Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation

by Zaakir Tameez

For this reason, Republican strategists were outraged and worried by Sumner’s polarizing and vituperative speech. They had urged rhetorical caution, hoping not to lose vital support from hesitant moderates who were voting for an antislavery candidate for the first time. In their view, Sumner had impulsively let loose the radical strain of his party, putting their chances in an uncertain election at risk. Sumner disagreed with these centrists. He thought Republicans should unabashedly stick to principles. He surmised that voters would have greater respect for a political party that had the courage to break from past political norms.

“The civilized world will hear you, and rejoice at the tremendous exposure of the meanness, brutality, blood-guiltiness, hell-black iniquity, and barbarism of American Slavery,” wrote Frederick Douglass. “The gratitude of the colored people of this Country towards you is incalculable,” said one Black businessman.

In a stunning upheaval, Abraham Lincoln swept the electoral votes of every single northern state. Though he lacked the nationwide popular vote, claiming only 40 percent in a four-way race, he had a clear mandate for his antislavery agenda from the majority of northern voters.

The lame-duck president Buchanan was attending a wedding when South Carolina had reached its decision. During the wedding, Congressman Laurence Keitt—the man who had advised Brooks on caning Sumner—barged into the hall. Jumping up and down, waving a telegram from his home state in his hand, Keitt began hollering, “Thank God! Oh, thank God!… South Carolina has seceded!… I feel like a boy let out from school!” When President Buchanan grasped the gravity of Keitt’s news, he was stunned. He fell back, grasped the arms of his chair, and asked someone to take him home. He was in no mood to celebrate anymore. As another wedding guest recalled, “this was the tremendous event which was to change all our lives.”

Washington was abuzz with rumors about a southern plot to invade the nation’s capital. “Many of the residents here are preparing to remove their families,” a D.C. resident wrote in a letter. “Almost everyone has talked of certain civil war; of streets drowned in blood, and of the city a prey to the flames.” By late January, Stanton was convinced that the rumors were true. He feared that his docile boss, the lame-duck president Buchanan, was not up to the task of protecting the capital. A lifelong Democrat, Stanton turned to Republicans for help. He warned Sumner about the conspiracy to take the city.

Around an hour past midnight, Stanton showed up at Sumner’s lodgings so they could talk freely. He spent an hour trying to convince Sumner that a coup attempt in Washington was on the horizon.

IT WASN’T OBVIOUS that war would come. After Lincoln’s election, terrible suspense hung over the North during a period now known as secession winter. During these cold, dark months, northern politicians wondered whether the South really meant to secede. Perhaps it was a paranoid ploy to frighten antislavery Republicans into backing off their plan to ban slavery in the territories.

“This is the time that tries men’s souls,” one Republican remarked.

Now that bloodshed seemed possible, Lincoln was caught in a bind. He told some Republicans that the North should stand firm regardless of what slave states threatened. But to William Seward, whom he picked for secretary of state, Lincoln privately advised overtures to the South, like cracking down on fugitive slaves and sanctioning the domestic slave trade and slavery in D.C. It was Lincoln’s last-ditch effort to hold the country together.

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.

As more states joined the rebellion, Sumner came to welcome war. “Much as I desire the extinction of Slavery, I do not wish to see it go down in blood,” he confessed. “And yet the existing hallucination of the slave-masters is such that I doubt if this calamity can be avoided. They seem to rush upon their destiny.”

Sumner had the same violent antislavery impulse as his mentor John Quincy Adams. While serving as a congressman after being president, Adams promised a Black audience that “the day of your redemption must come.… It may come in peace or it may come in blood.” Either way, he thundered, “LET IT COME.”

Adams believed that a war to end slavery would not only be just; it would also be legally sound under the right circumstances. If the South ever fell into a state of “servile, civil, or foreign” war, Adams foretold, Congress could declare war to restore control over the region. Then, he said, “all the powers incident to war are by necessary implication conferred” by the Constitution to both Congress and the executive branch.

“Not only the President of the United States, but the Commander of the Army, has power to order the universal emancipation of the slaves,” he proclaimed.

In the treatise, Story had raised the hypothetical of an American slave who arrived in England, where slavery was outlawed. The slave would “become ipso facto a freeman,” Story decreed, because England was under no obligation to recognize a foreign property interest it believed to be immoral. This fact implied that slaves might be emancipated in the South, too, if rebel land were treated as enemy territory governed by national or martial law rather than state or municipal law.

