“God sees it,” Brown said to his son Jason as they stood on a hill above the burning town of Osawatomie. “I have only a short time to live—only one death to die, and I will die fighting for this cause. There will be no more peace in this land until slavery is done for. I will give them something else to do than to extend slave territory. I will carry the war into Africa.”
On July 20, his daughter Ruth wrote him from North Elba, “Gerrit Smith has had his name put down for ten thousand dollars towards starting a company of one thousand men to Kansas.” Under a warrant of arrest and a cloud of myth John Brown fled eastward.
CHAPTER TWELVE
DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA
Once Charles Sumner felt capable of being moved from his bed he was taken in June 1856 to the home of Francis P. Blair at Silver Spring for convalescence. He spent almost every day lying down, interrupted only by a slow walk around the garden, “hoping daily for strength which comes slowly.” William Seward paid him a visit on July 4th, alarmed at his condition. “His elasticity and vigor are gone. He walks, and in every way moves, like a man who has not altogether recovered from a paralysis, or like a man whose sight is dimmed, and his limbs stiffened with age.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, painting by Théodore Chassériau (1855)
Sumner consulted four physicians and traveled to Philadelphia to be evaluated by another, who described him in “a condition of extreme nervous exhaustion, his circulation feeble, and in fact every vital power alarmingly sunken.” He sought rest at the seaside resort of Cape May, New Jersey, and a mountain hotel in Pennsylvania, but still felt immense pressure within his head. Doctors could do little for him. The medical science for diagnosing brain trauma injury and the technology to scan it simply did not exist. No physician could ever determine the lasting neurological damage that may have affected his personality.
Though he was an invalid, the New York Tribune urged his nomination as the Republican candidate for vice president as a gesture of tribute. “And would not the entire People applaud his elevation to the office of President of that Senate which has witnessed with disgraceful indifference the recent attempt to suppress Free Speech by the assassin’s bludgeon?” He received thirty-five votes. Sumner had no ambition to become vice president, but he did want to campaign. Blair counseled him to continue his recovery. “You have . . . done more to gain the victory than any other,” he said.
Sumner’s beating was a leitmotif of the Republican campaign, the “free speech” part of its slogan: “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men, Fremont!” The Illinois Republican State Committee, under the direction of Abraham Lincoln, published a circular, “Republican Bulletin No. 7,” entitled: Tyranny of the Slave Power “We Will Subdue You.” The Outrage Upon Senator Sumner, which contained a lengthy quote from
That pure and venerable patriot, Hon. Josiah Quincy, of Mass. . . . upon Preston S. Brooks’ crimes as follows: “The blow struck upon the head of Charles Sumner did not fall upon him alone. It was a blow purposely aimed at the North. It was a blow struck at the very tree of liberty. . . . J.Q. Adams once said to me, ‘The characteristics of Southern Representatives are boldness, fearlessness, and desperation; while the characteristics of the Northern Representatives have always been dog timidity and fear.’ And well the South know this. If we do not act now, the chances may never again return; and all that will be left the North will be to tackle in with the slaves, and drag the carts of slaveholders, only beseeching them to spare the whip, and make the load as light as possible.” Heed the advice of the Old Roman, and vote for Fremont and Freedom.
On November 3, 1856, Charles Sumner made a triumphant entrance on his return to Boston in order to vote in the national election to be held the next day. He began his procession from the house of his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Brattle Street in Cambridge to the Brookline home of Amos A. Lawrence, whose criticism of Sumner was now forgotten. From there a cavalcade of virtually every notable was assembled to accompany him—elected officials, officers of the Massachusetts militia, Harvard professors, and business leaders. When his cortege crossed the city line into Boston a band broke out into “Hail Columbia,” and Josiah Quincy, at eighty-four years old the most distinguished citizen of the commonwealth, and Mayor Alexander H. Rice greeted him. Quincy delivered a welcoming address: “He comes, a cheerful and victorious sufferer, out of great conflicts of humanity with oppression, of ideas with ignorance, of scholarship and refinement with barbarian vulgarity, of intellectual power with desperate and brutal violence, of conscience with selfish expediency, of right with wrong.” Sumner joined Quincy and the mayor in their carriage drawn by six magnificent gray horses and surrounded by a bodyguard of marshals and police. A contingent of young women threw bouquets of flowers in his path attached with mottoes: “No bludgeon can dim the lustre of our champion of Freedom.” “Massachusetts’ most honored son. If the ladies could vote, he would be the next President.” Then through downtown, around the Common, up to Beacon Hill and the State House, crowds were packed and buildings festooned with flags and banners. One, wreathed in black, read: “May 22, 1856.” Another: “Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.” And: “Welcome, Freedom’s Defender.” At the State House there were more speeches, and Sumner responded in a “feeble” voice: “I shall persevere against all temptations, against all odds, against all perils, against all threats,—knowing well, that, whatever may be my fate, the Right will surely prevail.” He was escorted to his house on Hancock Street, where his mother waited at the door. He went to his bedroom, where he stayed for months.
