The Great Abolitionist: Charles Sumner and the Fight for a More Perfect Union

by Stephen Puleo

Sumner, too, favored harsh retribution against the South, and while he truly mourned Lincoln’s death, he also acknowledged that Lincoln’s demise “will strengthen those who wish strong measures.” As painful as the assassination was to the country in the moment, it could serve as a providential event to eradicate slavery forever and propel the drive for equal rights under the law, dual principles Sumner had championed virtually his entire public life.

While President Lincoln has been, justifiably, the subject of countless biographies, thousands of essays, and lavish praise about his wisdom and leadership from scholars and schoolchildren alike, Charles Sumner’s life and accomplishments have faded, an unfortunate historical occurrence—this is the first full biography of Sumner in more than a half century.

all of these place Charles Sumner among a handful of the most influential non-Presidents in American history, alongside Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Susan B. Anthony.

For a quarter of a century, including twenty-three consecutive years in the Senate from 1851 until his death (which encompassed a three-year absence as he recovered from his caning injuries), it was Charles Sumner—not Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, or anyone else—who was the nation’s most passionate and inexhaustible antislavery and equal rights champion.

This biography (better described as a “biographical history”), rather than focusing on Sumner’s every movement and utterance between childhood and death, traces the arc of his antislavery and equal rights leadership as he stood at the center of the storm that swept across the nation during the 1850s and 1860s.

Charles Sumner was the boldest, most controversial, and most influential voice of America’s most turbulent two decades: the 1850s and 1860s. No one else came close.

He had a particular understanding of the power of words and big themes to move people, to challenge their ways of doing things.

Sumner understood politics, but he had little patience for the political process or in nourishing personal relationships that made the process run smoothly.

Like Winston Churchill during World War II and Martin Luther King, Jr., during the civil rights era, Charles Sumner, throughout the 1850s and 1860s, relied most heavily on the uncompromising clarity of his ideas, his relentless honesty, and his steadfastness as his most effective attributes as he sought to move the heart and mind of a country embroiled in crisis.

No single individual did more to influence the antislavery movement on a national scale. No single person was more responsible for founding and fueling the growth of the antislavery Republican Party.

By the final leg of his exhausting six-day journey south, on a stagecoach ride from Baltimore to Washington—a stretch of only thirty-eight miles through “barren and cheerless country” that took all day over the “worst roads” Sumner had ridden upon—Sumner spotted a group of slaves toiling in a field. He appeared to view them with a combination of contempt and curiosity.

“They appear to be nothing more than moving masses of flesh, unendowed with any thing of intelligence above the brutes.” He concluded his reference with an ambiguous aside that may have been an indictment upon the South itself, the slave system, or the jarring sight of seeing enslaved people: “I have now an idea of the blight upon that part of the country in which they live.”

In fact, Washington at the time of Sumner’s first visit was the nexus for a great slave migration—a slave “trail of tears,” as it were—in which hundreds of thousands, perhaps up to one million, “Upper South” slaves, who worked in tobacco fields and as household servants in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky, were sold to labor-hungry plantation owners in the rapidly growing Deep South cotton and sugarcane states of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana.

Sumner’s father, Charles Pinckney Sumner, had strong antislavery sentiments, and though Charles and his father were not close, the elder Sumner’s convictions carried great sway over his son’s thinking. Young Charles denounced proslavery violence in the South, and he began reading William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator.

In his opinion, the camaraderie displayed between students of different races at the Sorbonne could only mean one thing—“that the distance between free blacks and whites among us is derived from education, and does not exist in the nature of things.”

Sumner not only disagreed with Garrison’s conclusions about the Constitution, but he also believed such language only served to array conservatives, moderates, and the country in general against the antislavery movement, even as these groups were all potential allies essential to its success. Sumner grew increasingly uncomfortable with the tone of the language used in the Liberator. “It has seemed to me often vindictive, bitter, and unchristian,” he said. “I have been openly opposed to [its] doctrines on the Union and the Constitution.”

He was stung by criticism from both sides and often felt he was standing alone.

Soon Sumner began isolating himself from Boston society and even his closest friends, perceiving that people were talking behind his back and ridiculing him both for his antislavery positions and his lack of enthusiasm for his law practice. Only Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s company satisfied him,

Rapid mood swings, bouts of paranoia and depression, feelings of inferiority (even while professing his superiority), acerbic language, animus toward others, and a need to assume the martyr’s mantle—these were all traits that shaped Charles Sumner’s personality and influenced his actions.

