With women, especially, Sumner exhibited great awkwardness. His dark, wavy hair and rugged good looks were more than offset by his dourness and insecurity. Strong, intelligent women intimidated him, yet because of his social standing, this was precisely the type of potential wife he was expected to pursue. He had grown up in a home in which letting down his guard was a sign of vulnerability, and this extended to his relationship with women—fear of rejection and humiliation accompanied him his entire life. Julia Ward, who later married Sumner's friend, Samuel Gridley Howe, claimed Charles had “no heart.” An indignant Sumner protested: “I have a heart—it is not my fault if all its throbbing had been in vain.” Holmes declared that Sumner was “less at ease with women” than with men. Once at a social gathering, his friends noticed him talking uneasily to an attractive woman and wagered how long it would take for Sumner to turn away and revert to his more comfortable surroundings—talking to men. They roared with laughter when it happened in a matter of minutes. Frustrated with his own lack of success in dealing with women, Sumner exclaimed: “I would walk on foot around the earth to find a woman who would love me with…truth.”
Perhaps women sensed Sumner's self-centeredness more acutely than his male friends. In the matter of relationships, even when they did not involve him directly, Sumner made his own feelings paramount. When Howe announced he would marry Julia Ward in 1843, Sumner's primary emotion was not happiness for the couple, but despair for himself. He wailed: “I am alone—alone…. My friends fall away from me. I lead a joyless life, with very little sympathy. What then will become of me?” When Henry Wadsworth Longfellow announced his impending marriage the same year, Sumner was distraught; the two men had shared long conversations and spent hours in each other's company. “What shall I do these long summer evenings?” Sumner wondered to Longfellow. “Howe has gone…now you have gone, and nobody is left with whom I can have sweet sympathy.” Taking pity on Sumner, Longfellow and his wife, Fanny (Appleton), allowed Sumner to accompany them on their honeymoon to the Catskills.
As Sumner struggled with all of these relationships, he continued to express an acute sense of loneliness, and he increasingly adopted and relished the martyr's role of standing alone against perceived injustices, personal and public. Both his narcissistic tendencies and his position on issues hardened, and the personal nature of his public utterances became more intense. Upon his return from Europe, and throughout the 1840s, he was more convinced than ever of his rightness on the slavery issue—and on virtually everything else. He was defined by his grandiose self-image, his desire for recognition, and his harsh response to almost any criticism. “Once Sumner suspected a slight,” biographer David Donald wrote, “he magnified every occurrence, real or fancied, into an assault.”
Sumner's aggressive personal attacks on public figures first occurred in the mid-1840s. During debates about the condition and methods of Boston's prison system, Sumner launched into several diatribes against Louis Dwight, secretary of the Boston Prison Discipline Society. Rather than simply disagreeing with Dwight's positions, Sumner angrily denounced Dwight's reports as “lies” and “willful and unwarrantable perversions of the truth.” Later he described Dwight as lazy, inefficient, and extravagant, and publicly denounced one Dwight-authored report on the Boston prison system as “flimsy” and a waste of money. Waving the pages of Dwight's report above his head during a meeting, Sumner said, “Our three thousand dollars have been wrapt here as in a napkin.”
Dwight battled back, but he was no match for Sumner and the public ridicule took its toll; the prison administrator suffered a nervous breakdown, though he remained secretary until his death in 1854. For his part, Sumner believed he had contributed to the overall improvement of the penal system by pointing out the flaws in Dwight's leadership. He also showed no sympathy for Dwight's emotional condition, informing his brother George, “Mr. Dwight, the secretary, has become insane, whether incurably so or not, I do not know.”
Members of Boston society, including influential leaders on Beacon Hill, were shocked at Sumner's intemperate attitude and vituperative language. Some stopped speaking to him. Others were mystified that he chose anger and personal insults as his debate weapons. His actions against Dwight cost Sumner a chair at Harvard Law School; in the opinion of the scholar who got the job, the conservative Corporation of Harvard College “consider Sumner in the Law-school, as unsuitable as a Bull in a china shop.”
