Schurz was mostly though not completely correct about Sumner’s political blindness. Sumner was keenly aware of the world in which he operated, but rather than usually engaged in the subtleties of regular politics he sought to influence its direction mainly through his oratory, the classical subject at which he was best in teaching at Harvard. The alpha of his tactics and omega of his strategies was his language. Sumner was hardly an organization man, but nobody would do more to infuse the Republican Party with a sense of moral purpose through personal self-sacrifice. He was also one of a handful of men who exercised his influence through six presidencies from prewar crisis to Civil War to Reconstruction—and his ideas would live on to inspire the civil rights movement nearly a century later.
Sumner was one of the most cosmopolitan Americans of his generation, as a young man moving easily among lords and literary giants in London, dubbed an honorary member of the theatrical Garrick Club, accepted as an equal by the latter-day philosophes of Paris, learning French and studying law at the Sorbonne, and befriending artists in Rome. He made himself at home abroad. Despite his wide travels and cultural horizons, however, he remained a Puritan at heart and never ceased to be shocked by European mores.
In the Washington of the 1850s, a thoroughly Southern city, dominated by Southerners in the anterooms of Congress and the drawing rooms of the grand houses, Sumner was more than a bit awkward in a society where Southern women exercised their wiles. Handsome and genteel, Sumner strangely lacked the basic elements of attraction. His manner with the fair sex was like his orations, rehearsed and pedagogical. Varina Davis, Jefferson Davis’s wife, recalled, “His conversation was studied but brilliant, his manner deferential only as a matter of social policy, consequently, he never inspired the women to whom he was attentive with the pleasant consciousness of possessing his regard or esteem. He was . . . fond of talking to Southern women, and prepared himself with great care for these conversational pyrotechnics, in which, as well as I remember, there was much Greek fire, and the ‘set piece’ were numerous; he never intruded his peculiar views upon us in any degree, but read up on the Indian mutiny, lace, Demosthenes, jewels, Seneca’s morals, intaglios, the Platonian theory, and once gave me quite an interesting resume of the history of dancing.” (In 1866, Sumner, at the age of fifty-four, would marry the twenty-seven-year-old Alice Mason Hooper, a beautiful, vivacious, and decidedly nonintellectual widow of Brahmin Boston background, daughter of a wealthy congressman, who preferred dancing and parties, and, when Sumner ignored her, she drifted into the company of a young attaché at the British embassy. The marriage was nasty, brutish, and short. Alice felt neglected and treated cruelly, while Sumner, who “supposed there was an attraction about him superior to balls,” felt his “self-esteem was wounded,” according to a gossipy account of the ill-suited couple in a Boston newspaper.)
Sumner’s ostracism in the Washington of the 1850s hardly came as a surprise; it mirrored the pattern of his experience in Boston. He had been branded by exclusion from the beginning of his political life. His amiability in the capital was accepted only to the degree it was reserved to conversation of the classics about which Southern senators flattered themselves they were learned and did not cross the boundary into slavery. Sumner embraced his status as a political pariah as an affirmation that he was doing right. He proudly wore his dissonance as an adornment of a more profound election. After he had been cast out of the drawing rooms of upper-class Whig Boston, he prefaced an address in 1847 on “Fame and Glory” to the Amherst College literary society with apt quotations, one from Milton’s Paradise Regained on glory attained “without ambition, war or violence,” and another from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus: “He lives in fame that died in virtue’s cause.” After campaigning for the Free Soil Party in 1848, he wrote his brother, “As a necessary consequence I have been a mark for abuse. I have been attacked bitterly; but I have consoled myself with what John Quincy Adams said to me during the last year of his life: ‘No man is abused whose influence is not felt.’ ”
In an age when oratory was among the most prized political skills, his opponents were awed and repelled by his intellectual firepower, logic, and severity. He was the opposite of the frenzied, shirt-ripping, and snorting Douglas, who sought to crush his enemies with ferocity. One of Sumner’s admirers, comparing him to Cicero, described his “magic,” which “sways our feelings and thrills our very souls . . . his appropriate and graceful gestures—his rich and mellifluous voice—his grand and elegant diction—his fervid and brilliant eloquence—his deep and stirring pathos—his sound and irresistible logic—his masterly and overpowering argumentation.”
