The Caning

by Stephen Puleo

  His feelings toward his twin sister carried over to most of the rest of his family. Sumner grew up in a loveless home, raised by a stoic, distracted mother who was unable to express affection (it was not until after her death that Sumner learned that she had kept a lock of his baby hair), and a rigid, demanding father who tolerated little in the way of mistakes or underachievement. Sumner resented his younger brothers, whom he viewed as rivals for his father's affection, and determined that most of his sisters were incapable of making decisions or getting through daily life without his wise counsel. Sumner's unhappy home experience and lack of emotional ties to his family, manifested primarily by his inability to please his father, had a profound impact on his behavior throughout his life. His unpleasant family situation laid the foundation for his self-centeredness, his paranoia, his often desperate desire for praise, his lack of empathy and concern for the feelings of others, his inability to employ humor and self-effacement, and his eagerness to wear the martyr's mantle. These characteristics contributed to irrational petulance in many of his relationships, a reflexive intolerance for criticism or opinions that differed from his own, and a deep need to resort to invective in his speeches and writings—he was either oblivious to, or uncaring about, the wounding power of his venomous words.

  The aloofness and lack of affection that marked Sumner's relationship with his family deeply influenced his interaction with others and ultimately had an enormous impact on the nation.

  “I have a son, named Charles Sumner, in his fifteenth year, and large of his age, but not of so firm and solid a constitution as I should wish him to have,” Charles Pinckney Sumner wrote to Captain Alden Partridge, commander of the American Literary, Scientific, and Military Academy in Middletown, Connecticut. Although young Charles had good grades, at the time his father could not afford to send him to college, and, he stressed to Captain Partridge, “The life of a scholar would be too sedentary and inactive for him.”

  It was clear early that Charles Pinckney had questions about his son's ability to transition to manhood. Despite his strong academic performance at Boston Latin School, young Charles was uncoordinated and had no interest in sports or games. Boys nicknamed him “Gawky Sumner” and a friend later pointed out that he “never, so far as I know, fished or shot or rowed; he had no fancy for dogs and horses; and in a word, was without all those tastes which are almost universal with men of his age.”

  Maturity and accomplishment were paramount in his father's eyes. The Sumners could trace their Massachusetts lineage to the 1630s and they took great pride in their deep roots and their contributions to the commonwealth. Charles Pinckney did not demand so much of his other sons; but Charles, bearing his father's name, carried a special burden to uphold the family's reputation. “Charles,” his father said, “upon your discretion and good deportment the happiness of my life will in no trifling measure depend. If any persons entertain a favorable opinion of you, I hope you will never disappoint them.” Young Charles resented his father for setting this impossible goal.

  Charles Pinckney's fortunes improved when he became sheriff of Suffolk County, a position that paid more than $2,000 a year, and he was able to send young Charles to Harvard. Despite the fact that Charles had vacated his father's Beacon Hill home to study in Cambridge, the elder Sumner did not let up on his son. He wrote a long send-off letter to Charles urging him to “preserve…a good character [and] associate with those who have it; shun those who have no good character of their own.” He required Sumner to report every week on what happened at school and kept meticulous watch of his son's expenses. Anything less than perfection was unacceptable. One of Sumner's biographers points out that, despite young Charles's absence for only three of 580 classes and chapel exercises during his first year of school—a remarkable attendance record—his father was far from impressed. “It is of little avail to have expensive and learned professorships established at college if a scholar does not devote his whole times to the duties prescribed,” Charles Pinckney admonished his son.

  Charles Pinckney wanted his son to achieve an exalted and perhaps impossible well-roundedness. The elder Sumner loved the scholarly life, but as the son of a Revolutionary War hero himself, he also wanted young Charles to excel physically and attain the proud bearing and strength of character that military training often produces. When Charles paid a visit to West Point during a Harvard recess, his father wrote a letter of introduction to the commander of the military academy in which he lamented that his son was “somewhat deficient in strength.” Without a doubt, Charles Pinckney wrote, had Sumner been under the commander's tutelage for the past three years that he spent under “mere literary men,” his son would now be “as strong as a soldier of Bonaparte.”

  Even after he graduated from Harvard and contemplated his future course in life, Charles complained to a friend that his father offered “nought by way of encouragement. He seems determined to let me shape my own course, so that if I am wise, I shall be wise for myself; and if I am foolish, I alone shall bear it.” Expressing his gratefulness for his friend's support, Charles contrasted that with his own family's lack of interest in his future fortunes, which left him “despondent.” When Charles went to Europe later, he made a point of not corresponding with his father. “Where Charles is now and what his designs [are] I am ignorant,” Charles Pinckney confessed in 1839.

