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September 28 - October 6, 2025
A stalwart constitutionalist, Sumner acknowledged that the federal government currently lacked authority to reach into individual states to end slavery, but by making “slavery sectional and freedom national”—the opposite of the current state of affairs—he was convinced that slavery would be removed from the “vortex of national politics” and begin to die of its own accord within state borders.
The successful Democrat and Free Soiler coalition secured a considerable majority in both houses of the legislature; what’s more, people from across the state turned their backs on the Whigs. Twenty-one Free Soil and Democratic senators were elected statewide compared with only eleven Whigs; in the House, Free Soilers and Democrats won 220 seats compared with 176 for the Whigs.
One Sumner supporter said it best when he wrote to congratulate him on the Free Soiler performance: “You have whipped Webster!”
Sumner had turned the abolitionist argument on its head. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution should not be rejected because they explicitly did not prohibit slavery, they should be embraced because their indisputable messages of freedom obliterated the very notion of slavery. Sumner’s framing had moved the radical abolitionist movement nearer to the mainstream (with still a long way to go) and caused those who were ambivalent or agnostic about slavery to take a fresh look at the issue.
In his youthful days, Sumner himself had once called for “abolish[ing] the Constitution because of the slavery question,” but as he wrote and thought further about the issue, his thinking evolved and had come full circle.
With such a fresh perspective, antislavery voices sensed that a Sumner Senate candidacy could finally make a difference, could catalyze action on an issue that had been debated over and over again for decades, with barely any incremental progress to show for the effort.
This was heady stuff for Sumner, and he was unsure how to respond to the groundswell of support. He vacillated between cautious enthusiasm in favor of accepting the candidacy to outright gloom were he ever to win election.
In one form or another, in one letter after another, Charles Sumner swung back and forth between his private aspirations and his public duty. And because of this ongoing struggle and indecision, Sumner wondered, would not Free Soil members of the legislature be better off simply nominating someone else?
Despite his strident antislavery voice, Sumner was palatable enough to many of these Democrats because he was sound on “all the great measures of Democracy, from Jefferson’s time downward.” They did not like Sumner’s “red-hot abolitionism,” but they despised the Webster Cotton Whigs more; hence their coalition with Free Soilers, the strangest of bedfellows.
Among the general public, while those with Free Soil sympathies represented a sizable minority within the city, Boston was primarily a Whig and Democratic stronghold. Most Free Soil support came from the surrounding towns and the Massachusetts countryside.
Sumner was five votes short of the simple House majority required for victory; several Democrats still balked at supporting him and simply refused to cast ballots, arguing that his antislavery position constituted both abolitionism and “disunionism.”
The House’s failure to select a senator on its first ballot touched off a fiery two-month marathon, with bitter debate and intense maneuvering on both sides. Whig newspapers called on Sumner to retract his pre-election remarks about Webster and Fillmore, and when he refused, they called him a traitor. Dissenting Democrats asked for assurances from Sumner that he would not “agitate” the slavery question in the Senate, which he steadfastly refused to provide.
Still, by April 1851, despite their unwillingness to waver, some Free Soilers were growing weary of the logjam and many vocal party members expressed only faint hope for Sumner’s success. They had failed to rally additional votes for him—recalcitrant Democrats still viewed him as too much of an agitator on the slavery question—and now it seemed the Webster Whigs were content to outwait or end-run them, to create enough doubt about Sumner’s viability that the stalemate would calcify and eventually, out of sheer weariness, enough Democrat votes would shift from the beleaguered Sumner to the
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President Millard Fillmore’s administration indicted eight men for violating the Fugitive Slave Law and abetting Minkins. Divided juries failed to convict them, but to prevent a repeat of the Minkins affair, Fillmore authorized the use of federal troops to quell any future agitation in Boston. An example needed to be set.
With his last words, Sims offered a sharp rebuke to his captors: “And is this Massachusetts liberty?”
But most Boston establishment newspapers and Cotton Whigs applauded the city’s law enforcement apparatus for its efforts in returning Sims and abiding by the Fugitive Slave Law. The Boston Herald expected the South to now “please accord us all the credit which is due.”