The Massachusetts General Assembly elected Sumner to another term in the Senate by acclamation. His prestige was unassailable, but behind his icon was a guiding political hand called the Bird Club. Francis W. Bird, a paper manufacturer and adherent of the Free Soil Party, began holding weekly lunches at Parker House Hotel after the 1848 loss. Starting with a handful of antislavery friends, the number grew to several dozen men, and the Bird Club over time became the heart and soul of the Massachusetts Republican Party. Ward bosses, journalists, and abolitionists alike belonged. Its first victory was backing Sumner for the Senate, and its second was his reelection. Bird was particularly close to John A. Andrew, a lawyer and antislavery politician, who became governor in 1860 and would appoint Bird to the Governor’s Council. At the lunches, Bird sat at the head of the table, with Andrew on his right and Sumner, when he was in town, on his left. The rising influence of the Bird Club was a sign of the insurgent Republicans becoming a regular political organization and governing party.
In early January 1857, John Brown marched into the office of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee, the local chapter of the Emigrant Aid Society, on School Street in Boston, wearing a gray military-style overcoat with a cape and a fur hat. He presented a letter of introduction to the secretary of the committee, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, from Sanborn’s brother-in-law, George Walker, who was acquainted with Brown in Springfield, Massachusetts. Sanborn, twenty-six years old, was a precocious and radical abolitionist Harvard graduate who had recently founded a college preparatory school at Concord for the children of the leading Transcendentalists. Brown seemed to him to have stepped out of a storybook as an ideal figure from the epic past. “He was, in fact, a Puritan soldier, such as were common enough in Cromwell’s day, but have not often been seen since. Yet his heart was averse to bloodshed, gentle, tender and devout.” Brown regaled Sanborn with tales of his heroism and famous victories, his plans to “resist aggression,” and immediate need for two hundred Sharps rifles and $30,000 in cash.
The enraptured Sanborn brought the “Puritan soldier” to meet the great and the good. At Theodore Parker’s house the man of war was introduced to the apostle of peace, William Lloyd Garrison. “They discussed peace and non-resistance together,” according to Garrison’s grandson and biographer, “Brown quoting the Old Testament against Garrison’s citations from the New, and Parker from time to time injecting a bit of Lexington into the
controversy, which attracted a small group of interested listeners.” Wendell Phillips, who was present, distanced himself, at least then, writing Garrison afterward that Brown’s massacre at Pottawatomie “cannot be successfully palliated or excused.” His objection underscored that Brown’s role in the murders or suspicion of it was not unknown.
George Luther Stearns, a wealthy manufacturer and abolitionist donor, chairman of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee, after meeting Brown at Theodore Parker’s house, invited him to his estate at Medford. “He rose to greet me,” wrote Mary Stearns, his wife, “stepping forward with such an erect, military bearing, such fine courtesy of demeanor and grave earnestness, that he seemed to my instant thought some old Cromwellian hero suddenly dropped down before me.” “Gentlemen,” said Brown, “I consider the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence one and inseparable; and it is better that a whole generation of men, women, and children should be swept away than that this crime of slavery should exist one day longer.” “These words were uttered like rifle balls,” recalled Mary Stearns.
