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September 28 - October 6, 2025
On a cold December morning in 1849, he stood outside the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court building, prepared to embark on his course, a journey from which he would never turn back.
Bitter cold air swept in from the harbor as the two Boston attorneys ascended the marble stairs of the courthouse,
While a large swath of Boston’s elite business and cultural leaders had become increasingly uncomfortable with Sumner’s radical views, his vociferous opposition to slavery endeared him to the city’s black community that lived along the north slope of Beacon Hill—just blocks from Sumner—about two thousand people that formed a close-knit neighborhood known across the city as “Nigger Hill.” It was not lost on Morris that Sumner found the designation abhorrent.
A large contingent of black parents, angry at the notion of segregated schools, had engaged in a multiyear boycott of the Smith School that resulted in a 40 percent drop in attendance by 1845.
At the same time, a group of eighty-five black parents, Roberts included, petitioned the Primary School Committee to abolish segregated schools, arguing that they inevitably led to a “small and despised class” of people, which, by definition, meant that the “standard of scholarship degenerates.” Then, teachers and students are “soon considered and of course become an inferior class.”
Finally, one of the board’s subcommittees published a lengthy report, along with its recommendation, in a June 1846 document titled On the Petition of Sundry Colored Persons for the Abolition of the Schools for Colored Children.
They were not opposed to equality in certain areas—in 1843, Boston had rescinded the law prohibiting interracial marriage, and “colored cars” on railroads had disappeared; blacks in Boston could vote, hold office, and testify in court. But just as a line of demarcation between blacks and whites existed in residential neighborhoods, so too had the city’s power brokers insisted on separate facilities when it came to educating Boston’s children.
Between 1845 and 1849, the city’s population increased from 115,000 to 137,000; and in 1847 alone, more than 37,000 immigrants flooded Boston, three-quarters of them Irish who were fleeing the Great Famine. By 1850, 43 percent of Boston’s population would be foreign born.
“The city is bigoted, narrow, provincial and selfish,” Charles Sumner would soon write about Boston proper. “The [surrounding] country[side] has more the spirit of the American Revolution.” For Sumner, such a distinction at least partially explained why the nearby communities of Salem, Lowell, New Bedford, and Nantucket had already integrated their schools, while Boston stubbornly refused to do so.
Tension and drama crackled through the audience as the two lawyers entered the high-ceilinged courtroom.
The sixty-eight-year-old Shaw, a graduate of Harvard College, former president of the Boston Bar Association, and the father-in-law of writer Herman Melville, reveled in his reputation. The definition of a Boston power broker, he was, in fact, synonymous with the city itself—when Boston Town became a city in 1822, with its population of just a little over forty-three thousand people, it was Shaw who authored the city charter.
Unfortunately for Sumner, he had a not-so-favorable history with Shaw. Sumner’s cranky battles with old-line Boston Whigs during the Robert Winthrop and Mexican War controversies had once cost him a coveted professorship at Harvard Law School.
If the board could distribute children into different schools according to race, then what could stop them from creating different schools based on “mere discretion?” Could the School Committee establish separate public schools for people of Irish or German heritage? Could they separate Catholics from Protestants? Would not the School Committee have the power to create separate public schools for the rich, so “they may not be offended by the humble garments of the poor?” Or perhaps “exclude the children of mechanics and send them to separate schools?”
Bold, brilliant, unprecedented—all describe Charles Sumner’s extraordinary argument before the prickly Shaw,
Comparing the evils of segregated schools to a form of slavery seemed likely to offend Shaw and his justices, but Sumner suggested that both were symbols of massive abridgments of freedom that required remedy.
A confident Salmon Chase, Free Soil U.S. senator from Ohio, suggested with enthusiasm that Sumner’s argument would carry the day and recommended publishing the remarks so that his message could be widely circulated before the court issued its ruling. Benjamin Roberts agreed, and within ten days of Sumner’s argument on behalf of his daughter, he printed it in pamphlet form and distributed it to antislavery offices and black social clubs around the city.
