Sumner was already involved in intense meetings with Charles Francis Adams and the other Conscience Whigs to anticipate “an organized revolt” during the presidential campaign of 1848. Longfellow described those surrounding Sumner as “his captains.” In May the Democratic convention nominated Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan. “No Northern politician was ever more abject in his submission to Southern dictation,” wrote Edward L. Pierce, Sumner’s authorized biographer. Cass’s selection was the signal for the walkout of the Barnburners, or the Soft faction from New York. Many were closely linked by a skein of past relationships to former president Martin Van Buren, who had been denied the nomination in 1844 through the imposition of the two-thirds rule that institutionalized Southern control. The Softs’ break was partly an act of revenge. Sumner was the Boston group’s key contact with the Barnburners, including “Prince” John Van Buren, the former president’s son. The “Little Magician” now miraculously transformed himself from a president who had been a Southern instrument into a staunch opponent of slavery’s extension partly through guidance in letters from Sumner.
When the Whigs nominated Zachary Taylor, the military hero of the Mexican War, as their presidential candidate to stand on no platform whatsoever, Sumner and his friends staged a well-prepared bolt. On June 28, they held a state convention to create the new Free Soil Party. Sumner delivered a stirring keynote address in which he laid out how the plot to nominate Taylor had brought about the capture of the Whig Party as an arm of the “Slave Power . . . to serve its interests, to secure its supremacy, and especially to promote the extension of Slavery.” With thrilling rhetoric, he pointed the finger of blame and shame at the Boston Whigs. “I speak only what is now too notorious, when I say that it was the secret influence which went forth from among ourselves that contributed powerfully to this consummation. Yes! it was brought about by an unhallowed union—conspiracy let it be called—between two remote sections: between the politicians of the Southwest and the politicians of the Northeast,—between the cotton-planters and fleshmongers of Louisiana and Mississippi and the cottonspinners and traffickers of New England,—between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.”
In August, Sumner attended the national Free Soil convention at Buffalo, where Van Buren was nominated and Charles Francis Adams named his running mate. About the tattered Van Buren’s ironic emergence as an antislavery tribune, Webster remarked, “I think the scene would border upon the ludicrous, if not upon the contemptible.” He recalled initially encountering Van Buren more than twenty years earlier when he was conniving to overthrow President John Quincy Adams. “If nobody were present,” said Webster, “we should both laugh at the strange occurrences and stranger jumbles of political life. . . . That the leader of the Free Spoil party should so suddenly have become the leader of the Free Soil party would be a joke to shake his sides and mine.” At a Boston rally, Sumner answered Webster’s jibe. “It is not for the Van Buren of 1838 that we are to vote, but for the Van Buren of today.”
The Boston Atlas, the stalwart Whig newspaper, rained poisonous arrows on the defectors. Adams was “a political huckster,” Palfrey a “Judas,” and Sumner “a transcendental lawyer.” The paper was particularly inventive in its venom toward Sumner, deriding his “cant,” “inordinate vanity and self-conceit,” “puerile self-consequence,” and “vagrant theories.” William Schouler, the Atlas’s editor, encouraged a promising young congressman from Illinois to campaign in Massachusetts for the Whigs to give the party a fresh look. On his tour, Lincoln appeared on a Boston stage with the party’s most prominent figure, William Seward, for their first meeting. None of the Free Soilers bothered to observe the obscure Lincoln’s passing presence.
Sumner was drafted to run for the Boston congressional seat against Winthrop, and after wavering plunged in. Longfellow’s diary recorded his friend’s anxious state of mind. On September 3: “Sumner, full of zeal for the ‘Barnburners.’ But he shrinks a little from the career just opening before him.” On September 17: “He looks somewhat worn. Nothing but politics now. Oh, where are those genial days when literature was the theme of our conversation?” On October 22: “Sumner stands now, as he himself feels, at just the most critical point of his life. Shall he plunge irrevocably into politics, or not?—that is the question; and it is already answered. He inevitably will do so, and after many defeats will be very distinguished as a leader. Let me cast his horoscope: Member of Congress, perhaps; Minister to England, certainly. From politics as a career he still shrinks back. When he has once burned his ships there will be no retreat. He already holds in his hand the lighted torch.” Sumner was soundly defeated, but now fully committed to a political life. Leaving Atticus’s retreat for good, he entered Cicero’s arena.
