Letter from Hon. Charles Sumner . . . [Sumner’s February 19 letter to Dr. Stone follows, reprinted in full; see page 103]
One remarkable thing about this picture is, that it is intended to operate on the refined Legislature of Massachusetts. This we infer from a sentence in the Senator’s letter and from the following brief extract from the Boston Telegraph:
“The Daguerreotype mentioned in the following letter is a portrait of one of the family referred to, a most beautiful white girl, with high forehead, straight hair, intellectual appearance, and decidedly attractive features. It may be seen for a few days at the State House, in the hands of the Clerk of the House of Representatives.”
An improvement seems to be going on in the Senator and in the grave, dignified, and enlightened legislators of the great State of scholars. They have heretofore worshipped the black, flat-nosed, thick-lipped sons and daughters of Africa. But, from the above account, it seems that they have become fascinated “with a most beautiful white girl, with high forehead, straight hair, intellectual appearance, and decidedly attractive features.”
Senator Sumner, to complete the matter, ought, by all means, to have a Daguerreotype taken of the grave, solemn, enlightened, and dignified Legislature of Massachusetts, when the picture of his “Ida May” is formally presented. We can imagine the bristling hair, the compressed lips, the glaring eye balls, of the Massachusetts legislators. But we should like to see the picture. He is fond of pictures. We hope that in his leisure moments he has made arrangements to have this one taken.
—Washington Sentinel, March 2, 18554
Mary was still in Washington when this calumny was printed; perhaps Elizabeth read it and feared for her daughter’s upcoming tour of the Massachusetts legislature, they of the “glaring eye balls” and “bristling” hair. Tucker’s article showed other possible responses to our poster child: amoral thoughts and perhaps disgust. Tucker seemed to think that the senator did not take into account the motives of his whole constituency.
A political cartoon produced during Sumner’s second term, captioned “I’m not to blame for being white, sir!” shows him giving preferential treatment to a black girl, a rag seller, over a white girl selling firewood. Set on Boston’s fashionable streets, the 1862 lithograph features two well-dressed white women under a parasol, to serve as arbitrators and audience. In the center, Sumner looks off into a middle distance, expressionless, and the two girls are represented like Topsy and Eva from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He hands four coins to the black girl, who smiles up at him, her palm open. Her head in profile is a racist caricature, with bare shoulders and bare feet. The printer has colored her skin so dark that her features nearly disappear into silhouette.5
“I’m not to blame for being white, Sir,” lithograph of Charles Sumner and two children, attributed to Dominique C. Fabronius, printed by George W. Cottrell of Boston, 1862.
Tucker’s monstrous article had called Sumner’s interest in Mary “an improvement” in abolitionism’s object, as the movement had “heretofore worshipped the black, flat-nosed, thick-lipped sons and daughters of Africa.” Tucker’s screed could stand as a description of the black girl pictured here in this antislavery lithograph, published seven years later. White supremacy’s static vision of who is beautiful, and who deserves our attention, persists. The white girl also has her hand outstretched, but it is unclear whether she reaches for coins or points at the black girl in accusation. Her shoulders are bare and colorless, and her body looks suggestively like that of a grown woman. Her slippered feet are inches from Sumner’s leather shoes, squared off as in a dance. A second caption, printed beneath the headline, provides Sumner’s response to her: “True, my girl, but charity ought to begin where it is most needed, and you, certainly, are the better off, having more friends and less oppressors.”
Apparently, Sumner knew with startling prescience that his white audiences would connect with Mary Mildred Williams as a poster child for American slavery. His clear-mindedness, especially when it came to recognizing oppression, seems anachronistic and inconsistent with his era. By most accounts, Sumner was a total failure in the emotional work required for empathy. While his speeches read as excellent studies in human behavior and motivation, the man himself was harsh, critical, and vindictive, as his biographers have noted. President Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury, Hugh McCulloch, considered Sumner unmatched as an orator and scholar, a “handsome” and “commanding presence”: “a pure man, a man of unsullied and unassailable integrity. All this can be justly said of him. On the other hand, his prejudices were hastily formed and violent. His self-esteem was limitless. Impatient of contradiction, his manner to those who differed with him was arrogant and offensive. His ears were ever open to flattery, of which he was omnivorous.” As for his politics, he worked at the level of principles, not people. “For the freedom of the slaves he was an earnest worker; of their claims to all the privileges of freedom, after their emancipation, he was an able and eloquent advocate and defender; but to appeals by needy colored people to his charity, or even his sympathy, he was seemingly indifferent.”6
He reserved his innermost confidences to his lifelong friends, Samuel Gridley Howe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Although Sumner’s wife, Alice Mason, was his equal in intelligence and independence, there was no love between them; their marriage in 1866 did not last a year.
Years later, writing for the Independent, correspondent Mary Hudson would remember Sumner as “a man solitary by the primal law of his nature, preoccupied, absorbed, aristocratic in instinct, though a leveler in ideas, never a demagogue, never a politician,—he is the born master and expounder of fundamental principles.” Somehow he found in Mary the key that was needed to unlock the sympathy of voters, who were exclusively white men like himself, while reserving his own. There is a sort of genius there.