On January 8, Stearns designated Brown the agent of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee, assigning him two hundred rifles, $1,000 in military supplies, and $5,000 in cash. Brown raced to see Gerrit Smith, who, in a downward phase of one of his manic-depressive cycles, refused to give him more funds and complained that Brown had not paid him for his land in North Elba. Sanborn traveled with Brown to Chicago to plead with the National Kansas Committee, the governing board of the Emigrant Aid Society, for guns and money, but he was rebuffed.
Brown returned to Boston where Sanborn arranged for him to address a committee of the state legislature on February 18, 1857, to petition for $100,000. He recounted thrilling stories of his adventures, the hardships of settlers, and his sons’ victimization. The next day, Amos A. Lawrence, acting for the committee, sent him a meager check for $70.
Sanborn took Brown to Concord for dinner with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. “He spoke of the murder of one of his seven sons, the imprisonment and insanity of another,” Sanborn recalled, “and as he shook before his audience the chain which his free-born son had worn, for no crime but for resisting slavery, his words rose to thrilling eloquence, and made a wonderful impression on his audience. From that time the Concord people were on his side, as they afterwards testified on several occasions.” He was invited to speak at the Town House in Concord, again telling his tales of Kansas and declaring again, “better that a whole generation of men, women, and children should be swept away than that this crime of slavery should exist one day longer.” Emerson gave him a small contribution and Thoreau “subscribed a trifle” because he had “so much confidence in the man—that he would do right.”
Charles Sumner had secured his second term in the Senate but was physically incapable of serving. His friends and allies no longer could turn to him as their beacon. He was more symbol than presence. In his absence the practical men who had been instrumental in making his political career went on to build the Republican Party, and they were preoccupied with the machinery of winning elections and governing. Their abolitionism was dedicated to gaining effective political power. A few of the high-minded idealists and radical abolitionists participated in the Bird Club, but they were mostly adrift in the vacuum left by Sumner’s withdrawal from public life. John Brown stepped into their drawing rooms to sweep them up with his authentic appearance and urgent stories just as they were enraged at the beating of their infirm champion.
After the legislature rejected his request for funds, Brown had an important call to make. He paid a visit to Charles Sumner at his Beacon Hill home, accompanied by James Redpath, the Tribune correspondent, who had come to Boston.
We spoke of the assault of Brooks, under which Sumner then was suffering. After describing it, as he was stretched in pain on the bed, Captain Brown suddenly asked if he had still the coat. “Yes,” said Sumner, “it is in that closet: would you like to see it?” Captain Brown said he would like to see it much indeed. Senator Sumner rose slowly and painfully from the bed, crossed the room, opened a closet and handed the coat to the old hero. . . . I recall the scene as vividly as if I had just seen it: Sumner standing slightly bent and supporting himself by keeping his hand on the bed, Brown, erect as a pillar, holding up the blood besmeared coat in his right hand and intently examining it. The old man said nothing I believe—I could never recall a word; but I remember that his lips compressed & his eyes shone like polished steel.
A week later, Sumner returned to Washington. “Mr. Sumner looks very well as he sits in his chair. He was never, perhaps, looking better,” reported the Boston Traveller. “But the idea of health is quickly dissipated when he attempts to rise, or more particularly when he commences to walk after rising, when his step appears feeble and uncertain, as though he were walking on a slippery surface and was sensible of its insecurity. He complains of a nervous sensation of his spine, and laughing describes his debility as arising from a want of ‘backbone.’ ” Seated in his chair in the Senate for the first time since the assault, his Republican colleagues thronged around him. “Douglas, Toombs, Slidell, Benjamin, Cass and others, passed and repassed Mr. Sumner’s seat and neither gave nor received a look of recognition.” Sumner voted on a tariff bill and “returned to his rooms perfectly exhausted.” He wrote Theodore Parker, “a cloud began to gather over my brain. I tottered out and took to my bed.”
