All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  Sumner fell under the sway of William Ellery Channing, the leading theologian of Unitarianism’s Moral Philosophy, pastor at Boston’s Federal Street Church, and the preacher of conscience in the cause of humanitarian reforms. It was through Channing that Sumner first publicly engaged with the question of slavery. In November 1841, one hundred and twenty-eight American slaves being transported along the Atlantic coast in a ship called the Creole staged a revolt and sailed to British territory at Nassau. There they were declared free under British law that had outlawed slavery in 1834. Secretary of State Daniel Webster, the towering figure among Massachusetts Whigs, demanded that they be returned to bondage. The British refused. Channing wrote a pamphlet, edited by Sumner, entitled “The Duty of the Free States,” arguing for the position of the British, and warning “the slave-power has been allowed to stamp itself on the national policy, and to fortify itself with the national arm.”

  Sumner steeped himself in antislavery literature. He read the first book advocating immediate emancipation when it was published in 1833, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, written by Lydia Maria Child, a member of the Transcendentalist circle, a friend of Garrison, a novelist, poet, and author of the best-selling The American Frugal Housewife. “If a history is ever written entitled, ‘The Decay and Dissolution of the North American Republic,’ ” she wrote, “its author will distinctly trace our downfall to the existence of slavery among us.” Child’s book heralded the organization of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Since its inception Sumner had subscribed to Garrison’s The Liberator, but he did not subscribe to Garrison’s version of abolitionism that condemned the Constitution as a proslavery charter and the Union as a league with slaveholders; nor did he embrace Garrisonian immediatism and its perfectionism. “I have never been satisfied with its tone,” Sumner wrote. “I have been openly opposed to the doctrines on the Union and the Constitution which it has advocated for several years. It has seemed to me often vindictive, bitter, and unchristian.” Sumner believed that the Constitution must be the foundation for an antislavery politics, ideas that Salmon P. Chase and the Liberty Party had developed. “Thank God! the Constitution of the United States does not recognize man as property,” he wrote his English friend Lord Morpeth in the aftermath of the Creole case. Sumner considered slavery “a local institution” that could be bound within the South and eventually strangled. “You will see how rapidly this question of slavery moves in the country,” he wrote Morpeth. “The South seems to have the madness which precedes great reverses.”

  In 1845, as one of the most prominent young men of Boston, a patron of the arts, admired for his prodigious intellect, and an exemplar of unblemished character, Sumner was invited by the mayor and City Council to deliver the annual Fourth of July oration before a distinguished audience that would include uniformed members of the Massachusetts militia and U.S. military. He informed the city fathers his theme would be international peace, and it was accepted. He was on the executive committee of the Peace Society of which Channing was a founder. War fever was in the air. James K. Polk had been elected president in 1844 on a platform of annexation of Texas as a slave state and threatening war with Mexico. On July 4, 1845, in an act well-advertised in advance, the Texas legislature approved annexation, setting the stage for the coming clash. That day, dressed for his appearance, Sumner “wore a dress-coat with gilt buttons,—a fancy of lawyers at that period,—and white waistcoat and trousers.” The Washington Light Guards led the procession of notables across Boston Common to the Tremont Temple to hear the address he entitled “The True Grandeur of Nations.” “A war with Mexico would be mean and cowardly,” Sumner declared. His speech, filled with classical allusions and lengthy Latin quotations, denounced war in general. “In our age there can be no peace that is not honorable: there can be no war that is not dishonorable,” he said. All the glorious battles of English history faded “by the side of that great act of Justice,” the emancipation of its slaves. “And when the day shall come” in the United States of “peaceful emancipation . . . then shall there be a victory, in comparison with which that of Bunker Hill [where his grandfather had fought] shall be as a farthing-candle held up to the sun.”