Despite his immersion in English literary life, Sumner never relied on wit, irony, or cleverness. He never picked it up or tried it out; it ran against his earnest grain. His speeches were structured according to the classical pattern and he preferred to use words with Latinate roots. “Did you ever see a joke in one of my speeches?” he reproached a friend. “Of course you never did. You might as well look for a joke in the book of Revelations.” This might have provoked a laugh, but he wasn’t trying to be funny. He was deadly serious.
Sumner’s abrupt limits as a politician, his self-conscious violation of acceptable political speech on slavery and its adherents as moral hazards to be avoided, his social maladroitness outside his charmed circle, his guarded dignity, absence of humor, and inability to deflect or absorb anger through self-deprecation or indifference, combined with his brilliant speech and majestic manner, his true profundity and unflinching courage, incited the feverish pitch of responses to him.
Part of Sumner’s problem in provoking his enemies was not just his superior air. His fundamental problem was that it was more than any conceit. He was loathed for more than his hauteur, intransigence, and impeccable dress. There were others at least as guilty of those offenses. He was hated even more for his exultant exposure of the shabby claims of the proslavery aristocrats manqué. Nor could he ever be accused of posturing out of mere political ambition. He was the object of unrestrained hostility because of the purity of his convictions, especially his open contempt for the slave owners’ social pretenses. He was resented for every perfectly crafted line and classical allusion, the product of his Boston Latin and Harvard education. He was no sloganeer who repeated rote words. His phrases were memorable, his logic persuasive, and his appeal inspiring. Sumner had no power within the institution of the Senate, but those who did feared his broader influence. The more they sought to diminish him, the more they elevated his stature. From the moment he entered the Senate, he was treated as a voice to be silenced.
The sight and sound of Sumner inflamed not simply the fire-eaters of the South, but also the prudent conservative men of more reserved Southern opinion. His very presence was seen as nothing less than a felony. He was declared to be criminal for his condemnation of the Fugitive Slave Act and support for fugitives. Sumner symbolized all they detested about worthy New England, a civilization standing in judgment on their own. He stood for utopian professors, “philanthropists,” and Moral Philosophers of wild-eyed antislavery agitation, true believers in the “glittering generality” that “all men are created equal,” and other misguided miscreants clamoring for lunatic causes such as votes for women. His political and personal chasteness mocked Southern hypocrisy, especially sexual—the most volatile aspect of slavery, the ultimate dominance of master over slave, the violent sexual control of white men over black women. Sumner’s unsparing critique inflamed the slaveholders of the Senate to bait him with lurid fantasies about sex with black women; his response would drive them to the boiling point. Unable to vanquish him in debate or silence him by innuendo, they became determined to force the Puritan to kneel like a slave before them.
Sumner was one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “representative men,” exemplars of their time and place. He was the representative man of more than the antislavery movement or a political party, but of a culture and history. He stood for a certai
n conception of Massachusetts rooted in the Puritan commonwealth that inspired him to declare of the antislavery cause at the Massachusetts convention of the Free Soil Party in 1848: “It is a continuance of the American Revolution.”
The Puritan as prophet, who first decried the fall from grace of the cracked monuments of puritanism, Sumner was moral Boston at war with Brahmin Boston. He exposed the base interests and false idols of the best men. He sought to break the financial and political linkage of Massachusetts and the South forged in the chains of slavery—the Northern money power allied with the Southern Slave Power. His orations were jeremiads by way of Unitarianism in which moral reform usurped Calvinism and sin was ever present in the guise of the evils of slavery, ignorance, and violence. For his relentless truth telling about slavery in the alien Southern capital of Washington he was treated like a fugitive, an identity he embraced. As the representative of the Transcendentalists, this was his personal brand of transcendence. He carried at his core an inner sense of being from the hub of the universe, a Bostonian radiating the magnetism of his moral compass pointing true north. Like all magnetic personalities in politics, he was polarizing.
