Kindle Notes & Highlights
On May 13, Queen Victoria issued a proclamation of neutrality in the U.S. Civil War. She infuriated the North by declining to support the Union.
President Lincoln informed him that Seward had drafted a dispatch for Ambassador Charles Francis Adams Sr. to share with Great Britain. The dispatch threatened war if Britain had any dealings with Confederate ships. Sumner probably stated the obvious to Lincoln: England, a country he loved, was “the greatest and most powerful oligarchy in the history of the world.” It would be a deadly mistake to provoke the empire on which the sun never set. Per Sumner’s request, Lincoln toned down the letter and asked Seward to keep his dispatch to Adams absolutely confidential. Sumner had successfully
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Sumner rushed back to Lincoln to warn the president that the stress of war was turning Seward into an unhinged man.
From here on, Lincoln sought Sumner’s advice before approving any major foreign policy decisions by Seward. Seward, for his part, resented Sumner’s influence on the president. “There are too many secretaries of State in Washington,” he grumbled.
During a one-on-one evening carriage ride, he told Lincoln that he agreed with the president’s current silence on the slavery question. But he predicted that a moment would come when it would be opportune for Lincoln to invoke the war power and emancipate the slaves of rebel states. When the time came, he advised, Lincoln must be ready to strike. In the meantime, he assured the president that he would avoid criticizing the administration for its silence regarding slavery.
Sumner went to Lincoln after the battle. “I told the Presdt that our defeat was the worst event & the best event in our history,” he excitedly told Wendell Phillips. “The best, as it made the extinction of Slavery inevitable.” The moment had come, he believed. Urging Lincoln to now issue an executive order for emancipating the slaves, Sumner was firmly rebuffed.
Nevertheless, in a sign that he was warming up to the idea, Lincoln argued about it with Sumner until midnight.
That summer, Robert Morris—the lawyer who had been organizing Black militiamen in Boston, to no avail—asked Sumner for a favor. He wanted his son, banned from most American colleges on account of his skin color, to pursue higher education in France. Sumner asked Seward if, as secretary of state, he might issue the younger Morris a passport. “This will never do,” Seward responded at first. “It won’t do to acknowledge colored men as citizens.” The once-firm Seward was caught in a political bind. On the one hand, he felt legally obliged to obey Dred Scott—the court ruling that said Blacks were
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Offering their knowledge of the area and their readiness to work for wages, these men and women convinced Gen. Benjamin Butler to hire them. A lifelong Democrat who cared little about slavery, Butler was so convinced of the fugitives’ usefulness that he invoked abolitionist legal ideas by calling them “enemy contraband” who could be lawfully confiscated by the Union Army. By the end of the session in August, Congress codified a process for Butler-like actions by army officers to assume jurisdiction over any enslaved people who liberated themselves by sneaking into Union lines.
To Sumner’s disappointment, Lincoln was displeased with the new law, now known as the First Confiscation Act. Believing that border staters and many northerners weren’t ready for the bill, he reluctantly signed it after concluding that a veto would only draw more attention. Discreetly, Sumner helped finance abolitionist petitions and lectures in the capital to shift public opinion in favor of military emancipation. He also sent Lincoln a new book, The Rejected Stone, by a Virginia-born abolitionist who laid out the argument for wartime powers.
By late fall, Sumner, losing patience with Lincoln, rescinded his commitment to avoid the slavery issue in public.
At the state Republican convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, in October, Sumner made an hour-long speech about John Quincy Adams’s wartime emancipation theory.
If Lincoln ended slavery with an “act of godlike justice,” Sumner said, his name would be etched into history alongside those of Columbus and Washington. The government’s current course was approximating what he prophetically called a “Proclamation of Emancipation.”
By striking at slavery, what he called “the ruling idea of this rebellion,” Lincoln would win, and so would the North, and so would justice. “Slavery is the very Goliath of the rebellion,” he declared. “But a stone from a simple sling will make the giant fall upon his face to the earth.”
PART OF SUMNER’S motivation for his rousing Cooper Union address was to reframe the Civil War in the eyes of the international community. He believed that a war to emancipate slaves would be politically popular overseas.
Seward firmly instructed American diplomats to insist that the war had nothing to do with slavery: it was purely a domestic rebellion that Lincoln planned to stamp out. Seward wanted the war to be framed in this manner to alleviate the concerns of border states and to leave room for a peaceful reunion with the South.
Indeed, many Europeans found the South inspiring, analogizing their cause to the wave of anti-monarchy revolutions that swept Europe in 1848. Capitalists, aristocrats, and monarchists in Europe were also excited by the war. It was a sight to behold: the radical, dangerous democratic experiment of America falling apart at last. In France, Napoléon III hoped to see the United States split into two weak nations, which would make his plan to invade Mexico easier.