  At the traditional post-oration dinner at Faneuil Hall, one speaker after another angrily denounced Sumner’s effrontery, culminating in a censure from Robert C. Winthrop, the leader of the Whig Party and member of Congress, the direct descendant of the founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony John Winthrop, protégé of Daniel Webster, and Sumner’s Latin and Harvard classmate. Sumner, he said, “seemed to contemplate non-resistance and dissolution of the Union.” Winthrop delivered his own toast: “Our Country, whether bounded by Sabine or Del Norte—still our Country—to be cherished in all our hearts—to be defended by all our hands.” His tribute to war with Mexico not yet declared before the assembled notables of the Whig establishment was a declaration of war against Sumner and those like him who dared to oppose the coming clash. Earlier, that January, the Massachusetts legislature had passed a resolution opposing Texas annexation. Winthrop’s toast was a signal from the Whig leadership that dissent would not be tolerated. Winthrop, after all, had the important matter of the tariff to navigate through the Congress and the waters needed to be calmed.

  The censure of Sumner’s July 4th speech launched his public life. As his mentors passed from the scene, Channing dying in 1842 and Story in 1845, he found “a Christian statesman” who was proving “the important truth, that politics & morals are one & inseparable”—John Quincy Adams. The former president sitting in the House of Representatives had led a relentless crusade against the Gag Rule, which prohibited the Congress from hearing antislavery petitions. Adams finally succeeded in ending the ban in 1845. He and Sumner shared common beliefs in Channing’s uplifting Moral Philosophy and in breaking the sordid political grasp of the Slave Power. Like Moses anointing Joshua, Adams wrote the youthful Sumner “beyond my own allotted time, I see you have a mission to perform—I look from Pisgah to the Promised Land. You must enter upon it.”

  Sumner began meeting at his Court Street law office with a small group of friends, the Young Whigs faction of the party, whose leader was Charles Francis Adams, son of J.Q. Adams. Through the practical political skills of Henry Wilson, a rising working-class state legislator, they forged a tenuous alliance with the volatile Garrisonians and Liberty Party activists to form the Massachusetts State Anti-Texas Committee. Their opponents derisively called them “Conscience Whigs,” and they responded by labeling them “Cotton Whigs.” Sumner edited the anti-Texas newspaper, wrote the group’s resolutions, and delivered his first political speech at a meeting of the group at Faneuil Hall on November 4, 1845, with Charles Adams presiding. “By welcoming Texas as a Slave State we make slavery our own original sin,” Sumner said. “Let us wash our hands of this great guilt.” Garrison’s Liberator reported, “The weather was extremely unpropitious,—the rain pouring down violently, the thunder roaring, and the lightning blazing vividly at intervals,—emblematic of the present moral and political aspects of the country.”

  Winthrop voted for the war, but then spoke against it. Sumner engaged his old classmate in a private correspondence on the “slave-driving war,” and urged him to vote against military appropriations. The month the war was launched Sumner, Adams, and their group of Conscience Whigs purchased a newspaper, The Whig, to serve as their voice. Writing under the pen name of “Boston,” Sumner accused Winthrop of supporting “an unjust war, and national falsehood, in the cause of slavery.” Winthrop felt wronged, and wrote Sumner that he sought “to rob him, personally of that ‘spotless reputation.’ ” Sumner followed with another article: “Blood! Blood! is on the hands of the representative from Boston.” Winthrop replied that Sumner’s articles contained “the coarsest personalities” and “the grossest perversions.” He severed their relationship. Sumner ridiculed Winthrop’s toast at the July 4th dinner a year earlier: “Our country, right or wrong, or
howsoever bounded, is a sentiment of heathen vulgarity and impiety.” Behind the polemics over the war lay a subtle conflict over class, the sheriff’s boy pulling down the Brahmin. In Massachusetts, the political was the moral, and whoever could claim the high ground could properly speak for Massachusetts and its traditions. Sumner, under his nom de plume “Boston,” seized it against the heir of John Winthrop, who had fallen short in “ye duty of ye representative of Boston, a place of conscience, & morality,” as Sumner charged.