Sumner’s background and rise were a chronicle of the New England enlightenment. He was among other things the Boston Latin and Harvard classmate of the aristocratic abolitionist Wendell Phillips; protégé of Supreme Court justice Joseph Story, William Ellery Channing, and John Quincy Adams; closest friend of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; sympathetic member within the Transcendentalist circle of Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson; a like-minded soul among the uplifting reformers Samuel Gridley Howe and Horace Mann; compatriot of Conscience Whigs Charles Francis Adams and Richard Henry Dana Jr.; cofounder of the Boston Vigilance Committee to protect fugitive slaves with Theodore Parker; and co-sponsor of the Emigrant Aid Society sending free state settlers to Kansas with Eli Thayer. Before he was elected to the Senate at the age of forty, he “participated actively in the cultural flowering known as the American Renaissance,” was “acknowledged as one of America’s most important men of letters,” and “achieved wide renown and provoked heated controversy as an outspoken champion of legal reform, international peace, education reform, and the reform of prison discipline,” according to his biographer Anne-Marie Taylor. But even that summary is cursory.
Sumner’s roots ran to the beginnings of the Bay Colony. The original Pilgrim of his family, William Sumner, from Oxfordshire, settled in Massachusetts in 1633, became a freeholder and local selectman, and established a flourishing family whose branches eventually included Increase Sumner, the governor after Samuel Adams. The family of Charles Sumner’s mother, Relief Jacob, traced its lineage to William Bradford, who arrived on the Mayflower, and was the founder and first governor of the Plymouth Colony. Job Sumner, Charles’s grandfather, attended Harvard, fought in the Revolutionary army at Bunker Hill, but died at thirty-five in Georgia, where the pre-constitutional Confederation had sent him trying to resolve its accounts with the state. His son Charles Pinckney Sumner graduated from the Phillips Academy at Andover and Harvard College, where he developed a close friendship with his classmate Joseph Story. At college Charles Pinckney Sumner was inspired by the freethinking writings of Thomas Paine and awarded honors for his poetry. One of his poems imagined a world without slavery: “No sanctioned slavery Afric’s sons degrade, / But equal rights shall equal earth pervade.” After Harvard, in 1798, he sailed through the West Indies, landing in Haiti in the midst of the slave rebellion against French rule. At a dinner attended by the black revolutionary leaders, he delivered a toast: “Liberty, Equality, and Happiness, to all men!” Upon returning to Boston, he clerked in the law office of Josiah Quincy, who became president of Harvard, a congressman, and mayor of Boston.
The Federalist Party—the party of Josiah Quincy, John Adams, and Increase Sumner—dominated Massachusetts. Charles Pinckney Sumner was a dissenting follower of Thomas Jefferson, who was despised by the Boston elite. During Jefferson’s reelection campaign in 1804, C.P. Sumner made public speeches on his behalf, and when the Democratic-Republicans gained a majority in the state legislature, he was rewarded with an appointment as clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, holding his position through 1811 under its Speaker, his old friend Joseph Story. Despite his political connections, his law practice faltered through his inattention. He moved to a house on the poorer side of Beacon Hill, the North Slope down from the State House, one block from the center of the neighboring free black community that was the largest of its kind in the country. In 1819, he was named deputy sheriff of Suffolk County and six years later was appointed sheriff, a plum job, by Governor Levi Lincoln, Jr., a Jeffersonian who became a founder of the Massachusetts Whig Party, and was incidentally a distant cousin of Abraham Lincoln, who would meet him on his campaign swing through the state in 1848.