Sumner next felt the full brunt of Boston society's alienation when he trained his sights and his scalding tongue on respected Massachusetts Congressman Robert C. Winthrop after the representative voted in favor of the Mexican War in 1846. An apoplectic Sumner described Winthrop's action as “the worst act that was ever done by a Boston representative.” Sumner said the congressman's actions could not be “forgotten on Earth [and] must be remembered in heaven.” Comparing Winthrop to a modern Pontius Pilate, he added: “Blood! blood! is on the hands of the representative from Boston. Not all great Neptune's ocean can wash them clean!”
An angry Winthrop responded with a letter that terminated relations with Sumner for the next sixteen years. He declared that Sumner's words were full of “the grossest perversions” because they attacked not just Winthrop's actions but his integrity. Winthrop was hurt on a visceral level, and believed it “inconceivable” that a man who had professed to be his friend “should turn upon me with such ferocity, denounce me so publicly and grossly, and pursue me with such relentless malignancy.” Entirely unaware of the power of his own words, Sumner was surprised by Winthrop's angry reaction.
Again, much of Boston, including most of his close friends, turned against Sumner after the personal vitriol he exhibited against Winthrop. His friend Cornelius Felton ventured that Sumner was becoming so intolerant that he believed the “difference from his opinions can only proceed from a bad head or a corrupt heart.” Sumner was totally alone. “There was a time when I was welcome at almost every house within two miles of us,” he remarked while riding down Beacon Street in Boston. “But now hardly any are open to me.” One member of Boston's wealthy elite who knew Sumner said: “His solitude is glacial. He had nothing but himself to think about.” Despite his isolation, Sumner interpreted his condition as a type of social martyrdom, the price to pay for the sake of adhering to principle. He derived enormous satisfaction from “doing his duty.”
Sumner continued his ways as the 1850s began, eviscerating Daniel Webster and branding him a “traitor” for his role in the Compromise of 1850. After his election to the Senate, Sumner had an argument about slavery with his friend, Francis Lieber, while Lieber was teaching in South Carolina. Sumner blasted Lieber for his views on the subject at hand, but he did not stop there. He accused his old friend of becoming “the apologist of slavery.” Incensed and hurt, Lieber had to remind himself that “Sumner uses words as boys do stones,” to “break windows and knock down flowerpots, while he all the time plays the offended.” As if to prove Lieber's point, in 1853, Sumner called the Congress of which he was a member “the worst—or rather it promises to be the worst—since the Constitution was adopted. It is the Devil's own.”
None of this ferocious language or personal bitterness was accidental. Sumner intensified it during the rancorous debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, often citing his intentions to shock his opponents with the sharpness of his words. He could never admit that he was wrong or that his tactics were mistaken. In his view, his critics almost always demonstrated poor judgment. Nor could he grasp why they would take offense to criticism that questioned their moral character, their virtue, or their integrity.
As storm clouds gathered over Kansas during the winter and spring of 1856, Sumner's personal attacks continued, particularly against Southern leaders. “Bleeding Kansas” became his rallying cry and he blamed the slave oligarchy for spilling that blood. He expressed utter disdain for the South, especially South Carolina, the staunchest of the slaveholding states. During his preparation of “The Crime Against Ka
nsas” speech, he planned all along to pepper his arguments with personal attacks as a way to call attention to his larger themes. Aside from pointing out the injustices taking place in Kansas, he could not resist insulting his opponents, believing it was necessary to “say something of a general character, not belonging to the argument, in response to Senators who have raised themselves to eminence on this floor in championship of human wrongs.”
As Senator Charles Sumner approached the biggest speech of his career in May 1856, his attitude of superiority, his need to render judgment, antagonized and infuriated the South and even irritated most of his Northern colleagues. As historian Allan Nevins would write years later, by the spring of 1856, Sumner's arrogance had cloaked him with the unofficial but nonetheless befitting title of “the best-hated man in the chamber.”