  To compensate for his inability to please his father, Charles Sumner sought the company and mentoring of other men who were contemporaries of his father—former president John Quincy Adams; Joseph Story, at various times speaker of the Massachusetts House, Supreme Court Justice, and Harvard law professor; and Unitarian reformer William Ellery Channing. It was under their tutelage that Sumner gained self-confidence, honed his ideas, and entered the world of Boston's elite. Story, especially, was everything Sumner's father was not—warm, affectionate, complimentary. It is telling that Sumner, who does not mention his father in his autobiography, writes of Story: “Who could forget his bounding step, his contagious laugh, his exhilarating voice, his beaming smile, his countenance that shone like a benediction?” Sumner remembered Story as a man “whose face was never turned to me, except in affection.” When Story died, Sumner wrote that the loss created “a chasm which I shrink from contemplating.”

  Sumner's own father's death created no such chasm. Charles Pinckney raised a son who feared making mistakes, desperately needed the acceptance of other men, and craved public attention and affirmation, all in response to a dreary upbringing and an iron rule at home. When Charles Pinckney died in April 1839, at the age of sixty-three, it was almost a relief to his son. Young Charles was traveling in Europe and opted not to return from Rome, “for I do not see any particular thing in which I could be useful.” To his friend George Hillard, he admitted that his father's death “has caused me many painful emotions—not the less painful because [it is] beyond the reach of ordinary sympathy.” Hillard knew of Sumner's strained relationship with his father, which prompted Charles to add: “To you… I need say nothing.” To another sympathizer, he wrote: “I cannot affect to feel entirely the grief that others have on such a bereavement.” Nonetheless, his father's death—indeed, the memory of their relationship—was a source of “unfeigned sorrow” to Sumner, “[which] has thrown a shadow across my Italian pleasures.”

  Other friends tried to reassure him. “You were a good son,” wrote Francis Lieber in his condolence letter. Henry R. Cleveland, who knew all the circumstances of Sumner's home life, added frankly, “That your duty to him was fully done must now be a source of infinite satisfaction.”

  And then Cleveland added a brutally honest assessment that even Sumner may have been afraid to state: “What your father has been to you, you have not disguised from me.” Thus, it was not surprising that Sumner was “not as deeply afflicted by his death as you would have been if he had been like a father to you.”

  Charles Sumner's personal travails started with his father but did not end there. His relationshi
ps with virtually all of his siblings were marred by clumsiness and coldness for most of their lives. With one exception—his sister Mary—Sumner constantly and alternately lectured, admonished, tolerated, or outright ignored his siblings. Often he was as domineering as his father, reproaching his brothers and sisters for what he perceived as their shortcomings and lack of discipline. He did not include them in important moments in his life, made scant references to any of them in his autobiography, and penned letters to them that were professorial, preachy, condescending, and tedious. For all but Mary, he had little to say when his siblings died, and when he did mention them—as he did when Matilda passed—his words carried either the impersonal musings of the philosopher or the arm's length observation of a stranger. Expressing love was a rarity for Charles Sumner.

  Occasionally, he seemed to recognize his shortcomings and his inability to correct them. On his first trip to Washington, D.C., he wrote a letter to twelve-year-old Mary. After a particularly lengthy and dense recap of his day (“I have found time to read an able work…and to run my eyes through a law book, and to prepare a law-argument of four pages”), Sumner finally seems to realize that the letter's content was not suitable for his young sister. “My dear Mary, I am ashamed of addressing such a letter as the above to you,” he concluded. “It contains nothing, I feel, adapted to your age, and should rather be addressed to father.” After a similar missive to fourteen-year-old Jane, he wrote: “Pardon the above dissertation.”

  Sumner was full of weighty advice for his young siblings, too. In the same letter from Washington, he urged Jane to study Latin to “discipline your mind,” and read books that will become “constant friends to relieve you from lonesomeness and perhaps sorrow.” He pointed out that his advice in the letter consisted of “incoherent hints,” and offered—in a gesture that must have frightened his young sister—to “expand them into a treatise.” Five years later, he wrote to his fourteen-year-old brother, Horace, from London and acknowledged that he simply couldn't resist imparting mundane advice and exhorting the young man to study hard. “You will, I fear, think me a dull preacher, and will dread my letters as much as the minister's sermon,” he wrote, “but I cannot take my pen to write any of you without, forth-with, falling into this vein.” While Horace might find his older brother's words “irksome” at this point in his life, Sumner was sure that “if we both live, you will thank me hereafter.”

  Nor did things change much as the years passed. Sumner's brother George, who traveled to Russia and Europe extensively and at one point did not see Charles for fifteen years, nevertheless could not escape his older brother's incessant advice and nit-picking. After George announced that he planned to write a book about his travel adventures, Charles launched into a torrent of suggestions and asserted smugly: “I shall criticize you in order to save you from the criticism of others.” He urged his brother to “study your subject thoroughly” and suggested that he think long and hard before he put words to paper: “You may imagine that you have the subject well digested in your mind. Believe me, you will see it more clearly two years from now.” He admonished George for using the word “swill” in a letter instead of “dirt,” warning him against using such crass words and reminding him that a “pure and undefiled English style” could only be achieved from conversing with the best authors and “considerable practice.”

