Sumner made immediately clear in his speech he was referring to Butler’s false, “incoherent,” and “foul-mouthed” proslavery positions. “There was no extravagance of the ancient Parliamentary debate which he did not repeat; nor was there any possible deviation from truth which he did not make,—with so much of passion, I gladly add, as to save him from the suspicion of intentional aberration. But the Senator touches nothing which he does not disfigure—with error, sometimes of principle, sometimes of fact. He shows an incapacity of accuracy, whether in stating the Constitution or in stating the law, whether in details of statistics or diversions of scholarship. He cannot ope his mouth, but out there flies a blunder.”
Sumner cited a diplomatic episode involving Benjamin Franklin to portray Butler as “a foul-mouthed speaker.”
Surely he ought to be familiar with the life of Franklin; and yet he referred to this household character, while acting as agent of our fathers in England, as above suspicion: and this was done that he might give point to a false contrast with the agent of Kansas,—not knowing, that, however the two may differ in genius and fame, they are absolutely alike in this experience: that Franklin, when entrusted with the petition of Massachusetts Bay, was assaulted by a foul-mouthed speaker where he could not be heard in defense, and denounced as “thief,” even as the agent of Kansas is assaulted on this floor, and denounced as “forger.” And let not the vanity of the Senator be inspired by parallel with the British statesmen of that day; for it is only in hostility to Freedom that any parallel can be found.
Sumner’s disparaging slights were exactly targeted. They homed in on Butler’s speech—precisely his incapacity of speech. Belittling Butler’s “vanity,” Sumner destroyed each element of his argument as well as deriding the manner of his speech. Butler’s slavering style represented his substance; his physical deficiency was a manifestation of his intellectual deficiency. Unlike the threats that Douglas made against Sumner, Sumner did not menace with harm but with mockery.
Sumner defended the Bay State’s pride denigrating the Palmetto State’s disgrace. Butler had accused the Commonwealth of Massachusetts of being the source of disunion and violence. “Pray, Sir,” said Sumner, “by what title does he indulge in this egotism? Has he read the history of the ‘State’ which he represents? He cannot, surely, forget its shameful imbecility from Slavery, confessed throughout the Revolution, followed by its more shameful assumptions for Slavery since. He cannot forget its wretched persistence in the slave trade, as the very apple of its eye, and the condition of its participation in the Union. He cannot forget its Constitution, which is republican only in name, confirming power in the hands of the few, and founding the qualifications of its legislators on ‘a settled freehold estate of five hundred acres of land and ten negroes.’ ” South Carolina, declared Sumner, was “in the very ecstasy of madness.” He questioned whether “the whole history of South Carolina blotted out of existence, from its very beginning down to the day of the last election of the Senator to his present seat on this floor, civilization might lose—I do not say how little.”
Even more than Butler, Douglas was Sumner’s target. Butler carried more social prestige as an elder of the F Street Mess, but Douglas was more formidable and dangerous as an adversary in debate. Sumner unleashed his full repertoire of erudition against him. Douglas was more than Sancho Panza. Sumner quoted at length in Latin from Cicero’s denunciation of Catiline, the conspirator against the Roman republic. “As I listened to the Senator from Illinois,” said Sumner, “while he painfully strove to show that there is no Usurpation, I was reminded of the effort by a distinguished logician to prove that Napoleon Bonaparte never existed.” Sumner called forth the unholy trinity from John Milton’s Paradise Lost—Satan, Sin, and Death. Again, Sumner raised an image of rape through poetic citation, for Satan raped his daughter Sin, who gave birth to Death. The imposition of slavery on Kansas was “a Dance of Death.” “Popular Sovereignty, in whose deceitful name plighted faith was broken and an ancient Landmark of Freedom overturned, now lifts itself before us like Sin in the terrible picture of Milton.” Douglas, the author of “popular sovereignty,” assumed the role in this allegory of Satan, progenitor of Sin, who is the mother of Death.