Elsewhere in the nation, there was much rejoicing at the vindication of the Compromise of 1850. Daniel Webster wrote President Fillmore, arguing that the next step was to discredit some of the “insane” abolitionists.
Sumner, who alternated between tears and rage over the Sims case, recognized that a shift was taking place—moderates found themselves agreeing with abolitionists about the unjustness of the Georgia slave’s fate. And that unlikely alliance was strengthened when Massachusetts received word on April 19, one week after Sims had left Boston, that upon his arrival in Savannah he’d been whipped in the public square for his “crime” of escaping the shackles of slavery. The punishment, thirty-nine lashes across his bare back, was followed by three months in prison. When the prison doctor told Potter
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Many Massachusetts moderates were disgusted that Boston’s actions played such an active role in Sims’s horrific punishment. “My appeal is to these people,” Sumner wrote, “and my hope is to create in Massachusetts such a public opinion as will render the [Fugitive Slave] law a dead letter.” Once again, perhaps a measure of good could be extracted from an act of evil. The Sims episode, he concluded, had given Massachusetts and the other free states “a sphere of discussion which they would otherwise have missed.”
Then, Boston Whig Sidney Bartlett, in an apparent attempt to give Democrats an opportunity to vote secretly against Sumner, proposed that ballots should be cast in writing and enclosed in envelopes, which would then be opened by the Speaker who would announce the results. The motion was approved. On the next House ballot, the twenty-sixth, Sumner received 193 votes, the exact number he needed to secure the Senate seat.
It was a stunning choice by the Massachusetts legislature, one that would have been inconceivable only a year earlier, prior to Webster’s March 7, 1850, speech and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, prior to California’s admission in September, and, most especially, prior to the Sims debacle—
Webster, whose unabashed support for the Fugitive Slave Act diminished his stature in Massachusetts, would be succeeded by Sumner, whose rock-ribbed opposition to the same law elevated his. In addition, Webster, who believed the Fugitive Slave Act would still the nation’s turbulent waters, had been replaced by Sumner, who believed the Compromise would roil the sensibilities of even the most ambivalent Northerner and generate a groundswell that would ultimately lead to the rejection of slavery. Finally, Webster, the ultimate compromiser, had been succeeded by Sumner, who, especially on the
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Webster himself announced that he was “grieved and mortified” by the results, and one Whig newspaper decried Sumner’s election as the “blackest of frauds.”
He would also be only one of three Free Soil senators in the upper chamber.
Boston abolitionists were unhappy with Sumner’s cautious acceptance letter and the tempered course of action he laid out.
On the day Sumner took his seat, Senator Henry Clay, architect of the Compromise of 1850, sat in his chair for the final time.
It didn’t help that he, Chase, and Free Soiler John P. Hale of New Hampshire were men without a home in the Senate, on the outside looking in at Southerners who unquestioningly supported slavery and slaveholding interests, and at Northern Whigs and Democrats who welcomed any compromise on the slavery question so long as it maintained the fragile peace and was deemed essential to party success.
Senate leadership assigned Sumner to two lackluster committees—one on Revolutionary War compensation and the other on roads and canals—
As for impatient Free Soilers and abolitionists from his home state, Sumner suggested that Howe offer a simple answer to any who questioned the new senator’s course of action: “You can say that I have always known when to speak,” Sumner said, “and that I shall speak at the proper time.”
Additionally, because President Millard Fillmore would be seeking the 1852 presidential nomination at the Whig convention in June, a confrontational public demand to free Sayres and Drayton would almost require the President to deny a request for a pardon of the two men (which, Sumner believed, was their best chance of release) for fear of alienating Northern Democrats and other moderates. Sumner’s plan was to withhold the petition and work behind the scenes—vigorously and effectively, but quietly.
Sumner submitted his opinion to Fillmore and the attorney general on May 14, entitled “The Pardoning Power of the President.” In short, Sumner argued, both common law and legal precedent suggested that Fillmore’s power to pardon Drayton and Sayres was constitutionally appropriate.
Things finally moved in Sumner’s direction in June, when the Whigs nominated General Winfield Scott, and not Millard Fillmore, as their presidential candidate. Influenced by Sumner’s legal brief, sensitive to the pleas of Dorothea Dix, and now freed from the constraining optics and politics of a presidential campaign, Millard Fillmore finally issued a full pardon for Drayton and Sayres on August 11, 1852.