On March 7, 1857, he sailed to Europe on an extensive tour of his familiar sights in search of a cure. Leaving the whirlwind of London society, he sought peace, quiet, and scintillating conversation at the Normandy château of his friend Alexis de Tocqueville. Descended from a millennium-long aristocratic line, Tocqueville was a resolute liberal, appalled by the Old Regime, the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution in which his parents were imprisoned and narrowly escaped the guillotine, and the Bourbon restoration. He crossed the Atlantic in 1831 as a magistrate to investigate the prison system in the United States, but he wound up writing about every aspect of the American experiment, producing his Democracy in America. From his experience with despotism and revolution and with a sociologist’s insight he described the New World of social equality, voluntary associations, and civil liberties, as well as the propensity to prejudice and the threat of “the tyranny of the majority,” his phrase. Toward the conclusion of his tour d’horizon, he addressed the conundrum of slavery. Tocqueville was an abolitionist who believed that slavery “contrasted with democratic liberty and the intelligence of our age, cannot survive.” But he did not know how emancipation might happen in America without setting off “the most horrible of civil wars and perhaps in the extirpation of one or the other of the two races.”
The ancient Château de Tocqueville near the English Channel housed a library of six thousand volumes. “Within that large room was a small cabinet, or study, in which he generally sat,” recalled Sumner. “What particularly struck me on entering this room was four portraits on the four walls, one of which was of Washington, and another of Hamilton. Of course I could not help exclaiming. When De Tocqueville found that I had recognized them, he seemed much pleased. I, of course, expressed my great pleasure at so high a compliment to our country. We soon were engaged in discussing the character of General Hamilton.”
Sumner expressed his certitude that slavery would be overthrown. “There can be no doubt about the result,” he said. “Slavery will soon succumb and disappear.” “Disappear! In what way, and how soon?” inquired an incredulous Tocqueville. “In what manner, I cannot say,” replied Sumner. “How soon I cannot say, but it will be soon. I feel it. I know it. It cannot be otherwise.”
“Mr. Sumner is a remarkable man,” remarked Tocqueville after he left. “He says that slavery will soon entirely disappear in the United States. He does not know how, he does not know when; but he feels it, he is perfectly sure of it. The man speaks like a prophet.”
PART TWO
THE RISE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CREATION
“For it is the solecism of power, to think to command the end, and yet not to endure the mean. . . . The rising unto place is laborious; and by pains men come to greater pains; and it is sometimes base; and by indignities men come to dignities. The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall, or at least an eclipse, which is a melancholy thing. . . . All rising to great place is by a winding stair.”
FRANCIS BACON, ESSAYS, AMONG LINCOLN’S “FAVORITE BOOKS”
On May 26, 1856, Abraham Lincoln finished up three cases of debt collection in Danville. He had practiced law in the county courthouses of central Illinois for years, familiar stations on the Eighth Judicial Circuit. He was in Danville so often that he maintained a subsidiary law office there with his friend Ward Hill Lamon, whom he called “Hill.” None of Lincoln’s friends or colleagues called him “Abe.” Those who did marked themselves as falsely intimate. He preferred to be called “Lincoln.” He did not like being deferentially addressed as “Mr. Lincoln.” “I don’t recollect of his applying the prefix ‘Mr.’ to any one,” recalled Henry Clay Whitney, a young attorney who traveled from town to town with Lincoln. Lincoln called those in his coterie by their last names, except for Judge David Davis, the chief of the circuit and master of ceremonies, whom Lincoln called “Judge.”
Abraham Lincoln, 1858
Before he rode the railroads Lincoln traveled around by horse—Old Bob and Old Tom—and buggy. “His horse was as rawboned and weird-looking as himself,” recalled Whitney, “and his buggy, an open one, as rude as either; his attire was that of an ordinary farmer or stock-raiser, while the sum total of his baggage consisted of a very attenuated carpetbag, an old weather-beaten umbrella, and a short blue cloak reaching to his hips—a style which was prevalent during the Mexican War. This he had procured at Washington while a Congressman, and carried about with him as a winter covering for the years thereafter.” The umbrella, originally olive green, was so old it had turned brown and the knob fallen off. No one would mistake it as belonging to anyone but Lincoln, but he had nonetheless sewn the letters of his name in it. In the spring, Lincoln switched his half cloak for a long white linen duster that was wrinkled and covered with dirt. He wore a beaver stovepipe hat that had three indentations on its thin brim from his courteous doffing of it. He often kept papers in it. Despite his wife’s best efforts to make him appear a prosperous and thoroughly respectable professional man, he was “oblivious” to style, had “no talent to dress well,” and gave a first impression to those from metropolitan centers as a hopeless provincial, “not susceptible to conventionality or to polish.”
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