The Senator from Illinois naturally joins the Senator from South Carolina, and gives to this warfare the superior intensity of his nature. He thinks that the National Government has not completely proved its power, as it has never hanged a traitor,—but, if occasion requires, he hopes there will be no hesitation; and this threat is directed at Kansas, and even at the friends of Kansas throughout the country. Again occurs a parallel with the struggles of our fathers; and I borrow the language of Patrick Henry, when, to the cry from the Senator of “Treason! treason!” I reply, “If this be treason, make the most of it.” Sir, it is easy to call names; but I beg to tell the Senator, that, if the word “traitor” is in any way applicable to those who reject a tyrannical Usurpation, whether in Kansas or elsewhere, then must some new word, of deeper color, be invented to designate those mad spirits who would endanger and degrade the Republic, while they betray all the cherished sentiments of the Fathers and the spirit of the Constitution, that Slavery may have new spread.
Accused of “treason” Sumner launched in return a quiver of arrows at Butler and Douglas. The word “treason” took several forms in Sumner’s speech. One was the sexual “treason” of rape at the root of slavery. There was also the “treason” against the American Revolution and the Constitution. The “treason” that Douglas had accused Sumner of committing for which the punishment would be hanging Sumner transformed into a holy crucifixion and Douglas into the ultimate betrayer. “Let the Senator proceed. Not the first time in history will a scaffold become the pedestal of honor. Out of death comes life, and the ‘traitor’ whom he blindly executes will live immortal in the cause. ‘For Humanity sweeps onward: where to-day the martyr stands, On the morrow crouches Judas, with the silver in his hands.’ ” The lines casting Douglas as Judas were quoted from the antislavery poem “The Present Crisis” composed by James Russell Lowell, who belonged to Sumner’s circle in Boston and would the following year become the founding editor of The Atlantic Monthly. (Lowell’s poem would inspire the name of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s journal, The Crisis, edited by W.E.B. DuBois, and Dr. Martin Luther King would freely quote the poem in his speeches.)
For his peroration, Sumner summoned Dante, who had consigned his enemies to the sufferings of the Inferno for their cowardice—the “Great Refusal.” Sumner warned the Congress to abandon its cowardly avoidance of slavery or be condemned to the fires of eternal damnation. “Let it now take stand between the living and dead, and cause this plague to be stayed. All this it can do; and if the interests of Slavery were not hostile, all this it would do at once, in reverent regard for justice, law, and order, driving far away all alarms of war; nor would it dare to brave the shame and punishment of this ‘Great Refusal.’ ”
Rising from the rings of the Inferno, Sumner ascended to the heights of patriotism—to Washington’s words to “the good people of Boston” bravely resisting the British in the Revolution. “Above all towers the majestic form of Washington, once more, as on the bloody field, bidding them remember those rights of Human Nature for which the War of Independence was waged. Such a cause, thus sustained, is invincible.”
Surrounding himself with the emblems of the American Revolution, Sumner concluded his epic oration. At once the wounded senators leaped up to excoriate him. Senator Lewis Cass, of Michigan, who had been the dreary and defeated Democratic presidential nominee in 1848, pronounced the speech “the most un-American and unpatriotic that ever grated on the ears of the members of this high body.”
Douglas took the floor to add his disparagement with more than a hint of threat. “Is it his object to provoke some of us to kick him as we would a dog in the street, that he may get sympathy upon the just chastisement?” He assumed a pose of indig
nation at Sumner’s scholarship as the ravings of a pornographer. Douglas was appealing to the resentment of the Southerners at Sumner’s sexual critique of slavery. “We have had another dish of the classics served up—classic allusions, each one only distinguished for its lasciviousness and obscenity—each one drawn from those portions of the classics which all decent professors in respectable colleges cause to be suppressed, as unfit for decent young men to read. Sir, I cannot repeat the words. I should be condemned as unworthy of entering decent society, if I repeated those obscene, vulgar terms which have been used at least a hundred times in that speech.”