  The Conscience Whigs organized to take over the state convention at Faneuil Hall on September 23. Creating a clamor, they demanded that Sumner be permitted to speak. He dismissed the issues of the tariff and internal improvements as “transient” and “obsolete ideas.” “The Whigs,” he declared, “ought to be the party of freedom,” and called for “REPEAL OF SLAVERY UNDER THE CONSTITUTION.” He appealed to the revolutionary tradition of Massachusetts. “Massachusetts can stand alone, if need be.” And he attacked Winthrop again, turning his signature word “bounded” against him. “Our party, bounded always by the Right,” he declared. Winthrop followed him with a tepid answer about tariffs. Sumner and his faction introduced an antislavery plank, which appeared would carry the hall until Daniel Webster himself mounted the platform calling for unity and muffled it. Sumner urged that the Conscience Whigs run a candidate for the Congress against Winthrop. They thought he was the logical man to run, but he refused the nomination, anxious that he would be perceived as having attacked Winthrop solely “for his own personal promotion.” Instead his friend Samuel Gridley Howe received the nomination, and lost decisively.

  Sumner’s battle with Winthrop coincided with a crusade against yet another Brahmin. The Boston Prison Discipline Society was an institutional pillar of the community, headed by the upright Reverend Louis Dwight, an advocate of harsh discipline and isolation that would presumably lead to religious salvation. Inspired by a report for reform written by Samuel Gridley Howe, Sumner openly challenged Dwight at the group’s annual meeting on May 25, 1846. For eight nights he and Howe drew large crowds debating Dwight, whom Sumner called “selfish, Jesuitical and lazy,” and the society’s treasurer, Samuel A. Eliot, the former mayor, whom he scored for his “vanity or self-esteem.” Sumner condemned their “system” of enforced “perpetual solitude” as “an engine of cruelty and tyranny.” Dwight and Eliot stood at the pinnacle of Boston society, related by kinship and marriage to the dense network of families that controlled the banks of State Street, the factories, philanthropies, and board of Harvard. Eliot had criticized Sumner for his July 4th address and was closely allied with Winthrop. Dwight suffered a nervous breakdown from the shock of public confrontation, the Prison Society never again held a public meeting, and it dissolved in 1855. The Boston Post, a newspaper of the Whig establishment, denounced Sumner as a “malignant defamer” and “having a disordered intellect.”

  As these controversies simmered to their heated climaxes, a new professor was to be chosen to fill the chair at the Harvard law school left vacant by the death of Joseph Story. He had designated Sumner to be his successor. But Harvard president Edward Everett, the former governor, a close friend of Winthrop who had also treated Sumner with benevolent interest in the past, presided over the board’s unanimous rejection of him. The lines in Boston were drawn for and against Sumner.

  The largest mansion on Beacon Hill, designed by the famed architect Charles Bulfinch in the Federal style, commanding the strategic corner of Beacon and Park Streets, in the shadow of the golden dome of the State House, and with a sweeping view of the Common, was the temple of Brahmin society. Here resided the arbiter of proper Boston, George Ticknor, wealthy heir to the cofounder of the Provident Bank, married to the daughter of Samuel Eliot, board member of civic institutions, eminent professor at Harvard, where he redesigned its curriculum, acquainted with the most influential people throughout the country and Europe, and author of the monumental History of Spanish Literature. Those receiving Ticknor’s favor were welcomed into his parlor under a portrait of Sir Walter Scott amid his library of fourteen thousand books and invited to dine at a table graced with such guests as Webster and Hawthorne. He was, according to his biographer, “of the true ‘Brahmin caste,’ ” “refined,” and of the “Tory temperament.” One of his frequent guests, Edwin Percy Whipple, the literary critic, wrote that “his ample means, his cultivated manners, and his possession of the best house, both as regards situation and elegance, which then existed in the city, made him a leader in the society of the place.” “He had his own set of people,” observed William Cullen Bryant, the poet and editor of the New York Post, “and seems to have looked down upon everybody else.” His friends referred to their intimate world as “Ticknorville.”