In Great Britain, the home secretary couldn’t fathom what the war was all about. “The South fight for independence,” he noted. “What do the North fight for, except to gratify passion or pride?”
“If the war was for liberating the slave, we could see something worth fighting for,” Bright explained. Another radical statesman, Richard Cobden, also wrote to Sumner. “We observe a mighty quarrel: on one side protectionists, on the other the slave owners. The protectionists say they do not seek to put down slavery. The slave-owners say they want Free Trade.”
“It is a war to prevent the foundation of a slave-holding Confederacy,” he tried to persuade British abolitionist Harriet Martineau. But Martineau wrote back to say that most British sources “insist, loudly & persistently, that the war is not for the abolition of slavery.” Leading British journalist William Howard Russell also dismissed Sumner’s claim that the war would end slavery. “The pretence that this is an anti slavery war cannot be sustained for a moment & is sedulously disavowed by the Govt. itself,” he observed.
Informing Queen Victoria that the American “government is not guided by reasonable men,” Palmerston predicted that “war was the probable result.” He was not overreacting: even the German socialist revolutionary Friedrich Engels expected war between Britain and the U.S. North. “Have these Yankees then gone completely crazy to carry out the mad coup with the Confederate Commissioners?” he asked Karl Marx.
The American public had no clue about the war fever sweeping Great Britain, because British ships carrying mail and newspapers took at least ten days to cross the Atlantic. In the meantime, the North was jubilant at the news of the arrests of the diplomats.
Seward and Sumner tried to prove to the Cabinet that the British were hell-bent on war. Seward sternly advised their immediate release to Great Britain; Sumner suggested that they propose to Great Britain a third-party arbitration on the matter. Both leaders struggled to get their message across until an aide interrupted the meeting to inform Lincoln that France had just joined Great Britain in denouncing the capture as a violation of international law.
A few weeks later, he delivered a Senate address that laid out why international law had dictated Lincoln’s decision. His speech set him apart from many others, who had underestimated the British threat and were angry at another example of Lincoln’s perceived weakness.
The speech strengthened Sumner’s political hand as he positioned himself, rather than Seward, as the nation’s most astute foreign policy thinker. “I heard Sumner’s speech. It is the best thing for his popularity,” Richard Dana wrote to Charles Francis Adams Sr. “It was the first opportunity he has had to speak without offending half the nation.” Lincoln no doubt appreciated Sumner’s public support; Seward probably didn’t. Centrists were impressed that Sumner could act so reasonably. “I have considered Mr. Sumner a doctrinaire,” one foreign diplomat confessed. “Henceforth I recognize him as a
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During one of his Trent Affair meetings with Sumner in December, he stated that he was going to eventually call for legislation to pay states to abolish slavery. It would be the first of several abolitionist steps Lincoln suggested he would take. “The only difference between you and me on this subject is a difference of a month or six weeks in time,” he assured Sumner.
ONE MORNING EARLY IN LINCOLN’S TERM (THE EXACT DATE IS, sadly, unknown), Charles Sumner barged into the White House and interrupted one of the president’s meetings. He was exhausted by Lincoln’s indecisiveness on emancipation.
For several minutes, Forney watched an irate Sumner berate the president with a stream of accusations about his poor decision-making abilities. “It is a mistake to say that Sumner was not a ready debater,” Forney later said about the senator. “His logic was irresistible; for his cause was mighty.… He literally overran with information, and delighted to communicate it.”
“MR. SUMNER, I WILL NOT ISSUE A PROCLAMATION FREEING THE SLAVES NOW,” Lincoln exclaimed.
“Forney, what shall we do with that man?” Lincoln heaved. “I really can’t answer that question, but it is best not to quarrel with him,” Forney cautiously advised the president. “Quarrel!” Lincoln sighed. “Oh, no, that is the last thing I should think of doing.”
Lincoln reportedly paid Sumner a visit and invited him to join him and Forney for dinner. When Sumner arrived, Forney was stunned. “It was the happiest dinner that three men ever enjoyed,” he remembered. He had no idea what Lincoln had said to calm Sumner down, but he said he “never saw Sumner in such high good spirits as he was that evening at dinner.”1
Lincoln oscillated between annoyance and appreciation for the dogmatic but experienced statesman; Sumner vacillated between condescension and deep respect for the folksy but brilliant politician. Their bewildering relationship became one of Washington’s most important and consequential friendships during the Civil War.