In fact, Sumner rarely expressed love and tenderness to anyone. In this way, the eldest son mirrored his father, the person in the Sumner household who most affected Charles’s personality as a young man,

Despite young Charles’s absence for only three of 580 classes and chapel exercises during his first year of school—an enviable and remarkable attendance record—his father was far from impressed and chastised him for failing to devote his “whole time to the duties prescribed.”

To compensate for his inability to please his father, Sumner sought the company and mentoring of men who were his father’s contemporaries—including Justice Joseph Story, whose influence and Harvard connections helped Sumner meet Unitarian reformer William Ellery Channing, and former President John Quincy Adams. It was under their tutelage that Sumner gained self-confidence,

At one gathering, his friends noticed him talking uneasily to an attractive woman and wagered how long it would take for Sumner to turn away and revert to his more comfortable surroundings—conversing with men. They roared with laughter when it happened in a matter of minutes.

It’s also likely that women were less tolerant of Sumner’s self-absorption than his male friends.

Sumner had a soft spot for Mary that he had for no one else.

Whatever the cause of Sumner’s incapacitation—there is insufficient evidence to offer a definitive diagnosis—for the last two weeks of July 1844, his family and his friends thought he was going to die.

During the early 1840s, Sumner dabbled in many issues, including progressive movements calling for reforms in prison, education, and mental health services. But by the latter half of 1845, no topic consumed his thoughts more than slavery and its attendant evils.

Next, while he acknowledged that the national government could not constitutionally reach into a slave state to abolish the institution, it could establish antislavery laws within the District of Columbia, in territories, and as part of interstate commerce and coastal trade.

In his own fiery speech, defiant abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison said that if Congress approved the plan, Massachusetts should consider the union dissolved and form a new government with other free states.

That his country was fighting a war to essentially extend slavery left Sumner livid and unable to concentrate on much else. “In Sumner’s alphabet just now there are only two words: Slavery and the Mexican War,” wrote his friend, George Hillard.

Charles Sumner learned a great deal about himself from the Texas speech. For an intellectual who had previously expressed himself mainly through the written word, it taught him the full power of oratory and specifically the broad range of his own oratorical skills. For a rising talent whose name was known only to a few Boston political insiders, the Texas oration brought him national fame. For an attorney who had spent most of his early career huddled with dusty lawbooks, gloomy and unfulfilled professionally, the speech freed him from the constrictions of the legal profession, encouraged him to think about entering public life, and expanded his world in profound ways. The Texas speech demonstrated his towering intellect, his tenacity in argument, his capacity to deal with universal issues, and his moral courage.

Sumner’s actions, Winthrop’s reaction, and the ensuing fallout make the incident the ideal microscope through which to view the competing facets of Charles Sumner’s personality, characteristics he demonstrated to a wide audience in the latter half of the 1840s, traits he would carry with him for his entire life. In this Sumner versus Sumner struggle, the unwavering antislavery crusader, the equal rights idealist, the visionary who foresaw a bright future few others thought possible, waged a constant internal battle against the sanctimonious egotist, the self-appointed martyr of righteousness, and the insecure, brooding, often lonely man who struggled mightily with personal relationships.

Wily Democrats, through parliamentary maneuvering, inserted a controversial preamble into a bill that provided $50,000 for supplies and 50,000 additional men for Zachary Taylor’s army; and the bill’s preamble declared that the war had been caused by Mexican aggression. As a Northern lawmaker who opposed slavery’s extension, Winthrop opposed the preamble, but as a Whig politician who supported the military, he could hardly vote against supplies and reinforcements (never mind that Taylor neither requested nor needed either). So, like most Whigs, Winthrop cast a “yes” vote. Winthrop insisted that he did so only after a pledge by President Polk that he was carrying on the war not for the purposes of aggression and conquest but only to achieve an honorable peace. But Winthrop’s explanation rang hollow.

Writing under the pseudonym “Boston” on July 22, 1846, in the Whig, a party newspaper he and other Conscience Whigs had purchased to promote their aggressive antislavery views throughout Boston, Sumner first claimed he “cherished” Winthrop on a personal level, valued their cordial relationship, and never doubted the integrity of his character. However, by voting for the war bill, Winthrop had “told a lie” and committed “gross disloyalty to Truth and Freedom.” Sumner’s rhetoric became more personal and animus-filled in a later article, in which he accused Winthrop of sanctioning “unquestionably the most wicked act in our history.” Winthrop’s vote was “wrong by the law of nations and by the higher law of God,” Sumner declared.