Fearful that Southerners would attempt to re-arrest Drayton and Sayres upon their release, Sumner rushed to the D.C. prison, and once the pardon arrived at 5:00 P.M., silently escorted the two Pearl captains to a waiting carriage, where an armed friend of Sumner’s would escort them northward.
Wendell Phillips, critical of Sumner only weeks earlier, now congratulated him, admitting: “You have earned your honors.”
Reverend Theodore Parker warned that Sumner was in “imminent deadly peril” from impatient abolitionists at home and concluded that “if he does not speak, then he is dead—dead—dead!”
Sumner nonetheless assured his supporters in letters that the subject of slavery was “always in my mind and heart,” and he worked on writing and memorizing a speech on the subject, which he entitled “Freedom National; Slavery Sectional,” throughout the summer.
Sumner’s colleagues denied his request to speak on the issue by a vote of thirty-two to ten. It was an embarrassing defeat on a routine procedural vote that left Sumner “mortified and dejected.”
Virginia senator Robert Hunter, on behalf of the committee shepherding the bill through the Senate, put forth an amendment for paying “the extraordinary expenses incurred by ministerial officers executing the law.” Though no particular law was mentioned, senators knew the language was intended to cover expenses incurred in the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. Just to be sure, Sumner also consulted with the Senate’s auditor to confirm the purpose of Hunter’s amendment.
Without hesitation, he seized the floor and with it history by delivering what would be the first major antislavery speech ever made in the U.S. Senate.
During the course of his remarkable and groundbreaking “Freedom National; Slavery Sectional” speech, Sumner also established the foundation for the antislavery and equal rights views he would articulate in the years to come.
He put forth the case that supporters of the Compromise of 1850, who most often saw themselves as conservative unionists, were actually radical sectionalists, while antislavery so-called “radicals,” portrayed as sectional agitators, were the true unionists.
Many House members made their way into the Senate, and Daniel Webster, within two months of his death, also came to listen. Sumner would later crow that he, not the aging secretary of state, was now the spokesman for Massachusetts.
Stephen Douglas of Illinois complained that Sumner’s attack on the law was an assault on the Constitution, whose language did not prohibit slavery. Iowa Democrat Augustus C. Dodge was fearful that Sumner would next try “to introduce black-skinned, flat-nosed, and woolly-headed senators and representatives” to Congress.
Sumner’s motion to repeal the Fugitive Slave Law was defeated 47–4. He was supported only by the two Free Soil senators, Salmon Chase of Ohio and John Hale of New Hampshire, and by Chase’s Ohio colleague, antislavery Whig and Senate newcomer Benjamin Wade.
A Kentucky congressman said the South believed Sumner was the only Northern man who would “never under any circumstances swerve from his position.” Blatant politicking and backroom dealmaking were simply not part of his makeup.
a taunting call by Whig newspapers for Sumner to resign due to a lack of popular support; and a corresponding call by Garrisonian abolitionists to step down after his “Freedom National” speech vigorously defended the Constitution—“Webster’s fall was not so deplorable as that of Charles Sumner’s,” one antislavery society member said
(with Missouri entering the Union as a slave state in 1820, Congress, to maintain a balance, designated a large northern section of Massachusetts as a new free state, Maine).
While Douglas knew the legislation would spark acrimonious debate, he did have convictions beyond the purely political in mind when he proposed its passage. He believed strongly in the principle of popular sovereignty (self-rule by the citizenry), and he predicted that the residents of Kansas would choose to prohibit slavery, even if they had a right to allow it (Nebraska was probably too far north to make slavery economical).
Not even the irrepressible and defiant Calhoun, slavery’s most ferocious guardian, or the proslavery Democratic senator from Missouri, David Atchison, had contemplated overturning the more than three-decade-old Missouri Compromise.
Never one to resist the pull of gallows humor—in this case, literally—the self-aware Douglas half joked and half lamented that, during debate on the bill, he could have traveled the entire route between Washington, D.C., and his home in Illinois by the light of his own burning effigies. Unsurprisingly, Charles Sumner was not laughing.
