooftops on June 2, 1854, to protest Burns's return to slavery. As Burns marched toward Long Wharf, surrounded by one thousand U.S. soldiers and militiamen, the Brattle Street Church bell tolled, the crowd booed, hissed, cursed, and cried, “Kidnappers, Kidnappers.” Black bunting draped office buildings in Boston's mercantile and financial districts, and the accompanying symbolic props were telling. From one building a coffin was suspended with the word “Liberty” printed on its side; at the Merchants Exchange, a petition calling for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law was signed by many of Boston's commercial elite, proving that “the most solid men of Boston…are fast falling into the ranks of freedom,” abolitionist Theodore Parker wrote. Indeed, many Webster Whigs, among the strongest pro-Union voices in the country, felt betrayed by the South. Yes, they had commercial interests and economic ties to consider, but most found both slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law distasteful.
Now, Kansas-Nebraska was another bitter pill to swallow—perhaps the South had overstepped. Merchant Amos Lawrence wrote on the impact of the Burns case: “We went to bed one night, old fashioned, conservative, compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”
For Sumner, the Burns episode, which made him feel “hum-bled in the dust,” along with final passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Southern threats simply fortified his desire to renew his war on slavery. He planned to again demand the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act and seek “the complete annulling by the North of all other compromises” on the odious institution. He promised Theodore Parker: “Slavery will be discussed with us as never before.”
“I find myself a popular man,” Charles Sumner wrote upon his return to Boston in the late summer of 1854. “If my election to the Senate were now pending before the million [sic] of educated people whom I now represent, I should be returned without any opposition.”
He had battled hard throughout the final debate on the Kansas-Nebraska bill. In June, he launched into a fresh and ferocious debate on slavery when, in the wake of the Burns case, nearly three thousand Massachusetts citizens petitioned Congress for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. He said he would never support it, again prompting Southern retorts that he refused to uphold the constitution. “I recognize no obligation in the Constitution of the United States to bind me to help to reduce a man to slavery,” he retorted during debate. They labeled him a fanatic, a charge he welcomed, saying Bostonians were familiar with the label. “It is the same which opposed the execution of the Stamp Act, and finally secured its repeal; it is the same which opposed the Tea-tax; it is the fanaticism which finally triumphed on Bunker Hill.” When another Southerner said Boston was filled with traitors, Sumner said the charge was nothing new. “Boston of old was the home of Hancock and Adams. Her traitors now are those who are truly animated by the spirit of the American Revolution.”
During the debate over the Massachusetts petition, Sumner spoke in bitter personal language, intending from the outset to be “as severe as the overseer's lash.” He singled out South Carolina's Butler and Virginia's Mason for special treatment, rebuking their “plantation manners” and claiming both men viewed the United States Senate not as an august body, but as a “plantation, well stocked with slaves, over which the lash of the overseer has full sway.” Furious Southern senators explored the possibility of expelling Sumner for perjury and treason, but realized they could not gather the votes.
Sumner attained new stature during the summer of 1854. He proved to his supporters that he was more than an intellectual; he could fight back and stand tall against criticism, even when outnumbered. “You have done gallantly,” his friend Richard Henry Dana wrote. “You don't know how rejoiced I am that a Northern gentlemen and scholar has met them in the true spirit of a cavalier.” Sumner returned to Massachusetts with new purpose.
He was further buoyed in September when he addressed the regular nominating convention of the new Republican Party, an antislavery coalition of former Free-Soilers, Whigs, and even some Democrats. He blasted the national proslavery administration, branded the Kansas-Nebraska Act as an atrocity, and said federal authorities had shamelessly run roughshod over the law and Boston in the Burns case; the courthouse was guarded by a “prostituted militia” who saw that the “precious sentiments, the religion, the pride of glory of Massachusetts were trampled in the dust.” He viewed the new Republican Party, fledgling though it was, as the only antidote to the slave power, arguing that neither Democrats nor Whigs could effectively carry on the fight, especially against the “unutterable atrocity” that was the Fugitive Slave Act.
