Not Sumner. At first, the abolitionist senator wanted the few seceding states to go peacefully. “If the secession can be restrained to the ‘Cotton States,’ I shall be willing to let them go,” he wrote, thinking that a small confederacy would be weak, domestically and internationally isolated, and vulnerable to slave rebellions. Their departure would strengthen his hand in the Senate, too. “But can it be stopped there?” he wondered.