William Lloyd Garrison, Boston’s most famous abolitionist at the time, who called Sumner’s argument “luminous and profound,” printed it over several issues in the abolitionist Liberator. Garrison predicted—prophetically it turned out—that Sumner’s ideas would not be a matter of “temporary local interest” but would be part of any antislavery and equality discussion in other states for years to come. The opinionated Garrison added one final thought on the upcoming court decision, a sentiment consistent with the confidence of Chase and the hopes of Sumner, Benjamin Roberts, and the entire Boston
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On the Friday before Thanksgiving, November 23, 1849, Dr. George Parkman, a benefactor of Harvard and one of the richest men in Boston, left his home around noon and was last seen entering the Harvard Medical College. His apparent goal: to collect on some long-overdue notes from his Harvard classmate and friend of fifty years, Dr. John Webster. In thirty years, Parkman had never failed to come home for his 2:00 P.M. lunch—“dinner,” as it was called then—but in this case, his wife sat up all night awaiting his return before calling police to say her husband had disappeared. A week later, after
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Shaw conceded that “colored persons, the descendants of Africans” were entitled by Massachusetts law to equal rights—the only question for the court to settle was whether separate schools violated any of those rights. The court’s view was that they did not.
“This prejudice, if it exists, is not created by law,” Shaw wrote in what would become an oft-quoted passage, “and probably cannot be changed by law.”
In the decades that followed, courts in New York, Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, West Virginia, Kansas, South Carolina, Oregon, California, and Nevada cited Shaw’s decision in the Roberts appeal to uphold segregated schools.
Sumner predicted that within ten years, the legal profession and society at large would repudiate Shaw and agree instead with his argument on the unconstitutionality and moral shortfalls of “separate but equal” schools. He would be proven right in Boston at least. In 1855, pressured by black and white abolitionists furious over a draconian national Fugitive Slave Law and inspired by a speaking tour and petition drive by Sarah’s father, Benjamin Roberts, the Massachusetts legislature passed a law decreeing that throughout the common schools of the state, “no distinction shall be made on account
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“so comprehensive that the arguments of the next hundred years would not add significantly to the themes he developed.”
The January 1848 discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in northern California provided the catalyst for all of it.
They moved quickly and decisively, essentially skipping the stage of requesting Congress to admit California as a territory; instead, they ratified a governing constitution in November 1849 and petitioned Congress for statehood in early 1850.
Voters in the land of gold had adopted a governing document that forbade slavery. Some of the reasons were geographic and based on population—like many states that had entered the union since the original thirteen, California did not contain the large farms or plantations that would make slavery economically viable, plus the region’s black population was small. Other reasons were philosophical; those who ventured to California were free spirits, entrepreneurs, and live-and-let-live adventurers. The very fact that they had traveled so far under onerous conditions to reach America’s West Coast,
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As Congress considered California’s request, the American union consisted of thirty states—fifteen slave and fifteen free—a delicate balance that both sides had worked to achieve, a fragile coexistence that had lasted for decades.
Northern abolitionists and even moderate antislavery elements would rejoice, believing, probably correctly so, that slavery’s future was doomed, that the newly acquired territories of New Mexico and Utah would follow suit, that Southern power would become irreparably weakened, that slave owners would become further isolated and vilified, and that the peculiar institution, deprived of oxygen and unable to spread further, would wither and die. Southerners believed almost all of the same things, which meant they viewed California’s admittance with a sense of foreboding and outrage.
Clay, Calhoun, and especially Webster would touch off a firestorm when they fashioned and endorsed—albeit Calhoun with great reluctance—what would become known as the Compromise of 1850. The legislation was Clay’s brainchild, but Webster assumed the role of political whip—before the term became part of the Washington vernacular—who twisted arms and brokered deals in his effort to build support for the controversial measure.
Fully aware that he would anger many Northerners and that his hopes for a future presidential run could evaporate, Webster believed that preserving the union outweighed any sectional loyalties.
Webster realized that the law mandated harsh and summary enforcement over civil liberties, but he understood that its very strictness was the only way to ensure Southern support; even the most fervent proslavery lawmakers would recognize the new bill’s good-faith concessions to Southern interests.
The case for returning a slave to his master would be heard by a federal judge or a court-appointed federal commissioner, who would be paid ten dollars if the certificate of removal were issued (that is, returning a runaway slave to his or her master), but only five dollars if the claim was denied and the runaway was allowed to remain free. Abolitionists, of course, decried this measure as virtually bribing the commissioner to return an individual to bondage.