Story had inadvertently laid the seeds for the wartime emancipation theory in other places as well. The judge had once said in an appellate ruling that the American government could legally seize timber privately owned by British merchants during the War of 1812. When the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Marshall affirmed this issue in Brown v. United States (1814). “War gives to the sovereign full right,” he decreed, “to take the persons and confiscate the property of the enemy.”7

In one of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton said “no constitutional shackles” should be imposed on Congress to provide for the common defense.

Even Chief Justice Roger Taney—author of the Dred Scott decision—had upheld the Rhode Island state government’s choice to trespass on a local insurrectionist’s property after a dispute about the election results in the early 1840s. Taney said the property of rebels could be seized so long as it was a “necessary” measure during martial law.

According to the abolitionist Wendell Phillips, Sumner “was among the very first to insist that we should seize the opportunity the rebellion gave not only to fortify the Union, but to abolish slavery, and that abolition was inevitable.”

TWO OF SUMNER’S closest friends vehemently disagreed. As early as December, Charles Francis Adams had been toying with compromise. Although Sumner believed his friend was “as great a man as his father or his grandfather,” the younger Adams had failed to make a name for himself in politics so far.

With the secession crisis impending, Adams decided to set himself apart. Unlike other antislavery men, he promised to help negotiate a compromise to save the Union that his grandfather had helped create. In December, he joined the House Committee of Thirty-Three, a group composed of one member from each state, to draft a compromise proposal. The committee settled on the infamous Corwin Amendment, a proposal to change the Constitution to permanently stop Congress from interfering with slavery in any state.

While busy negotiating this peace deal, Adams moved his family to Washington. At their new home, as was their custom in Boston, they often invited Sumner to join family dinners. These must have been jovial occasions at first. The son Henry Adams said he “worshipped” Sumner as a boy. Sumner was his hero, a man “far closer than any relation of blood.” Charles Francis Adams Jr. said that Sumner was once “the most intimate personal friend my father had.” They were all close to him until the secession crisis tore them apart.

Adams was astonished to find Sumner unwilling to compromise in the least. When he accused Sumner of “stiff-necked obstinacy,” Sumner refused to respond.

Sumner’s anger was exacerbated by the feeling of betrayal from another longtime friend, William Seward. For decades, Seward had labored fiercely against slavery. He even used his property as one of the last stops on the Underground Railroad before Canada, and he had recently sold seven acres of his property to Harriet Tubman at a cheap rate for her family’s use. But Seward was always temperamentally different from most abolitionists. In the Senate, he had friendly relations with many slaveholders, including Jefferson Davis, until the start of the war.

To avert war, Seward said he would endorse the Corwin Amendment and new fugitive slave laws. Shocked, Sumner interrupted his friend and begged him not to deliver the speech. “I protested with my whole soul, for the sake of our cause, our country, and his own good name,” he recalled. But Seward wouldn’t relent. Evidently, he hated war and disunion even more than he hated slavery.

“His vanity, or modesty, or what you will, is sensitive as a woman’s,” Henry Adams said of Sumner. From here on, Sumner looked upon his own allies with mistrust and often aggressively accused them of lacking backbones. He became known for being vain and obstinate not only to opponents, but also to friends. Though he once admitted to Abigail that her husband, Charles Francis Sr., was “honest” in his mistaken course, he held a grudge against the entire Adams family for the rest of his life. The feeling was mutual; the Adamses no longer wanted anything to do with him.

Notably, Seward’s wife, Frances, took Sumner’s side. She warned her husband about “taking the path which led Daniel Webster to an unhonored grave ten years ago,” for his role in the Compromise of 1850. “Compromises based on the idea that the preservation of the Union is more important than the liberty of nearly 4,000,000 human beings cannot be right,” she said.

Frances and Sumner arguably failed to appreciate that both Adams and Seward still wanted to end slavery. They simply felt that the price of war wasn’t worth the chance of emancipation.

That said, there was strategic value in attempting compromise, even if it could not avert war. Four slave states straddled the border between North and South. These states—Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware—were torn on secession. Clear-eyed conciliators made overtures to the South to retain the states. Without these border states, it would be nearly impossible for the North to wage a successful war. For example, if Maryland seceded, Washington would be threatened at its northern front.