Sumner’s advocacy on behalf of the Free Soil Party was not accepted in Boston as a simple difference of opinion; nor was it understood as just a matter of politics. His words tore apart his personal relationships, alienated him from patrons and friends, and severed his ties to respectable society. His stinging accusation of the conspiracy of “the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom” to nominate Taylor was the final straw. Influential Whigs of Massachusetts, after all, were instrumental in Taylor’s nomination. Abbott Lawrence, founder of the mill town of Lawrence with his brothers and the congressman from Boston preceding Winthrop, had supported Taylor in a tentative arrangement that was to conclude with his being named as the vice presidential candidate, but it was foiled when Henry Wilson staged an embarrassing walkout at the Whig convention. Beforehand, Sumner had confronted Lawrence, urging, “Get out of it. . . . It is never too late to begin to do right.” To which Lawrence candidly replied, “What can I do about it, I am in up to the eyes.” (Taylor would appoint Lawrence the minister to the United Kingdom.)
Samuel Lawrence, Abbott’s brother and business partner, had taken an avuncular interest in the brilliant Sumner, even subsidizing his Grand Tour of Europe. But now he was outraged that the scholarly young man had bitten the hand that fed him. “No man regrets the part you are acting more than I do,” he wrote Sumner. “You have taken hold of this one idea of slavery, and are in a fair way of becoming severed from a very large circle of friends who give dignity and honor to our common country. I could name scores and scores of men whom you have honored your whole life who regret and condemn the course you have taken.” When Sumner tried to explain, Lawrence wrote in another letter:
“How an intelligent Massachusetts man could have given utterance to these words is beyond my comprehension. . . . Your principles tend directly to the breaking up of this glorious republic. You and I never can meet on neutral ground. I can contemplate you only in the character of a defamer of those you profess to love, and an enemy to the permanency of this Union.” About Sumner’s affiliation with the Free Soil Party, “a Faction,” Lawrence wrote: “. . . and Mr. Martin Van Buren!!!!”
Nathan Appleton was equally appalled. “I have regretted to see talents so brilliant as yours, and from which I had hoped so much for our country, take a course in which I consider them worse than thrown away,” he wrote Sumner. Appleton was the cofounder of the city of Lowell, where he had introduced the power loom into the manufacture of textiles, was a partner in many enterprises with the Lawrence brothers, and a former congressman representing Boston. Of more intimate interest, his daughter Fanny was married to Longfellow, and Longfellow informed his friend it would be best if he didn’t visit his home when his father-in-law was present.
Sumner always believed that Massachusetts must occupy a unique place as the beacon of liberty, true to the principles of the American Revolution. Transforming the nation turned on transforming the commonwealth. In the year after his defeat running for the Congress, he made the first legal argument against school segregation. Benjamin Roberts was a free black and printer who published antislavery pamphlets and several short-lived newspapers for the black community, the Anti-Slavery Herald and the Self Elevator. He lived on the back slope of Beacon
Hill. His five-year-old daughter, Sarah, walked past several schools in order to attend her inferior all-black one. Roberts secured the services of Boston’s first black lawyer, Robert Morris, to file a suit to allow Sarah to enter an all-white school. Ellis Gray Loring, scion of an old Boston family and attorney for the Anti-Slavery Society, had trained Morris in the law. Morris was also a leader of the Boston Vigilance Committee to aid fugitive slaves. Morris asked Sumner to act as his co-counsel to write and present the brief before the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Sumner did so without charging a fee.
