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September 28 - October 6, 2025
Free Soilers beamed with satisfaction as they saw their old adversaries, the Webster Whigs, confessing to the failures of the Compromise and repeating the claims of Free Soilers whom they once denounced as unpatriotic and treasonable.
But, Sumner added, just as important and just as undeniably, “it is the best bill … for it … annuls past compromises with slavery and makes all future compromises impossible.” Therefore, he declared, “it puts Freedom and Slavery face to face, and bids them both grapple. Who can doubt the result?”
It was no great surprise when Henry David Thoreau praised Higginson, calling him the “only Harvard Phi Beta Kappa, Unitarian Minister, and master of seven languages who has led a storming party against a federal bastion with a battering ram in his hands.”
Influential merchant Amos Lawrence colorfully assessed the changes in attitude brought about by Kansas-Nebraska and the Burns episode: “We went to bed one night, old fashioned, conservative, compromise Union Whigs, and waked up stark mad Abolitionists!”
When Frances Seward, wife of New York senator William Seward, wrote to Sumner that his speeches during the final passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill had filled her with “tears of gratitude that so much ability and eloquence were devoted to the advancement of truth and freedom,” she was expressing sentiments held by thousands across the North.
He viewed this new, principled Republican Party, fledgling though it was, as the only antidote to the slave power, arguing that neither Democrats nor Whigs could effectively carry on the fight. The Whigs were split irreparably over the slavery question, and the Democrats had maintained commercial and policy alliances with slaveholders for so long that it was fanciful and naïve to expect them to bite the hand that fed their political interests.
Sumner would eventually and almost single-handedly be responsible for the meteoric growth of the Republicans on a national scale, though, as the calendar turned to 1855, neither he nor anyone else could ever have imagined how.
The South, desperate to extend slavery, still smarting about the admittance of California as a free state, and fearful that a free state on the western border of slave-state Missouri would harbor escaped slaves, was intent on doing almost anything to make Kansas a slaveholding state. A Missouri newspaper warned that failure could mean “abolitionists would settle in Kansas and run off with our slaves.” Those fears were not unfounded. The Massachusetts legislature had chartered the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which was established to send settlers with antislavery sentiments into the
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Atchison said he could send as many as five thousand men to cross the border into Kansas, “enough to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the territory.”
Known as the “black laws,” they blatantly disregarded the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and were among the most egregious violations of civil rights in American history. They mandated severe punishment for antislavery activity: two to five years of hard labor for anyone possessing an abolitionist publication; five years of hard labor for authors or publishers of antislavery writings. The laws also mandated the death penalty for anyone fomenting slave revolts.
President Franklin Pierce threw his support behind the proslavery legislature and asked Congress to admit Kansas as a slave state. Advocates of slavery were exultant and opponents mortified.
George Washington Brown, editor of the Herald of Freedom newspaper, was one of seven free-state leaders arrested in the spring of 1856, charged with high treason, and held prisoner by federal troops near Lecompton.
(South Carolina candidates were required to own at least ten slaves to run for Congress).
Southern delegates, en route to the Democratic National Convention in Cincinnati, detoured to the nation’s capital to observe the day’s events; every journalist’s chair was filled, and virtually every senator was uncharacteristically seated at the session’s outset, awaiting the words of a colleague.
He reserved his most vicious and insulting verbal attacks for the man least able to fight back—the elderly, ailing, absent Butler—and for the state from which he hailed, South Carolina.
The South Carolinian “touches nothing which he does not disfigure with error,” Sumner said, a clear reference to Butler’s drooping face after the stroke.
When Sumner finally sat down, the storm broke forth in the stunned Senate—and it was mostly from Northerners, who believed Sumner had gone too far. Michigan’s Lewis Cass, the dean of the Senate and the man who formally presented Sumner to his colleagues for his swearing-in ceremony in 1851, declared to his colleagues that Sumner’s speech was “the most un-American and unpatriotic
more than one million copies of The Crime Against Kansas would be distributed within a couple of months.
Vanity prevented the nearsighted Sumner from wearing eyeglasses,
New York Times reporter James W. Simonton was the first to move, running forward followed by a group of other men, seemingly determined to stop Brooks,
maybe most important, the caning had convinced thousands to join the fledgling Republican party over the summer and fall, so much so that members held out hope that, in the November 1856 election, the presidency was within reach of the Republicans’ first-ever nominee, John C. Frémont.
Throughout late May and early June, huge public gatherings and “indignation meetings” were held to protest the caning in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Albany, Cleveland, Detroit, New Haven, Providence, Rochester, and virtually every city and small town East and West—including places like Berea, Ohio; Rahway, New Jersey; and Burlington, Iowa.
One day after Sumner left Washington, Judge Thomas H. Crawford of the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia found Preston Brooks guilty of assault for the caning of Charles Sumner and sentenced Brooks to a fine of three hundred dollars. Brooks paid the fine and walked out of court—later, his supporters in the South raised the money to reimburse him. Sumner supporters were incensed, claiming the “paltry fine” clearly showed the proslavery temperament of the federal courts in the District of Columbia.
the House voted 121–95 to expel Brooks, but it was a full 23 votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority to remove him.
“I want these modern fanatics who have adopted John Brown as their Jesus and their cross to see what their Christ is!” thundered Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee as the U.S. Senate was preparing to investigate the Harpers Ferry raid. “This old man, Brown, was nothing more than a murderer, a robber, a thief, and a traitor.”