Sumner compared Winthrop to a modern Pontius Pilate:

Angry and hurt by the attacks, Winthrop responded with a letter that would terminate all communications with Sumner for the next sixteen years. He declared that Sumner’s words were full of “the grossest perversions” because they attacked not just Winthrop’s actions but also his integrity.

Much of Boston society shunned Sumner after the Winthrop affair, and even close friends turned against him. The Winthrop controversy ended his regular and cordial visits to Appleton’s house, and Boston educator and author George Ticknor never spoke to Sumner again. A Beacon Hill woman who had invited Sumner to a dinner party later received a withdrawal of an acceptance from a guest who’d learned that Sumner would be in attendance.

In Sumner’s view, there was “no real question now before the country, except as to the Slave Power.” He was frustrated at the lack of Whig action on the antislavery question. As his abolitionist views hardened, the Whigs seemed content to make speeches about issues that “fall below the occasion … they are superficial and do not really grasp the question.”

Some Conscience Whigs had drafted Sumner as a congressional candidate in the 1846 election, but he declined on the grounds that such a political move would be seen as self-seeking and thus detract from the purity of his staunch antislavery message.

The rallying cry for Sumner and other Conscience Whigs throughout 1847 was the ongoing congressional debate over the Wilmot Proviso, the proposal to ban slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico. They made support of the proviso a minimum threshold for any future Whig candidate for president and threatened to break off and start their own party if Whigs failed to endorse it. But at the Massachusetts Whig state convention in the fall, Sumner was disappointed when party loyalists applauded Daniel Webster’s candidacy for the presidency in 1848, despite Webster’s failure to endorse the Wilmot Proviso.

If Cotton Whigs and Conscience Whigs could not come together on the slavery issue, Charles Sumner believed it was time for the party to break apart.

leader of the fledgling Free Soil Party, whose ringing slogan, “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men,” Sumner believed—naively it turned out—would sweep the North with abolitionist fervor.

Charles Sumner would be deeply mired in the aftermath of the largest attempted slave escape in American history.

It was ironic, then, that when the Pearl reached port, Washington was in the midst of a massive celebration to mark the recent overthrow of Louis Philippe’s regime in France and the establishment of a free republic, raising the possibility of freedom spreading throughout other countries in Europe.

Drayton repeatedly denied that the rescue plan was the work of any organized abolitionist plot, but that he had “been paid by others to take the slaves.” He refused to say at first who these people were, only that he had received word from contacts in Philadelphia that a family in Washington was hoping to enlist his services.

Shortly after 10:00 P.M. on April 15, with the Pearl’s hold filled with seventy-seven runaway slaves, Drayton—convinced that the secrecy of his mission remained intact—ordered crew member English to cast off and make sail. But a half mile upriver, the Pearl encountered both a strong tide and a dead calm, forcing it to lay up until daylight—a crucial delay.

Most of the captured runaway slaves suffered a miserable fate. After their furious owners claimed them from jail, most of them were handed over to slave traders for sale in the Deep South—the Carolinas, Alabama, Georgia, and New Orleans. One Northern newspaper reporter visited the railroad depot and spotted about fifty slaves, most shackled together, waiting to board trains. “Some … were weeping most bitterly,” he wrote. “I learned that many families were separated. Wives were to take leave of their husbands, and husbands of their wives, children of their parents, brothers and sisters shaking hands perhaps for the last time.”

“In Europe they mob for Freedom,” he wrote, “in Washington for slavery.”

The new year brought a whiff of change. Sumner was encouraged when New York Whig congressman Daniel Gott offered a motion to prohibit the slave trade in Washington, D.C. It was soundly defeated, but Sumner applauded the effort—was there any doubt that the Free Soilers had scared the Whigs into at least taking some action?

And he was ecstatic when he received word in February 1849 that Ohio lawyer and ardent Free Soiler Salmon P. Chase was elected to the U.S. Senate, cobbling together a coalition of Free Soil supporters and antislavery Democrats in the Ohio legislature to propel him to victory. Chase’s election “has given our cause so triumphant a triumph,” Sumner exclaimed. “I can hardly believe it!” Chase’s success seemed to be “the beginning of the end” of slavery, Sumner said in his congratulatory letter.