On December 4, 1849, arguing in the case of Roberts v. the City of Boston, Sumner introduced a term that had never before been uttered in an American judicial court—“equality before the law.” “In the statement of this proposition I use language which, though new in our country, has the advantage of precision.” He traced his definition to France, to the philosopher Diderot’s Encylopédie, first published in 1751. The principle of equality was rooted in the Declaration of Independence and “embodied” in the Massachusetts constitution: “All men are born free and equal.” Denying equality would establish a “system of caste as odious as that of the Hindoos.” He observed that John C. Calhoun had assailed the claim of equality in the Declaration as “the most false and dangerous of all political errors.” But Sumner declared he would show “the fallacy of the pretension that any exclusion or discrimination founded on race or color can be consistent with Equal Rights.” Establishing his basic point, “Separate schools inconsistent with equality,” he argued: “It is easy to see that the exclusion of colored children from the Public Schools is a constant inconvenience to them and their parents, which white children and white parents are not obliged to bear. Here the facts are plain and unanswerable, showing a palpable violation of Equality. The black and white are not equal before the law.” Because a segregated school was not a “Common School,” it was, he said, “illegal.” “It is a mockery to call it an equivalent.” He compared this inequality to the anti-Semitism of Europe, where Jews had been “confined to a particular district called the Ghetto,” or “the Jewish Quarter.” “Compulsory segregation,” Sumner declared, was “a vestige of ancient intolerance directed against a despised people. It is of the same character with the separate schools in Boston. Thus much for the doctrine of Equivalents as a substitute for Equality.”
In 1850, Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, issued a ruling upholding segregation: “It is urged, that this maintenance of separate schools tends to deepen and perpetuate the odious distinction of caste, founded in a deep-rooted prejudice in public opinion. This prejudice, if it exists, is not created by law, and probably cannot be changed by law.” Five years later, in 1855, influenced by Sumner, the Massachusetts legislature prohibited school segregation. But in 1896 Shaw’s decision was cited as the basis for the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson enshrining the segregationist doctrine of “separate but equal.” More than a half century later, in its landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Supreme Court overturned Plessy on the grounds that Sumner had argued, citing the Roberts case.
While Shaw adjudicated the Roberts case, Massachusetts entered into its own prologue to the Civil War. Within a matter of months both political parties irrevocably split; great men toppled from the heights of reputation; slaves were hunted through Boston streets; and Sumner ascended to the Senate.
The demarcation line between political eras was a date Sumner would refer to as “Dies Irae”—the Day of Wrath—March 7 of 1850. It was the day that Daniel Webster stood to address the Senate. “The Godlike Daniel” had once eloquently reviled slavery and famously demolished the states’ rights doctrine of slaveholders. He was “the one eminent American of our time,” according to Ralph Waldo Emerson. New England looked to him for clarity and guidance. Only Henry Clay to whom he had confided knew what Webster would say, whether he would support the compromise bill that would leave open the question of extending slavery to the new territories gained from Mexico or support President Taylor in opposing it. Then, in what Emerson would call “a fatal hour,” Webster not only argued for the compromise but also for the Fugitive Slave Act, declaring that the South had been “injured.” He discarded the Wilmot Proviso, which would have prohibited the extension of slavery and which he had previously favored. (Congressman Lincoln had voted for it numerous times, calling himself “a Proviso man.”) Webster rebuked the Massachusetts legislature for sending him instructions to vote for it, a resolution written by Sumner, and singled out for praise Sumner’s former law partner George Hillard, who as a member of the legislature had voted against it. When Webster finished, Senator Chase overheard him whisper to Douglas, “You don’t want anything more than that, do you?”
The Whig Party of Massachusetts was forever ripped apart. “All the drops of his blood have eyes that look downward,” said Emerson of Webster. Sumner called Webster’s speech “a heartless apostasy,” compared him to “Judas Iscariot or Benedict Arnold,” and “the rebuke of his former self.” Charles Francis Adams observed, “So long as Mr. Webster adhered to the anti-slavery utterances of his earlier days,—so long as he saw fit to claim the Wilmot Proviso as his thunder, and to keep terms with the Liberty party,—the reactionary under-current was scarcely perceptible; but when he changed front openly,—putting in his bid for Southern support,—there was no longer any concealment. Under the guise of loyalty to the Union and the Constitution, social and business Boston by degrees became in its heart, and almost avowedly, a pro-slavery community; and it so remained until 1861.”