Charles Sumner always considered his antislavery feelings as his patrimony. From an early age his father regaled him with stories of the Haitian revolution and the heroic Edward Coles, the protégé of Jefferson and private secretary to President James Madison, who freed his own slaves and as the second governor of Illinois defeated the powerful political forces attempting to legalize slavery there. Sumner recalled his father treating black Bostonians as equal citizens, giving them his respectful “customary bow” upon passing them on the street. Sheriff Sumner was unusually outspoken against slavery, denounced the city of Washington as “a slave market,” openly opposed segregation of public schools and the legal ban on intermarriage, and insisted on fair trials for blacks as adherence to “that love of equality on which our Commonwealth is based.” In 1820, during the contentious debate over the Missouri Compromise, he predicted a civil war over slavery. “Our children’s heads will some day be broken on a cannon-ball on this question,” he said. He could not know that his prescient remark would apply to his own son.
One of the beneficiaries of C.P. Sumner’s enlightened views was William Lloyd Garrison, who began publishing his abolitionist newspaper The Liberator in 1831, “within sight of Bunker Hill and in the cradle of liberty,” as he proudly announced in its first issue. Almost immediately its appearance provoked denunciations from Boston’s leading citizens, merchants and industrialists tied by a thousand golden threads to the Southern economy. Southern state legislatures passed laws declaring possession of the newspaper a felony. In Washington, any free black caught reading The Liberator was subject to a large fine and imprisonment, and if unable to pay would be sold into slavery. Two years later, the emergence of the American Anti-Slavery Society, whose Declaration of Sentiments Garrison wrote, incited mobs North and South to riot. When the AASS embarked on an evangelical crusade in 1835 to send antislavery tracts to Southern clergy, their literature was banned from the federal mail and its activists accused of stirring up slave insurrections. After Boston authorities refused the petition of an antislavery group to use Faneuil Hall for a meeting, on August 21 “the social, political, religious and intellectual elite” filled it to condemn the abolitionists. Harrison Gray Otis, perhaps the most distinguished and wealthiest Bostonian, the former U.S. senator and mayor, ominously warned the crowd that abolishing slavery would be the equivalent of abolishing the Union. With that proclamation a political demarcation line was drawn.
A month later, on September 17, a double gallows was constructed on the street in front of Garrison’s Beacon Hill home. One rope was strung for hanging him and another for George Thompson, the leader of the British Anti-Slavery Society, then on a speaking tour of the United States, and the object of assassination threats. When it was rumored that Thompson would appear at a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society on October 21, a mob burst in and seized Garrison, tearing off his clothes and dragging him by a rope through the street. Mayor Theodore Lyman intervened to rescue him, escorting him to safety for the night in the jail. Among those Garrison thanked for saving him was Sheriff Sumner.
Charles Sumner wa
s one of the poorer boys to attend the Boston Latin School alongside the sons of the Beacon Hill elite. He wore rough shoes, cheap clothes, and was taunted as “gawky Sumner.” His fellow student, later the radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips, among the most privileged, whose father would soon become mayor, shunned him in an act of childish snobbery. After graduating from Harvard, Sumner went to the law school, where he became the protégé and amanuensis of Joseph Story, his father’s old friend, who Jefferson had appointed as associate justice of the Supreme Court and at the same time taught at Harvard. Story “treated him almost as if he were a son; and we were all delighted to welcome in to our family circle,” recalled Story’s son William. Story escorted Sumner around Washington on his first visit, introducing him to among other notable figures Chief Justice John Marshall with whom they shared most dinners. Sumner edited Story’s decisions to be published in three volumes and became an editor of the American Jurist journal as well as contributing articles to other publications, including the leading literary magazine, the North American Review. While Story was away from Cambridge during the court’s session, Sumner filled in for him teaching at the law school. He met weekly with Henry Longfellow, his best friend, Cornelius Felton, the future president of Harvard, and other literary men in a group they called “The Five of Clubs.” Bearing a letter of introduction from Story, he traveled to Europe to see the great and the good. Upon his return from his Grand Tour, he joined a law firm, but found day-to-day legal work to be drudgery and was not particularly interested in pursuing clients. He felt trapped as a scrivener of trivial briefs. “My mind, soul, heart are not improved or invigorated by the practice of my profession,” he wrote. “The sigh will come, for a canto of Dante, a Rhapsody of Homer, a play of Schiller.”
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