All that was missing when Charles Sumner entered the Senate chamber on May 19, 1856, was a fanfare of trumpets. The throngs awaiting his words, the intense heat, the grand stage, the sectional tension, the magnitude of the moment, the nation's eyes upon him—all of this lent a drama that suited Sumner's thirst for attention and his irresistible desire to preach and moralize to the masses, all in the name of their enlightenment. He felt the occasion was “the greatest…that has ever occurred in our history,” a categorization that presumably referred to the future of slavery and the events swirling in Kansas, but likely also served as a less than subtle reference that he would be addressing these issues.
As always, Sumner was prepared. He laboriously wrote out his speech, which, in printed form, would span 112 pages; his remarks were being set in type on the day of his speech and printed copies would be available within a couple of days. As was his custom, he committed the speech to memory, practicing for hours on end, so he could speak without referring to the text. Senator Stephen Douglas later mocked Sumner's theatrics, saying his Massachusetts colleague had “his speech written, printed, committed to memory, practiced every night before the glass with a Negro boy to hold the candle and watch the gestures, and annoying the boarders in their neighboring rooms until they were forced to quit the house!”
Douglas may have been exaggerating, but Sumner did practice in front of New York Senator William Henry Seward and his wife, Frances, forcing them to sit through the entire address—ostensibly to get their advice, but more likely to provide Sumner with a live audience. Frances Steward strongly advised Sumner to remove the stinging personal attacks in the speech, and her husband disapproved of his “gratuitous assault against the honor of South Carolina.”
Sumner ignored them both. Two decades of hardening anti-slavery views coupled with a lifetime of ignoring the feelings of others left little doubt about his course of action. He had promised “unsparing language,” and he would deliver. Violence on the plains, high drama in Washington, acrimony between North and South. It was upon this canvas that Charles Sumner prepared to apply slashing and scarring brushstrokes, designed to enrage and inflame, setting in motion a series of events that ultimately would lead America to the edge of the abyss.
At one o'clock in the afternoon, in a packed and stifling Senate chamber, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts rose to denounce and demand redress for “The Crime Against Kansas.”
SIX
THE CRIME AGAINST KANSAS
A profound occasion and a dramatic setting called for a powerful opening and Sumner did not disappoint. “A crime has been committed,” he began, “which is without example in the records of the past…. It is the rape of a virgin territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of slavery.” Only a handful of Senators were absent (the ailing Butler of South Carolina was one of them); the rest listened intently as Sumner promised to strip bare the proslavery conspiracy against Kansas in all its brutality, without, in the words of one correspondent, “a single rag, or fig-leaf, to cover its vileness.”
Sumner's speech would cover a total of five hours over two days—three hours on the first day—and one New York antislavery correspondent described him as “animated and glowing throughout, hurling defiance among the opposition, and bravely denouncing the Kansas swindle from first to last.” Without doubt, in that writer's view, some of Sumner's passages “electrified the Chamber, and gave a new conception of the man.”
Sumner's vitriolic opening castigated the slave power and its crime against Kansas, “a wickedness which I now expose,” fueled not simply by any “common lust for power,” but rather “in the hope of adding to the power of slavery in the National Government.” Sumner charged that the power employed by proslavery forces “compelling Kansas to this pollution, all for the sake of political power” represented, again, “an essential wickedness that makes other public crimes seem like virtues.”
Indeed, Sumner argued to his colleagues, the violence perpetrated by proslavery men in Kansas had forced the citizens of Lawrence to arm themselves before they slept, and despite the bitter winter, deploy “sentinels” to keep watch at night against surprise attacks. “Murder has stalked—assassination has skulked in the tall grass of the prairie,” he said. Worse, this violence was originating outside of Kansas, imposed by men who relied on brute force to accomplish their lawless ends because they could not achieve their goals peaceably. The Kansas violence had brought the entire nation to the brink, Sumner contended. “The strife is no longer local, but national,” he warned. “Even now, while I speak, portents lower in the horizon, threatening to darken the land, which already palpitates with the mutterings of civil war.”