Further, no jury could be called during the court proceedings, and—in one of the proposed bill’s most astonishing and offensive sections—testimony from the fugitive slave was prohibited.
“I might call him Judas Iscariot or Benedict Arnold,” Charles Sumner exclaimed of Daniel Webster days after the March 7 speech.
Like Sumner, Walt Whitman compared Webster to Judas. Ralph Waldo Emerson spat: “The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.”
Still, Sumner saw some good coming out of the speech. He believed that Webster’s intemperate support for the Fugitive Slave Law represented a watershed moment that would benefit the antislavery cause, bolster Free Soilers’ political fortunes, and ultimately hasten the demise of the evil institution.
In short, for thirty years, both spoken and unspoken congressional ground rules dictated the tone and tenor of debate, but always with an eye toward the status quo, designed to reduce the potential for sectional conflict. In Sumner’s view, the new Fugitive Slave Law could change all of that and finally provide an opening for drastic change. It was one thing for Northerners to consider slavery in the abstract, a system that occurred hundreds of miles away with little direct connection to their daily lives.
The very notion of the federal government requiring the suppression of freedom in free states might speak louder and send a more powerful message on the moral repugnancy of slavery than an endless litany of abolitionist speeches.
Now thirty-nine, Sumner had lost his father and four of his siblings, and again, he struggled to convey his grief (with Mary’s case being the one exception). He wrote of Horace’s death with a sense of detachment, almost as if his brother were a stranger: “All who knew him speak warmly of his gentle, loving, and utterly unselfish nature,” he observed in a stilted summary.
Massachusetts governor George N. Briggs appointed none other than Sumner’s nemesis, Congressman Robert Winthrop, as a placeholder to serve the remainder of Webster’s term, which would expire in 1851.
On October 2, Secretary of State Daniel Webster wrote: “We have now gone through the most important crisis that has occurred since the foundation of this government—whatever party may prevail, hereafter, the Union stands firm!” It was one of the great miscalculations in American history.
Charles Sumner spent the late summer and fall of 1850 alternatively insisting that he had no desire to become a senator and working behind the scenes to enhance the likelihood that it would happen.
he recognized the value of rowing toward his destination with “muffled oars,” in the words of one historian, to catch his opponents by surprise.
On a long August evening on a Swampscott beach, Sumner’s friend, poet John Greenleaf Whittier, convinced him to accept a Senate nomination if Free Soilers and moderate Democrats—whose support for slavery was lukewarm at best—could form a coalition to upset the Whigs.
“He really did not want the office,” Whittier would write later of the agreement the two men reached on the beach. “But we forced it upon him.”
Speakers repeatedly excoriated Webster with phrases such as “Traitor to Liberty,” “Benedict Arnold,” and “Lucifer fallen.” Most remarkable about the speeches were that most were not passionate outbursts but the words of men who had thought carefully about their remarks and were willing to stand behind them.
Later, several of Sumner’s contemporaries said his November 6 speech was the oratory that made him senator. Before hundreds of Free Soilers who greeted him with a raucous welcome, Sumner declared that the Fugitive Slave Law was unconstitutional on its face, that the people had a duty to resist this “legalized outrage,” much as their Revolutionary ancestors had risen up against the Stamp Act. He refused to even call it a “law,” which cloaked it with false legitimacy, instead insisting on calling it a “bill.”
Using his most vitriolic language against the President, Sumner spat that Fillmore’s signature forevermore left him languishing in the depths of infamy: “Better for him had he never been born! Better for his memory, and for the good name of his children, had he never been President!” Other presidents might be forgotten, Sumner said, “but the name signed to the Fugitive Slave bill can never be forgotten.”
He called on the people of Massachusetts to fight slave-hunters every step of the way, even preventing them from setting foot in the Commonwealth. And if by some chance a slave-hunter arrived on Boston streets, Sumner advocated no violence but urged his fellow citizens to shun him, to turn their backs on him. Any slave-hunter should be treated as a pariah and an outcast, and the public should know of his crimes.
“Nothing can be ‘settled’ which is not right. Nothing can be ‘settled’ which is against freedom. Nothing can be ‘settled’ which is against divine law.”