He loved matching backs with people to see who was taller, particularly with men like Sumner who, like him, were well above six feet. “You never put backs with Sumner, did you?” he asked his guest. “When he was in here, I asked him to measure with me, and do you know he made a little speech about it?” Lincoln’s face glimmered. Unsurprisingly, Sumner didn’t find the idea of matching backs to be funny. “He told me he thought this was a time for uniting our fronts and not our backs before the enemies of our country, or something like that,” Lincoln told his guest.
have never had much to do with bishops down where we live; but, do you know, Sumner is just my idea of a bishop.”
He never understood so-called Lincolnisms: witty stories that Lincoln would tell to make his points. Sometimes, he would ask friends like Schurz to explain Lincoln’s parables to him. He was especially confused by Lincoln’s sarcasm. “If one told Charles Sumner that the moon was made of green cheese, he would controvert the alleged fact in all sincerity, and give good reasons why it could not be so,” Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. once quipped.
“Did you ever see a joke in one of my speeches?” Sumner supposedly once asked a young man. “Of course you never did. You might as well look for a joke in the book of Revelations.”
Sumner saw greatness in Lincoln, greatness that Lincoln did not see in himself.
In the words of one Lincoln biographer, Sumner was “his warmest friendship among the senators.… Strange as it seems, these two very different men also enjoyed each other’s company.” There was a strategic calculus to Lincoln’s friendliness with Sumner, too. By keeping him close, Lincoln made a friend out of the Senate’s most radical statesman. He avoided problems with Sumner that arose with many other Republicans—many of whom even tried to unseat Lincoln a few years later, when he ran for a second term.
“Lincoln was the only man living who ever managed Charles Sumner or could use him for his purpose,” one Illinois congressman cynically quipped. A different Illinois congressman believed Lincoln genuinely needed Sumner. “Mr. Sumner had become the most sincere and confidential adviser of Mr. Lincoln,” he said.
BY FEBRUARY 1862, Sumner had solidified his relationship with another White House occupant—Mary Todd Lincoln.
Four days into his wife’s grief, the president sent Sumner a note. “Mrs. L needs your help,” he scribbled on a small, black-bordered card. “Can you come?”6
A few months earlier, his best friend Henry Longfellow had lost his beloved wife, Fanny—whom Sumner also called a friend—when her dress caught fire and set her ablaze.
Mary Lincoln came to regard Sumner as her closest male confidant in Washington. “I have no finer friend than him, or one, I like any better,” she once said. Frequently, Sumner joined Mary at the opera or theater. They would have a “very gay little time,” often without Lincoln.
Raised on a plantation, Mary was intimately familiar with slavery. She disliked it, but she did not think much about its end until after becoming First Lady. Sumner often discussed emancipation with her. She also learned more about the horrors of slavery from her Black dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley. Keckley recalled that Sumner was a “a gentleman that Mrs. Lincoln very much admired.” Probably with his encouragement, Mary befriended the abolitionist Jane Grey Swisshelm, who further influenced her. By 1864, Mary considered herself to be a fierce abolitionist and often pushed her husband to do
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In the meantime, he was reflecting on the next issue: when slavery finally ended, as he hoped it would, what would happen to Black freedpeople? How would they be integrated into the social, political, and economic landscape of a postwar South?
The first experiment in “re-organization” began in November 1861, when the U.S. Navy took control of the Sea Islands, a group of islands and tidal barriers off the coast of South Carolina. As soon as Union troops reached shore, white southerners fled to the mainland while nearly ten thousand enslaved people remained on the islands’ vast cotton plantations. Salmon Chase, now the secretary of the treasury, took charge. He affirmed that these ten thousand enslaved men and women, “confiscated” by the Union Army, were free. At the same time, he wanted the new freedpeople to keep picking cotton, a
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Chase asked an adviser to monitor the situation: Edward Pierce, a Sumner protégé. Pierce had first met Sumner when he was fifteen, sparking a lifelong admiration. Becoming a Harvard-trained attorney and loyal Republican, he had once served as Chase’s private secretary, a job he landed with Sumner’s help. (After Sumner’s death, he would spend twenty years writing a famous four-volume biography of him.)
After visiting many plantations and interviewing ex-slaves, Pierce concluded that they had all “the knowledge and experience requisite” to plant their own cotton and food crops. While he advised that white superintendents be appointed to initially oversee the plantation lands, Pierce strongly rejected a proposal to lease the land to white speculators in the North. He suggested instead that Black freedpeople eventually become farmers of their own land.
“If white men only did as well under such adverse circumstances, they could be regarded as prodigies,” he told Sumner. Sumner responded to say he was “proud”
Pierce had discovered what Sumner knew all along: if given the opportunity, Black Americans would thrive. Growing up, Sumner had seen firsthand a vibrant, thriving African American community that flourished despite immense systemic disadvantages.