Minnesota and Oregon had been added to the union as free states, disrupting forever the balance between slave and free states.
Charles Sumner was now one of twenty-four Republicans, compared with one of only three members of the old Free Soil Party when he first entered the Senate.
In relentless statistical detail—a shift from his usual lyrical and emotional rhetoric—Sumner compared the populations of North and South. He concluded that slavery had “stunted” economic and educational progress in the South, and it was likely not a coincidence that he singled out South Carolina to prove his thesis, pointing out that a smaller
percentage of its white population than of Massachusetts’ free Negroes attended school.
“The Barbarism of Slavery” was the final major congressional antislavery speech in American history.
Sumner did not deceive himself; he was aware of the potential consequences if there were no compromise. He detested violence almost as much as he detested slavery. “Much as I desire the extinction of slavery, I do not wish to see it go down in blood,” he said. But he was astute enough to know that prolonged civil war was all but inevitable.
One cavalryman also pointed out correctly that slavery in general enlarged the Confederate Army by permitting a large proportion of white Southern men to join the ranks “while their negroes are at home raising crops to support their families.” His solution: “free the slaves and the white men will be obliged to come home to look after the welfare of their families and go to work themselves or starve.”
British military planners decided to send a contingent of eleven thousand additional troops to reinforce soldiers already stationed in Canada. Not only could these troops defend British Canada if the United States decided to attack, but they could also easily conduct an offensive into the United States if war broke out. In such an event, British military leaders would attempt to coax Maine to leave the Union and join England, thereby offering the Crown’s troops easy access to other Northeast states.
Sumner believed the English position was untenable and nearly unforgivable. Unlike Trent, when the British arguments were legally correct and the United States was technically in violation of law and custom on the high seas, the British were now actively engaged in assisting a traitorous belligerent in its war against the United States.
Eventually, with Sumner’s influence, and tide-turning Union victories in 1863 at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the British relented. On September 8, 1863, Lord Russell notified the American minister that the British would release no more Confederate ships from English shipyards. And with those words, the crisis was over. For the second time in less than two years, Charles Sumner’s influence and diplomacy had averted war with England.
It is no exaggeration to say that Sumner’s efforts literally saved the country; without his expertise and diplomacy, the North certainly would have blundered into a devastating war with England that—waged simultaneously with its battle with the Confederacy—likely would have destroyed the United States of America.
Despite days of meetings between Lincoln and border-state members of Congress, twenty of the twenty-eight representatives politely declined to act on the President’s compensated emancipation plan.
perhaps most important, that such a proposed “radical change of our social system” had been hurried through Congress without reasonable time for debate, and with “not time at all for consultation with our constituents.”
It also provided for a three-person commission to appraise claims by slave owners for any slaves set free—limiting their allowance in the aggregate to $300 per slave. Congress appropriated $1 million to pay slave owners and added another $100,000 to pay them an additional $100 per slave for those who chose to immigrate to Liberia or Haiti. Charles Sumner hailed the bill, and the prospect of its speedy adoption, with “unspeakable delight.” It was only a “small installment” of the debt the United States owed to the enslaved people within its borders, Sumner pointed out, yet it would be
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“The events taking place seem like a dream,” the former slave wrote to Sumner. “If slavery is really dead in the District of Columbia … to you more than to any other American statesman belongs the honor of this great triumph of justice, liberty, and sound policy.…
Opponents were an unlikely mix of border-state senators who felt the bill was too sweeping (and feared Congress looking to emancipate their slaves next), radicals who felt D.C. slave owners deserved no compensation, and some Western senators who believed Congress was overstepping its authority, especially since the Southern-sympathizing D.C. city government was opposed to the measure.
The law would also stand unique in the country’s history as the only instance in which the U.S. government provided compensation to slave owners.
“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could do it by freeing all the slaves I would do it,” Lincoln wrote, “and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”
If Charles Sumner was disappointed that Lincoln’s proclamation delayed for one hundred days the freeing of slaves in the rebel states, or that it didn’t go far enough because it ignored border-state slaves entirely, he was too politically astute to show it.
While Douglass led the meeting at the Tremont Temple, Boston’s literary and social elite packed the nearby Music Hall. Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Harriet Beecher Stowe—all awaited the long-sought news from the nation’s capital.
Still, the proclamation provided the North with numerous advantages. It cleared the way for colored troops to fight in the federal army and deprived the South of a vital manpower source during a time of war. It all but removed frivolous political spats and disputes that detracted from the war effort. It silenced those voices who questioned Lincoln’s opposition to slavery.
The petitions were delivered to Sumner by abolitionists and women’s suffragettes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who, early in 1863, had organized the Women’s National Loyal League (WNLL), which hoped to secure a million signatures to petitions demanding the complete abolition of slavery through a constitutional amendment.
Since the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791, the Constitution had been amended only twice, and the most recent was ratified a full sixty years earlier.
The irony, then, was that Charles Sumner—more than any other individual most responsible for bringing the country to this historic juncture, and the unquestioned and unimpeachable conscience of the Senate, and the entire North, on the issue of slavery—had little to do with the actual writing of the amendment that ended slavery in the United States.
when Sumner brought it up again on June 22, exasperated border-state senator Willard Saulsbury of Delaware demanded the Senate adjourn without a vote. “Let us have one day without the nigger,” he begged, a sentiment shared by many slaveholding border-state lawmakers who continued to fear that abolitionists would turn against them next, regardless of their importance to the war effort.