For the rest of his oration on Monday, Sumner outlined the four “Crimes Against Kansas” and the four apologies offered for the crimes by their perpetrators. The first crime was the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act—a “swindle” in Sumner's view—which repealed the Missouri Compromise and opened the Western territories to slavery. The legislation made a mockery of Douglas's popular sovereignty, instead bringing about “popular slavery.” The second crime was proslavery sympathizer President Franklin Pierce's decision to appoint a territorial official in Kansas who enforced the “tyrannical usurpation” of freedom by Southern slave mongers. Third, Sumner claimed that proslavery forces in Missouri organized associations to intimidate Northerners from settling peacefully in Kansas. And fourth, the most heinous aspect of the crime was when slavery had gained “entry to free soil” because of the willingness of the “Slave Power” to use force against antislavery advocates already living in Kansas. The conspiracy of the “reptile monster,” slavery, was led by Senator David Atchison of Missouri.
“Slavery now stands erect, clanking its chains on the Territory of Kansas,” Sumner roared, “surrounded by a code of death, and trampling upon all cherished liberties, whether of speech, the press, the bar, the trial by jury, or the electoral franchise.”
Almost as egregious as the “crime,” in Sumner's opinion, were the four apologies for its perpetration—the Apology Tyrannical, the Apology Imbecile, the Apology Absurd, and the Apology Infamous. The Apology Tyrannical was the approval by Kansas territorial Governor Andrew Reeder of the “usurping” legislature that the Missouri border ruffians had success-fully established. The Apology Imbecile was the reply to the salvo Sumner fired against President Pierce, who claimed he had no power to intervene in Kansas, a position which encouraged the border ruffians. Under the full control of the slave power, Pierce was “ready at all times” to do or “not to do precisely” as it dictated. Indeed, Sumner declared Pierce not merely an imbecile, but an “idiot.”
Sumner said the Apology Absurd referred to an accusation by Southerners that a secret organization existed in Kansas that was promoting the total abolition of slavery and the admittance of the territory to the Union as a free state. According to the rumor, the organization's secret charter was pulled from the mouth of one of its founders as he was attempting to swallow it rather than be caught with the document on his person. Finally, the Apology Infamous, according to Sumner, was the Southern denunciation of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which the slave power saw as a coll
ection of wealthy interlopers from the North conspiring to dictate policy in Kansas. Not so, said Sumner, who argued that the company served a noble purpose to help foster “human progress” in Kansas by investing in schools, churches, and other institutions.
It was on this last point that Sumner angered the South further by claiming that Massachusetts was on the side of the angels in the slavery debate, and that his Massachusetts roots, grounded in freedom and liberty, provided him with the moral nourishment to plead the case for a free Kansas, “a cause which surpasses in moral grandeur the whole war of the Revolution.” It was Massachusetts, he declared, with its spiritual, intellectual, and moral superiority that would transmit the light from its “far darting rays whenever ignorance, wretchedness, or wrong prevail.”
On the second day of his speech, Sumner spoke for an additional two hours on the four “Remedies” available to stop the violence in Kansas: the Remedy of Tyranny, the Remedy of Folly, the Remedy of Injustice and Civil War, and finally, the Remedy of Justice and Peace.
The Remedy of Tyranny was President Pierce's proclamation that the government would enforce the laws of Kansas. Sumner argued that because the legislature “elected” by Kansas was illegal, any laws it passed were illegitimate, and to enforce such laws would constitute tyranny. The Remedy of Folly was the suggestion by South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler that the people of Kansas should be disarmed, which Sumner argued would blatantly deprive them of their constitutional rights under the Second Amendment. The Remedy of Injustice and Civil War referred to Senator Stephen Douglas's bill arguing that Kansas should be admitted as a state to the Union when it reached a certain population, which would ensure that it would be a slave state in the view of most with the infusion of border ruffians from Missouri and settlers from other Southern states. At various times in the speech, Sumner referred to the Missouri invaders as “murderous robbers” and men who had “renewed the incredible atrocities of the Assassins and the Thugs.”
The Caning Page 7