President Taylor suddenly died on July 9. His successor, Millard Fillmore, reversed his policy. Douglas engineered the compromise bill with the Fugitive Slave Act attached through the Congress on September 18. Within weeks, in October, slave hunters appeared in Boston to track down the escaped slaves William and Ellen Craft living as free blacks on Beacon Hill; they fled to sanctuary in England. President Fillmore appointed Webster his secretary of state. Winthrop replaced him in the Senate. Webster was disgusted at his protégé when Winthrop expressed dismay at the Fugitive Slave Act. To fill Winthrop’s open congressional seat the pro-Webster Whigs selected Samuel Eliot and the Free Soilers chose Sumner to oppose him.
On the eve of the election, November 6, Sumner delivered a speech at Faneuil Hall that was the making of his political career. Of the Fugitive Slave Act, he said, “the soul sickens.” Speaking of Millard Fillmore, he aroused the crowd to what was described as “Sensation.” “Into the immortal catalogue of national crimes it has now passed, drawing, by inexorable necessity, its authors also, and chiefly him, who, as President of the United States, set his name to the Bill, and breathed into it that final breath without which it would bear no life. Other Presidents may be forgotten; but the name signed to the Fugitive Slave Bill can never be forgotten. There are depths of infamy, as there are heights of fame. I regret to say what I must, but truth compels me. Better for him, had he never been born!” By contrast, he proclaimed, “Fugitive Slaves are the heroes of our age.” The compromise had not, he said, settled “the Slavery Question.” “Nothing, sir, can be settled which is not right.” He called for “the overthrow of the Slave Power,” which “humbles both great political parties to its will” and must be “openly encountered in the field of politics.” New men were needed in Washington to banish it from the “National Government.” “Three things at least they must require: the first is backbone; the second is backbone; and the third is backbone.”
Sumner’s electrifying speech contributed to the crushing defeat of the Whigs, who lost control of the state legislature. Sumner lost his race for the Congress, which was foreordained in the conservative Boston district, but the game all along was being played for higher stakes—Webster’s once eternal seat in the Senate. Sumner was the natural candidate of the newly empowered coalition of antislavery Democrats and Free Soilers. Again, he faced off against Winthrop. The splintering of the parties in
the legislature, however, kept Sumner just below a majority. And the moneyed interests behind Webster created a slush fund for anti-Sumner legislators. “Everything is being done to prevent Sumner’s election . . . that can be,” Amos A. Lawrence, the industrialist, informed Samuel Eliot. Former congressman Caleb Cushing, who denounced Sumner as a “one ideaed abolitionist agitator,” led a rump group of Democrats dubbing themselves the “Indomitables” to block him. (Pierce would appoint Cushing his attorney general.)
The balloting that began in January dragged on inconclusively for months. After three months of deadlock a seventeen-year-old runaway slave, Thomas Sims, was captured in Boston under the new Fugitive Slave Act. The Boston Vigilance Committee led by Theodore Parker tried to enter the courthouse to free him. Thick iron chains were wrapped across the courthouse doors. Sumner served as Sims’s co-counsel, urging his freedom. On April 19, the anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord that began the American Revolution, under the guard of amassed police, local militia, and 250 federal troops the shackled Sims was marched to a ship in the harbor to be returned to slavery. Henry David Thoreau referred to the event as a “moral earthquake.” A week later, on April 26, 1851, on the twenty-sixth ballot, Sumner edged to a one-vote victory. Henry Adams, the thirteen-year-old son of Charles Francis Adams, raced with the news from the State House back to the Adams home, where Sumner was dining. “It was,” he recalled, “probably the proudest moment in the life of either.”
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