He was greeted with a thunderous ovation from the immense throng and was triumphant at the response, though Sumner's elation may have been premature. The Republican Party had few followers and would not be a real factor in Massachusetts politics for close to two years. For now, though, what it lacked in numbers and political clout, it made up for in enthusiasm. “The people were tired of the old parties & they have made a new channel,” he wrote.
Charles Sumner himself would eventually be responsible for the growth of the Republicans on a national scale, though neither he nor anyone else could ever have predicted how.
Twenty years after he had seen his first slaves, Charles Sumner had become the nation's strongest, clearest, and most resolute antislavery champion. He had started his Senate career as a mere thorn in the side of Southern slaveholders; by 1855, he had emerged as their most formidable and dangerous opponent.
At the same time, Sumner helped lead and now represented the mood shift that had occurred in Massachusetts in five short years. Once solidly moderate and governed quietly by its State Street merchant and business interests, once tolerant but suspicious of abolitionists, once opposed to the extension of slavery but ambivalent about its continued existence in its current locations, Massachusetts had moved closer to Sumner. Webster's political pandering, the constant bullying by slaveholders, the sordid Sims and Burns cases, the threats against Sumner, and Douglas's opportunism in proposing the Kansas-Nebraska law—all conspired to spread the seeds of abolitionism across a much broader swath of a state that considered itself the birth-place of liberty and freedom.
Abolitionism still was not the mainstream philosophy in Massachusetts, but it would not take much to make it so. Southerners now correctly identified Sumner and Massachusetts as the twin pillars supporting activist antislavery sentiment throughout the North.
If Southerners felt contempt for Sumner the antislavery activist, they also despised Sumner the man. His acerbic language, his air of superiority, and his rudeness all rankled Southern sensibilities and violated the Southern code of how a gentleman should behave. It was not only what Sumner said that infuriated the South, but how he said it. Debate was expected and acceptable—personal insults were not. These irritating character traits that had shaped Sumner's personality for years made him more than a political target. They made him an enemy.
FIVE
THE MAKING OF CHARLES SUMNER
If psychoanalysis had been part of the American vocabulary in 1811, it wo
uld be easy to conclude that Charles Sumner's difficulties empathizing with and relating to others could be traced almost literally to the day he was born.
On January 6 of that year, Charles and his twin sister, Matilda, entered the world prematurely, struggling to survive, each weighing barely three and a half pounds. They were the eldest of the nine children who would eventually be born to Charles Pinckney and Relief Jacob Sumner of Boston. Charles was nursed by his mother, but Matilda was turned over to a nurse's care.
Relief Sumner's decision to separate the children appeared to have long-standing consequences; Charles and Matilda were not close and never shared the deep and inexplicable bond that is so often associated with twins. Sumner barely mentions Matilda in any of his writings, and when she died at age twenty-one from tuberculosis after a year's illness, her twin brother, who wrote fiery letters expressing his outrage on many topics, reacted with only cool detachment. “My grief, whatever it may be, has not the source that yours has,” he wrote to a college chum who had expressed sympathy. “I have lost a sister; but I still have other sisters and brothers, entitled to my instructions and protection. I strive to forget my loss in an increased regard for the living.”
Sumner explained to another friend that his understanding of his sister's disease was that it carried “no decided pain,” and that it often deceived its victims into believing they may regain their health. He admitted that he was not sure whether Matilda felt this way—he never asked her and “she seemed as studiously to avoid” the topic. Sumner described his normally cool and reserved father as greatly distressed over Matilda's passing (“More than once I saw tears steal from his eyes”), and his mother as “dejected and comfortless,” but young Charles expressed no such emotions, saying simply: “She is now beyond the show of my affection and regard.” Almost inconceivably, in the same letter in which he dismissed his friend's sympathy over Matilda's death, Sumner declared himself in excellent health. “I never was better,” he wrote.
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