The first record of Sumner in attendance at an antislavery meeting was in January 1845, when he was in his mid-thirties. There he heard William Lloyd Garrison speak for the first time, though as he told Garrison on that occasion, he had read The Liberator for years.
The land grab known as the “Mexican War” resulted in the annexation of new territories in the Southwest: in December 1846, Texas was admitted to the Union as a slave state, disrupting a carefully maintained balance in Congress between slave and free states. The Mexican War mobilized a generation of antislavery sympathizers to become activists, including John Andrew and Henry David Thoreau. Sumner, for his part, made his first speech against slavery in opposition to the war, arguing that it was motivated by a desire to extend the reach of slavery. In 1848, the Free Soil party was formed, a third party in a two-party system. Under its slogan, “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men,” it soon became a viable political platform dedicated to limiting slavery by focusing on keeping the new territories of the West free from the slave power.
The Compromise of 1850 was Kentucky senator Henry Clay’s legislative attempt to answer the question of slavery in the west. Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster, a Whig, gave his support to the Fugitive Slave Act in his infamous “Seventh of March” speech, claiming this capitulation to Southern interests as a necessary component of the Compromise of 1850, required to stave off political and economic disunion. Abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier published “Ichabod,” in response to Webster: “All else is gone; from those great eyes/ The soul has fled:/ When faith is lost, when honor dies,/ The man is dead.”
Sumner, by now a leader of the antislavery movement, called the Fugitive Slave Act “a hideous Heaven-defying bill . . . avowedly for the recapture of fugitive slaves, but endangering the liberty of freemen.”7 In August 1850, when it appeared the Fugitive Slave Act would become law, Sumner accepted the Free Soil nomination for U.S. Senate. That year, in direct response to Webster’s capitulation, Massachusetts voters gave his Senate seat to the smart young Free Soil radical.
Upon taking his seat in the Thirty-second Congress in December 1851, Sumner began with “caut
ion and reserve,” as he wrote in a letter to Whittier. “Some of the heaviest hours of my life have been since my election,” he confided in Whittier, “Would that another faithful to our cause were in my place!”8 His situation in Washington was “peculiar,” he wrote to his friend Samuel Gridley Howe, due to the prejudice throughout the country that he was a one-issue candidate, or as he called himself, “a fanatic.” “As a first condition to my usefulness,” he would need to course-correct and broaden his political scope. Proceeding under a “true policy . . . of silence,” he would play a long game: “I wish that the public should become submissive to the idea that I am a senator before they hear my voice. Unless this is so, I shall not secure a fair hearing from the country.”9
Sumner was true to his word: eight months passed before the country heard from him on slavery. Though he was ready to speak sooner, he was not granted the floor. Finally, on August 26, 1852, in a three-hour speech entitled “Freedom National; Slavery Sectional” he laid out a national position to “oppose all sectionalism.” His abolitionist argument was drawn in specifically congressional terms, calling for repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act on constitutional grounds, and offering voters a legislative approach to antislavery.
His proposal was not met with universal acclaim: in Boston, Garrison’s newspaper, the Liberator, rejected such legislative solutions and found Sumner’s proposal to “oppose all sectionalism” to be overly cautious.10 A key tenet of Garrisonian abolitionism was sectionalism, in its refusal to engage in politics or with slaveholders. Garrison and his followers believed that, since the Constitution was a pro-slavery document written by slaveholders, pro-slavery interests hopelessly, sinfully, corrupted the entire United States government. Their slogan, “No Union with Slaveholders,” ran counter to the nationalizing theme of Sumner’s new platform.
But voters were moving with Sumner. The 1850s saw renewed engagement with the political process to the benefit not only of the antislavery movement but also of movements for women’s rights and temperance.
Sumner’s first term in the Senate, 1851 to 1856, indicated the uncertain sands of his political hour. New political parties were formed out of the demise of Webster’s Whig Party, fueling the rising threat of the Know-Nothings, the American Party, and other nativist groups. The Democrats split into Northern and Southern parties, each with its own convention and platform. Admitting women into the debate caused dissension in the antislavery ranks, fracturing the movement. Free Soil would no longer be a viable choice when the time came for his reelection, so his friends Andrew and Howe urged Sumner to join the new coalition, the Republican party. This chaotic political scene would propel the Republican party ascendency, and even if Sumner was a reluctant participant in party politics, he rode the rise.
While Mary and her family were in Washington, in February 1855, the Senate was considering a bill to reinforce the Fugitive Slave Law. It would neutralize laws that obstructed fugitive capture and return; Vermont, Connecticut, and Michigan had passed such laws, and a fugitive protection bill was about to pass in Massachusetts. The federal bill further stated that “any suit commenced or pending in any State Court against any officer of the United States, or other person, for or on account of any act done under any law of the United States,” could be removed to the jurisdiction of federal circuit courts. In other words, federally commissioned officers who rounded up fugitives would be protected from lawsuits in antislavery states by ensuring their cases would be heard by more sympathetic federal courts.