Then Douglas belittled Sumner by drawing a scene in which he was preening for a black boy with its barely concealed slander of homosexual pedophilia. “The Senator from Massachusetts 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 the adjoining rooms until they were forced to quit the house.”
Senator Mason took his turn to condescend to the unworthy member from Massachusetts, the genteel aristocrat acknowledging the unmanly Sumner only to describe him as belonging to a caste beneath contempt—“associations here whose presence elsewhere is dishonor, and the touch of whose hand would be a disgrace. . . . I have said that the necessity of political position alone brings me into relations with men upon this floor who elsewhere I cannot acknowledge as possessing manhood in any form. I am constrained to hear here depravity, vice in its most odious form uncoiled in this presence, exhibiting its loathsome deformities in accusation and vilification against the quarter of the country from which I come; and I must listen to it because it is a necessity of my position, under a common government, to recognize as an equal politically one whom to see elsewhere is to shun and despise.”
Sumner would not reply to Cass. “Nothing I say can have anything but kindness for him,” he said. He swiveled to Douglas. “To the Senator from Illinois I should willingly yield the privilege of the common scold—the last word; but I will not yield to him, in any discussion with me, the last argument, or the last semblance of it. He has crowned the outrage of this debate by venturing to rise here and calumniate me.” After reviewing his previous debate with Butler on the Fugitive Slave Act, Sumner chided Douglas for his personal attacks.
Perhaps I had better leave that Senator without a word more; but this is not the first, or the second, or the third, or the fourth time that he has launched against me his personalities. Sir, this is the Senate of the United States, an important body under the Constitution, with great powers. Its members are justly supposed, from years, to be above the intemperance of youth, and from character to be above the gusts of vulgarity. . . . Let the Senator bear these things in mind, and remember hereafter that the bowie knife and bludgeon are not proper emblems of senatorial debate. Let him remember that the swagger of Bob Acres and the ferocity of the Malay cannot add dignity to this body. The Senator infused into his speech the venom sweltering for months—ay, for years; and he has alleged matters entirely without foundation, in order to heap upon me some personal obloquy. I will not descend to things which dropped so naturally from his tongue. I only brand them to his face as false. I say also to that Senator, and I wish him to bear it in mind, that no person with the upright form of man can be allowed . . .
“Say it,” demanded Douglas.
“I will say it,” replied Sumner. “No person with the upright form of man can be allowed, without violation of all decency, to switch out from his tongue the perpetual stench of offensive personality. Sir, that is not a proper weapon of debate, at least on this floor. The noisome, squat, and nameless animal to which I now refer is not the proper model for an American Senator. Will the Senator from Illinois take notice?”
“I will—and therefore will not imitate you, Sir.” “I did not hear the Senator.”
“I said, if that be the case, I would certainly never imitate you in that capacity—recognizing the force of the illustration.”
“Mr. President,” said Sumner, “again the Senator switches his tongue, and again he fills the Senate with its offensive odor. But I drop the Senator.”
Douglas took offense, but may not have understood the erudition of the insult. The reference to the “noisome, squat, and nameless animal” was to a creature only disguised as an animal. On November 2, 1855, in a speech at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, Sumner had rehearsed some of the themes and language he would use in his “Crime Against Kansas” oration. He declared that the “authors [of popular sovereignty] follow well the example of the earliest Squatter Sovereign—none other than Satan—who, stealing into Eden, was there discovered, by the celestial angels, just beginning his work; as Milton tells us, ‘—him there they found / Squat like a toad, close to the ear of Eve.’ ”
Sumner now faced Mason. “There was still another, the Senator from Virginia, who is now also in my eye. That Senator said nothing of argument, and therefore there is nothing of that to be answered. I simply say to him that hard words are not argument, frowns are not reasons, nor do scowls belong to the proper arsenal of parliamentary debate. The Senator has not forgotten that on a former occasion I did something to exhibit the plantation manners which he displays. I will not do any more now.”
Thirteen years later, the journalist Donn Piatt recalled that Douglas muttered to him as Sumner spoke: “That damn fool will get himself killed by some other damn fool.” Double, double, toil and trouble.