  As for his travel habits, Charles reminded George to “engage an instructor” to learn the language of the country he was visiting, to change his shirt once a day on the European continent (“every day should be clean-shirt day”), and to bathe “once or twice a week or oftener.” When George announced that he would be visiting France and England, Charles confided to a friend that, brother or not, he would not introduce George to his acquaintances in those countries “unless I feel assured that he is entirely presentable.”

  All of his advice, Sumner assured George, was “written in a brotherly spirit of love” and was not meant to insult or hurt. Perhaps realizing that his words could be construed as overly harsh, Sumner added: “I wish I could talk with you for one half-day; I could explain my views…in a way that should avoid mistake.”

  Occasionally, a sibling hinted that Charles's constant pillorying and his inability to show affection might actually have masked his true feelings. His sister Julia said: “There was a world of love and tenderness within him—often hidden under a cold exterior, or apparently crusted over with a chilling coat of reserve.”

  At no time was Sumner's chilling reserve more apparent than on the occasions of most of his siblings' deaths. His unemotional response to his twin Matilda's demise notwithstanding, at least he acknowledged it. But when his sister Jane died in 1837 at age seventeen from typhoid, Sumner was excitedly preparing to sail for Europe and mentioned nothing about the loss. He feuded with his brother, Henry, for years and remained silent upon his death in 1852, even as the sectional debate over slavery was heating up. In November 1856 (as Sumner was attempting to recover from his beating by Preston Brooks), Charles did not comment when his brother Albert, his wife, and their only daughter, Catherine, age fourteen, were killed in a tragic shipwreck sixty miles from Nantucket Light.

  Earlier, his brother, Horace, died in a separate shipwreck off Fire Island in New York in 1850, and Sumner did offer comment, but again found it difficult to express sympathy. Horace, who had been an invalid for much of his life, was returning from a trip he had taken to Italy in an effort to restore his health. His ship, the Elizabeth, ran aground and broke up—Horace tried to swim ashore and was never seen again. Charles told his friend, Samuel Gridley Howe, that Horace was returning to America “full of hope” and that his mother and sister Julia were anxiously awaiting his return and his stories. Sumner recounted the feelings of both women, but again, remained guarded about his own thoughts: “To them especially it is a bitter thing to lose him,” Sumner said. “All who knew him speak warmly of his gentle, loving & utterly unselfish nature.” Julia was Horace's constant companion—the two attended concerts and went horse-back riding together—and Charles admitted he could not find the words to console his sister. “I feel painfully my own inability to supply her loss, by sympathy or companionship.”

  Surprising, given his lack of relationship with Horace, Sumner did visit the site of the shipwreck, and walked the beach, which was “strewn for miles with fragments of the wreck.” Sumner said that because of the “rage” of the sea in the area, it seemed “unreasonable to expect” that his brother's body would ever be found. “My brother was an invalid, & has passed away from a life of suffering,” was all Sumner could reveal of his own feelings.

  The one exception to Sumner's unemotional reactions to his siblings' deaths was the deep sadness that consumed him when Mary died of tuberculosis in October 1844 at the age of twenty-two. Mary's demise was long and painful, and as the end neared, the thirty-three-year-old Charles—suffering his own emotional and physical breakdown from exhaustion—was bedridden in the room adjacent to his terminally ill sister. Some believed Charles was near death, too; his closest friends, George Hillard, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Cornelius Felton, who visited Charles, were shocked when he made a full recovery.

  Whether it was Mary's inherent gentleness, her long illness, or Charles's witnessing of her daily suffering even as he recovered from his illness, she was the only member of the family with whom Charles developed a deep attachment. He was devastated when she died. “I had long expected this blow,” he wrote, “but no preparation could render it other than bitter.” No other death, before or after, affected him so deeply. “I dwell often on the image of her beauty, of her sweet nature, and of her most serene soul,” he wrote a few months after her funeral.

  The normally staid, cool, self-centered Charles Sumner even admitted he would have traded places with Mary. “I feel that it would have been far better had the health, which was unexpectedly renewed in my veins, been bestowed upon her in my stead,” he wrote.

  It was the one time Charles Su
mner expressed unconditional love for a family member.

  * * *

  Charles Sumner's friends—and he had many, especially in his younger days—were also familiar with his brooding, self-righteous, and introverted manner.

  They enjoyed discussing politics and issues with him, but worried about his inability to relax and engage in pleasant conversation. “Though he was an interesting talker, he had no lightness of hand,” William Story wrote, pointing out that Sumner was “totally put off his balance” by good-natured banter, and when friends tried to joke with him “his expression was one of total astonishment.” He had no sense of humor “and little sense of it in others.” Indeed, Story said, during verbal jousting with his companions, Sumner was “never ready [with] a retort, tacked slowly, like a frigate” and was “almost impervious to a joke.”

  Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes described Sumner as “pleasant, affable, and cheerful,” but added he had “little imagination, wit, or sense of humor.” Holmes recalled that Sumner's group of friends teased him about his inability to enjoy or even recognize mirthfulness, joking that “if one told Charles Sumner that the moon was made of green cheese, he would controvert the alleged fact in all sincerity, and give good reasons why it could not be so.”