It was a grenade of a bill, and it was carefully timed. The correspondent for the New York Evening Post explained, “Of course, such a project, curtailing the powers of the State Courts, so odious and insulting in its intent, could not be suddenly sprung upon the Senators from the free States without provoking a long and acrimonious debate.”11 The Senate President allowed only thirteen hours of debate, before a vote would be called at midnight on Friday, February 23, 1855. The senators of Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut claimed every hour remaining to argue that the Fugitive Slave Law was unconstitutional. They demonstrated the combined oratorical strength of a block of antislavery senators—Charles Sumner, William Seward of New York, Francis Gillette of Connecticut, and the new junior senator (and former shoemaker) from Massachusetts, Henry Wilson. Wilson announced himself to the Senate chamber that evening as unequivocally against slavery, calling the Fugitive Slave Act “odious, inhuman, and unconstitutional.” Francis Gillette, who had been elected in 1854 on the Free Soil ticket to fill a vacancy, had only ten months to make his mark. He had a speech prepared and ready for delivery in his desk. William Seward, freshly reelected by New York, was the leader of this coalition of Northern senators, and a force among them. The night was theirs.12
Newspapers on the East Coast published the senators’ speeches in their entirety.
If any of the friends of freedom in Massachusetts are disheartened by the present aspect of the anti-Slavery cause, let them visit Washington. There is a change in the very atmosphere, which cheers and encourages the anti-Slavery heart. It is to call the attention of our friends in Massachusetts to some of these cheering facts and indications, and to bid them, thank God and take courage, that I write this hasty note.
We reached Washington on Friday evening. After tea we left our hotel to attend the President’s levee, when we heard of the GREAT DEBATE in the Senate. Hurrying to the Capitol, as we ascended the stairs of the Senate gallery, we heard the familiar tones of our new Senator [Wilson] . . .
Mr. SUMNER closed the debate, at midnight, in a short speech characterized by his usual fearless denunciations of slavery and of this new aggression. He was frequently interrupted by RUSK and BUTLER, both of whom, the latter especially, were shamefully drunk. It was very, very sad to see the representative of chivalrous South Carolina disgracing his State and the Senate by his maudlin incoherencies. Mr. SUMNER pressed the point with great force that this bill was only necessary to bolster up the Fugitive Slave Bill, and that the repeal of that Act would render the passage of this, even on their own ground, unnecessary; he therefore moved to substitute for this Bill an amendment repealing the Fugitive Slave Bill. The amendment was of course rejected and the Bill passed; and thus closed a debate which has done for the anti-Slavery men almost as much as the passage of the Nebraska Bill.
It was not alone the arguments pro and con which gave to this debate its importance; but it was the spirit of the whole scene. Slavery reads its doom. Throughout the debate, Southern Senators were, as compared with previous discussions, cowed—their tone is deprecating, very near the stage which the boys call “cry-baby;” Northern Anti-Slavery Senators were bold, confident, and defiant. . . .
I have said that the tone of the South is despondent. The North, they think, is at length in earnest. They have reason to be alarmed. Thirteen Senators voted against the motion to lay on the table Mr. Chase’s motion for a select committee on the repeal of the Fugitive Bill.
—Boston Telegraph, February 28, 185513
Senator Gillette read from the laws governing the District of Columbia, and then spent “more than an hour citing extracts in derogation of slavery.” On the Monday before last, he reported, “a woman tied with a rope” was dragged by horseback “under the very shadow of the Capitol.” He claimed that slavery had nothing to do whatsoever with race. “Persons are held here in slavery, at this moment, as white as the whitest Senator on this floor.” According to one newspaper, “The strength of his epithets, and the evident heartiness with which he applied them, had a reviving effect on the drowsy Southern Senators (not to speak it profanely), like a long pole in a cage of monkeys. They gathered around him as if he were a natural curiosity, asking all sorts of derisive questions, about as germane to his remarks as his remarks were to the precise subject presented in the bill before the Senate.”14
Senator William Dawson, a Whig from Georgia, remarked, “These laws are as obsolete as the Blue-laws of Connecticut. Never enforced here.”
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sp; Senator James Jones, the six-foot-tall former governor of Tennessee known as “Lean Jimmy,” said, “The Senator from Connecticut has read over fifty pages which must have taken a week to prepare, and speaks of the remarks of Mr. Wade, which shows he knew what Mr. Wade was going to say. Now own up, gentlemen, you knew all about this bill and what each other was going to say on it. I do not say it in my Senatorial capacity, but personally, I verily believe you are a band of traitors.”15
Gillette was unbowed. He was animated by talk as he sailed on with his litany of horrors, punctuated by lines of antislavery poetry and pieces of song that he sang for the chamber.
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