The Senate adjourned.
“You had better go down with Mr. Sumner. I think there will be an assault upon him,” Congressman John A. Bingham, Republican from Ohio, warned Senator Wilson of Massachusetts. “Do you think so?” asked Wilson. “I have heard remarks made, from which I think an assault will be made,” said Bingham. Bingham would later say that he thought Douglas’s remark to “kick” Sumner “was designed to produce or encourage an assault.” Wilson recruited two Republican congressmen, Anson Burlingame of Massachusetts and Schuyler Colfax of Ohio, to serve as bodyguards. “I am going home with you today—several of us are going home with you,” Wilson told Sumner. But Sumner waved them off. “None of that, Wilson.” He walked out alone, caught up with Seward on the street, with whom he had planned to have dinner, but Seward suggested that he go directly to the printing office to oversee the proofs of his speech.
The next day, on the floor of the House, Congressman Thomas Rivers of Tennessee was heard loudly holding forth in conversation that Sumner “ought to be knocked down, and his face jumped into,” and that he “hoped” someone “would whip him, and put his foot upon his face.”
CHAPTER NINE
THE ASSASSINATION OF CHARLES SUMNER
Early the next morning, on May 21, nearly one thousand Border Ruffians deputized as a posse to enforce writs of treason and sedition appeared on the bluffs overlooking the free state town of Lawrence. Anticipating the attack, the Committee of Safety had decided that able-bodied men should evacuate and residents were urged to offer no resistance.
Southern Chivalry, lithograph by John L. Magee
David Rice Atchison, “Bourbon Dave,” the former president pro tempore of the Senate, and acting vice president of the United States, rode as the commander of the Ruffian army. Blustery and belligerent, Atchison had loomed as a monumental figure at the F Street Mess. Born in Frogtown, Kentucky, he had been a rough-hewn classmate at Transylvania University of the polished Jefferson Davis, made his career on the Missouri frontier as a stalwart proslavery Democrat. After Atchison ousted the seemingly eternal old Jacksonian Thomas Hart Benton in 1851 from his Senate seat, which he had held for thirty years, Benton waged a crusade to regain his rightful place. Benton always fought to the death, sometimes literally, once killing a man in a duel. “Bourbon Dave” equated his endangered career to a mortally threatened South. He swooned from the vertigo of his vulnerability. He had quit his Senate seat to lead the Ruffians on the Kansas battlefield in the belief that a final victory there would e
nable him to vanquish Benton once and for all in the 1856 Senate race.
Atchison sent a scouting party that discovered “most of the arms-bearing population whisked away like sea-birds blown landward by a tempest,” according to an account. The deputy U.S. marshal, however, found three men to arrest for treason. Atchison, Sheriff Samuel J. Jones, the U.S. marshal and his deputy, and the militia officers rode into the town, where the proprietor of the Free State Hotel invited them to have lunch without charge. After finishing the meal, the militias were marched down from the hills under their flags, one proclaiming “Supremacy of the White Race.”
The Ruffians broke into the offices of the two newspapers, the Free State and the Herald of Freedom, and smashed the printing presses. Some men marched around with books stuck on their bayonets. Books and papers were strewn across the streets. The men invaded the Free State Hotel where they raided the wine and liquor cabinets. Five cannon opened fire on the building. Four barrels of gunpowder were ignited to blow up what remained. Observing the flames, Jones said, “This is the happiest moment of my life.” The houses and stores were looted. Charles Robinson’s house was torched. One Ruffian was killed from a fallen brick at the Free State Hotel. Another accidentally shot himself; yet another fell off his horse. Atchison was observed walking off with a box of cigars stolen from the hotel, a modest prize of war. (In early 1857, the Atchison-Benton contest for the Senate seat ended after forty-one deadlocked ballots in the Missouri legislature with a third candidate walking over their bodies. Their match was a political murder-suicide with both men attempting to murder the other and both committing suicide.)
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