“I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky,” Lincoln once reportedly said.

Desperate to avert war, centrist Republicans and Unionists in the Bay State were considering a bill to repeal the personal liberty laws that granted fugitive slaves a modicum of protection from recapture. They wanted to voluntarily mass arrest and deport fugitive slaves as a gesture of goodwill to the South. Sumner signaled his vicious opposition. “If Massachusetts yields anything now to the outcry of the traitors, other States will yield everything,” he warned one state lawmaker, who relayed Sumner’s views to his colleagues.

While white people in Massachusetts hesitated and debated, Black Bay Staters stood ready to go to war. Two civil leaders of Boston’s small but influential African American community, Robert Morris and Lewis Hayden, started recruiting soldiers in the spring.

In February, Andrew came to Washington to attend an unsurprisingly fruitless meeting with Sumner and the lame-duck president Buchanan. Buchanan had been blaming the North’s “intemperate interference” with slavery for South Carolina’s secession. Hoping to craft a political solution with the rebels, he wanted Andrew to crack down on fugitive slaves with mass deportation and Sumner to support it. Sumner angrily retorted that the Bay State would rather “sink below the sea & become a sandbank.” A few days later, several ex-Whig Bostonians—including Robert Winthrop and Edward Everett—visited Sumner to beg him to help make peace.

At the same time, Adams and Sumner were being buoyed by their allies to receive a nomination for the prestigious ambassadorship to England. Sumner’s brother George was leading the effort to convince the Lincoln administration to offer the role to Charles. “If you don’t accept the appointment, [we still] want the offer to be made,” one of Charles Sumner’s political friends explained to him. Otherwise, “our enemies will say that nothing was offered to the great apostle of Republicanism.” At the time, receiving an offer for a presidential appointment significantly raised a politician’s profile. Ultimately, Lincoln—per Seward’s advice—offered the post to Adams. While Adams knew less about England than Sumner did, his conciliatory politics aligned better with Seward’s and his father and grandfather were former English ambassadors. Adams eagerly accepted the nomination. While Sumner would likely have declined any potential offer, he was surely disappointed at not getting one.

Sumner’s disappointment in Lincoln was short-lived. The president’s speech at the inauguration on March 4 thrilled him. Lincoln denied the right of states to secede and threatened war.

Shortly after the inauguration, Senate leadership announced that Sumner would head the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The powerful post was an excellent consolation prize. He was put in charge of the committee that approved all treaties and performed oversight over Secretary Seward and all foreign ministers, including Adams. “Sumner’s influence is very potential—more than every body’s else put together,” a Bay State lawmaker observed. With this post, he could wield real power for the first time in his political career.

Though he took full advantage of the privilege, he also felt frustrated by it. “From early morning till late at night I see nothing but the contests of politicians & the incapacity of men in power,” he lamented to a friend. “I long for my old place in Opposition, free, open, unembarrassed.” Sumner always had a distaste for the politicking and backroom deals that were necessary for any politician. Although he was occasionally successful on the inside, he thrived best when he could use his thundering voice on the outside.

Stephen Douglas, who served on the committee, was pleasantly surprised by Sumner’s apparent willingness to work across the aisle. “I feared Sumner would send to Boston for a damned free n——r for a clerk,” he jested with a sigh of relief. Sumner didn’t mind appeasing Douglas, as Democrats had become politically weak. (Also, Douglas would die in June.)

To transmogrify the crisis into a question of patriotism, Seward wanted to demand that Spain, France, Britain, and other countries provide “explanations,” presumably about whether they supported the North or were neutral. If the explanations were unsatisfactory, Lincoln should “convene Congress and declare war against them.” After the European powers were goaded into war, Seward hoped southerners would immediately feel a rush of patriotism, forget about secession, hoist the American flag, and help the North stave off foreign attacks. Lincoln dismissed Seward’s bizarre and neurotic plan, which, in the words of one historian, “has puzzled historians ever since.”

Going behind Lincoln’s back, he told the South that the White House would surrender Fort Sumter, a garrison off the coast of Charleston. It was the last federal fort standing in South Carolina, and Seward wanted to avoid a potential battle over its control. While most of the Cabinet was advising Lincoln to let the fort go, the president hadn’t decided yet. As war fever grew in the South, Seward frantically decided to leak to Confederate leaders that the fort would be surrendered. To keep his actions covert, Seward asked intermediaries, including the Russian ambassador, to pass discreet messages to the South. Though he agreed to help, the ambassador found Seward to be shady.