  Ticknor had been Sumner’s literature professor at Harvard, invited him often into the warmth of his salon, and warned him against making rash public statements against slavery. From this Brahmin Eden, Sumner was banished. “In a society where public opinion governs, unsound opinions must be rebuked,” Ticknor wrote a friend referring to Sumner, and denounced in one breath “social democracy” and “demagogues” as a threat to “public morals.” It was more than a snub. Coming from an authority on Spanish culture, it was the judgment of an inquisitor. “There was a time when I was welcome at almost every house within two miles of us,” Sumner remarked ruefully to Richard Henry Dana, Jr. as they passed along Beacon Street, “but now hardly any are open to me.” Dana, too, would be proscribed, and so would Sumner’s friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote antislavery poems. Charles Francis Adams described the efforts at “social ostracism; attempts ludicrous now to look back upon, but at the time exasperating to those against whom they were insolently directed. An abolitionist was looked upon as a sort of common enemy of mankind; a Free Soiler was only a weak and illogical abolitionist.” Their views were “resented as outrages on decency” and they were “made to feel in many ways the contempt there felt for the cause they had espoused.” When Sumner “ceased to be seen” at Ticknor’s, it was a signal event in the inner life of Boston. “Slowly but surely the country was working itself up to the war point; and the conservative and reactionary interests, instinctively realizing the fact, demeaned themselves according to their wont.” Sumner should not have been surprised. Ticknor had once been the financial and literary benefactor of Lydia Maria Child, but ostracized her for her antislavery views, even cutting her off from library privileges at the Boston Athenaeum. Theodore Parker, blackballed by Ticknor from membership in the Massachusetts Historical Society, took to calling him the “arch devil of the aristocracy.”

  But the social insulation of the castes of Boston could not prevent unwanted events from intruding. Victory in the Mexican War thrust the question of the extension of slavery in the newly conquered lands to the center of politics. Sumner wrote a resolution adopted by the Massachusetts legislature in February 1847 that protested “the acquisition of any additional territory” unless the Congress prohibited slavery within it—“that there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in such territory otherwise than for the punishment of crime”—the language of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 inspired by Jefferson.

  Then Sumner led a contingent of Conscience Whigs to the state convention at Springfield on September 29 to battle for the soul of the party. Daniel Webster, intending the convention to be the springboard for his presidential nomination, found himself caught in the crosscurrents. John G. Palfrey, the first Conscience Whig elected to the Congress, introduced a resolution “to support no men for the offices of President and Vice-President of the United States but such as are known by their acts or declared opinions to be opposed to the extension of slavery.” Samuel Eliot warned Palfrey, a Unitarian minister, former dean of the Harvard Divinity School, and editor of the North American Review, to “be silent . . . or prepared for very rough usage.” Palfrey and Charles Adams were heckled and hissed before Sumner rose to speak for the resolution. “Loyalty to principle
is higher than loyalty to party,” he declared. Winthrop took the lead in arguing against the resolution. Webster, who had been endorsed as a candidate for president, said he was against slavery’s extension, but opposed to the resolution. As light faded in the hall and some delegates had already drifted out for the evening, the measure was defeated on a show of hands that the Conscience Whigs felt left their true numbers uncounted.

  In 1847 the fratricidal conflict resumed in Washington over Winthrop’s designation as the Whig candidate for Speaker of the House. Palfrey assailed him, along with Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio, “master of us all in antislavery matters,” as Sumner called him. They floated a rumor emanating from Giddings’s flawed memory that Winthrop had spoken in favor of the Mexican War in the Whig caucus just before the vote. The Boston Atlas, a regular Whig newspaper, attacked Sumner as the ringleader for his “inordinate vanity and self-conceit” and “personal malignity.” Finally, Winthrop was elected Speaker through the intervention of J.Q. Adams, who acted out of ancient affection for the Winthrop family above all else. Winthrop promptly denounced C.F. Adams and his comrades Sumner and Palfrey as “a little nest of vipers.” Sumner decried “private assassination and assault, which is our lot here—suspected, slandered, traduced by those who profess and call themselves Whigs,” and he called for “a new crystallization of parties, in which there shall be, one grand Northern party of Freedom.”

  “Be not Atticus,” J.Q. Adams admonished Sumner, referring to Cicero’s friend, Titus Pomponius Atticus, who sequestered himself from the tumult of politics in his library. Both men revered Cicero as their ideal public man and orator. Adams apparently made this remark to Sumner after he had suffered a stroke in the winter of 1847 while preoccupied with the legacy of his political principles. When Adams collapsed at his desk in the House of Representatives and died on February 23, 1848, Sumner stood at his crossroads between Cicero and Atticus.