“I think that no greater service could be rendered to the cause of peace,” Ambassador Richard Lyons wrote to London, “than to make Mr. Sumner aware of the real perils to which Mr. Seward and the cabinet are exposing the country.”

Much to Sumner’s relief, Lincoln did not take Seward’s foreign policy advice very seriously in the early days of the war. He also decided that Seward and other Cabinet members were wrong to advise the surrender of Fort Sumter. The president told Sumner that he planned to publicly send a ship with food and provisions to the sea fort. Let the South attack it, Lincoln reasoned. Sumner was doubtless thrilled.

On April 12, a day or two after Sumner’s remarks to Lincoln, South Carolina started bombarding Fort Sumter. Prevented from accessing Lincoln’s food shipment, the fort surrendered after thirty-six hours of attack. When he heard the news, Sumner rushed to the White House and told Lincoln that “I was with him now, heart and soul, and that under the war power the right had come to him to emancipate the slaves.”

“The cry now is for war,” Frederick Douglass declared, “vigorous war, war to the bitter end.”

AN AMERICAN NAVAL OFFICER PAID CHARLES SUMNER A VISIT. DISTURBED by the actions at Fort Sumter, he wanted to seek the senator’s advice on what he should do. South Carolinian by birth and education, the officer couldn’t make up his mind about which side to serve. He was loyal to the American flag, which he had sworn to protect, but his friends and family were in South Carolina, which he called home. “What shall I do, if my ship is ordered to the South to coerce my own people?” the officer sheepishly asked Sumner. “Read your commission, sir,” Sumner replied. He was referring to the official U.S. government certificate that the officer had received when becoming a soldier. “But suppose my ship is ordered to Charleston?” The officer pushed back. “Read your commission, sir,” Sumner repeated. The officer kept offering hypotheticals: “But suppose she ranges her broadsides against the city of my birth? But Senator, what if I am ordered to fire on my father’s plantation?” Sumner didn’t think any of it mattered. Frustrated by the officer’s uncertainty, he barked at him, “Read your commission, sir.” In Sumner’s mind, loyalty to the American flag had no ifs, buts, or maybes. Reluctant as he was, the officer heeded Sumner’s advice and kept his post in the Union Navy.

Few Americans in either North or South realized how heart-wrenching and bloody the war would become. Nearly everyone expected their region to achieve a quick victory. They were sorely wrong.

In Baltimore, Sumner was spotted by proslavery men on the street. A mob then formed outside his hotel, demanding that Sumner come out and face them. Hiding in a nondescript room, he spent the night nervously watching from the window as the rioters shouted his name.

He briefly spoke to the soldiers who were traveling southward. When they reached Baltimore, a mob attacked them. The rookie troops panicked and opened fire on the rioters. Twelve civilians and five soldiers were killed, and more than a hundred people were wounded. It was the first civilian bloodshed of the Civil War. If Sumner had taken a later train, he may have been among them. Speaking to another traveling Massachusetts regiment upon his arrival in New York, he compared the fallen soldiers to those who had died at Lexington, the first battle of the American Revolution, where Massachusetts men were also first to die. This war was “a continuation of the other,” he declared.

Caught up in the same patriotic war fever as everyone else, his brother George had volunteered to help supervise the loading of soldiers onto the trains. In a freak accident, he was hit by a train car and injured in the leg. Although the injury did not seem serious at first, it gradually resulted in paralysis of his entire right leg. Over the next two years, he would slowly decline. Charles spent some days with George and the rest of his family. “I cannot think of any invalid without turning to my brother George, whose case is the worst of all,”

When Sumner wasn’t home with George, he was busy entertaining the First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln. Along with her cousin, she had come to Boston to visit her son Robert Lincoln, who was a student at Harvard. “Everything [was] arranged for a charming reception at the Revere House [by Senator Charles Sumner], dining and drives, and we met many of the most distinguished men of Boston and Harvard,” Mary’s cousin fondly recalled. By being so hospitable, Sumner sparked a friendship with the First Lady that would blossom in the years to come.