Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation

by Zaakir Tameez

For most of the nineteenth century, American lawyers believed the national government had extremely limited powers. All other powers were reserved to the states. Sumner feared that Lincoln and other centrists were wedded to this prewar legal thinking.

Ironically, Republicans would more or less adopt Sumner’s plan by 1866, during a period now known as Congressional (or Radical) Reconstruction. Some historians have even described Sumner’s set of resolutions as the first comprehensive legal theory to justify that period. But when Sumner first proposed it, Republican senators thought his resolutions were ill-timed: it was early 1862, and the war appeared far from over.

After dismissing Sumner, Lincoln sent the plan to Congress to be read on the floor. It was widely celebrated. Conservatives preferred it to immediate emancipation; Sumner’s allies were stunned that Lincoln had bothered to do anything at all. Republican centrists saw the plan as a brilliant maneuver—a chance to strike at slavery without alarming white northerners and to strike a deal with proslavery border states that remained in the Union.

Though Sumner’s private consultations with Lincoln played a role in his changing policy, the senator’s strategic maneuvering of public opinion arguably had an even larger impact. For the past several months, Sumner had been assisting a network of controversial New England abolitionists in their influence campaign targeted at the Republican mainstream. He had also been speaking out on his own. By shifting public opinion toward abolition, he gave Lincoln the necessary political cover to make this consequential decision.

Less than two weeks after Lincoln’s announcement, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips visited Congress on Sumner’s invitation. Republican senators were eager to meet him. “They crowded around me still more numerous,” Phillips told his wife with shock. “A year ago, Phillips would have been sacrificed to the Devil of Slavery anywhere on Pennsylvania Avenue,” wrote an astonished reporter for the New York Tribune. “Never has there been a time when Abolitionists were as much respected,” another writer observed.

BY THIS TIME, many Republicans started openly calling themselves “Radicals.” Once a term of derision that referred to opponents of the Fugitive Slave Act, the term was slowly embraced by antislavery politicians over the course of the 1850s.

And under the stewardship of Sumner’s Radical Senate colleague Henry Wilson, Congress abolished slavery in all national territories and in the nation’s capital. When the D.C. emancipation bill reached his desk, Lincoln hesitated over whether to sign it. Sumner stormed into the White House to demand his signature.

“Supposed you should die, tonight, do you think your spirit could look back upon this great act of justice unperformed, and feel that Abraham Lincoln had done his duty?”

On the following morning, April 16, Lincoln signed the bill. The act liberated all enslaved people in the District of Columbia and compensated their enslavers for the loss of so-called property. It was the first national statute to free slaves in American history.

Although Sumner had played little role in the passage of these antislavery bills, Douglass believed the credit belonged to him. “To you, more than to any other American Statesman, belongs the honor of this great triumph,” he wrote. He said he rejoiced not only for his “freed brothers” but for Sumner himself. “You have lived to strike down in Washington the power—that lifted the bludgeon against your own free voice,” Douglass observed.

Sumner rose and exclaimed with triumph. “Thank God we have such opportunities to do good!” he cried out.

There was a dose of narcissism to his love for praise. But there was also something profound about Sumner, a powerful white senator, forging deep ties of mutual affection with and desiring the applause of radical Black reformers like Douglass.

Sumner then took his argument even farther. “You need more men, not only at the North, but at the South, in the rear of the Rebels: you need the slaves,” he told Lincoln. He believed that if the North recruited ex-slaves as soldiers, the Civil War could be ended. Lincoln retorted that he would do it at once if he didn’t fear that “half the officers would fling down their arms and three more States would rise.” While Sumner kept pushing, Lincoln demurred. “It would do no good to go ahead any faster than the country would follow,” he once told a group of Sumner’s abolitionist allies. “I think Sumner and the rest of you would upset our apple-cart altogether, if you had your way.…

The Confederate economy and military were still powered by slave labor. And the Union Army desperately needed more troops. Aware of these problems, Lincoln privately weighed whether to finally issue an emancipation order—but he wasn’t ready to commit yet.

Despite his doubts over enlistment, Lincoln was warming up to emancipation. In late July 1862, he told his Cabinet that he had finally decided to issue a general order.

LINCOLN HESITATED ABOUT emancipation partly because he didn’t know what freedom should look like. At the time, he didn’t share Sumner’s vision for a multiracial democracy after the war. He found it impossible to imagine whites and Blacks living together as equals in the South. To solve this conundrum, he entertained the idea of getting rid of Black people. He sent multiple advisers to Central America to explore the feasibility of colonizing faraway lands to which Black freedpeople could voluntarily immigrate.

First, working amiably with his foreign policy rival, Secretary of State William Seward, Sumner helped ratify a treaty with Great Britain to collaborate in stopping the transatlantic slave trade. Although the trade had been banned in the United States for decades, smugglers continued to kidnap men and women in Africa to bring to American shores forcibly. The new treaty permitted both parties to investigate any ships coming from either country that appeared to be transporting enslaved human beings.

Second, Sumner worked to secure diplomatic recognition of Haiti and Liberia. Ever since the Haitian Revolution at the turn of the nineteenth century, in which enslaved people liberated themselves and declared freedom from France, the United States had refused to recognize the island as its own country. It had also denied recognition to Liberia, a country on the West African coast founded in the 1820s by Black emigrants who had been sent by the American Colonization Society. Southern statesmen feared that the recognition of either country would bring Black ambassadors to the capital, a sight that none of them wanted to see. In a message to Congress, Lincoln suggested that both ought to be welcomed into diplomatic relations.

When a young, flamboyant diplomat from Haiti arrived, he praised Sumner. “Signore CARLO IL SENATORE! Why, his picture is in every cottage in Hayti!”

In Massachusetts, Republican centrists and Democrats hoped to oust Sumner in the upcoming election. They resented his take on racial issues and believed he was a radical agitator who was obstructing Lincoln’s ability to maintain unity in the North.

Painfully for him, one of his longtime friends, Richard Henry Dana, spearheaded the effort to replace him with a Republican centrist, such as his rival Charles Francis Adams. Sumner’s friend turned rival William Seward also seemed to be yearning for Sumner’s downfall. Seward’s closest ally, the powerful newspaperman Thurlow Weed, publicly called on politicians in the Bay State to oust Sumner. “Massachusetts should choose as Senator, in this hour of peril, a man of practical sense,” Weed wrote in an editorial. “In this quality, Mr. Sumner is eminently deficient.”

His quasi-political manager, Frank Bird, cleverly asked some Republicans at the state party convention in October to introduce a resolution endorsing Sumner for the senate seat. The idea of preemptively endorsing a senate candidate prior to the election was unheard of in Massachusetts. In pulling the trick, Bird forced state Republicans to put their support for or antagonism toward Sumner on record. Surprised and disorganized, most Republican attendees—even many of Sumner’s conservative critics—voted in favor of him, not knowing how to vote no.

While the senator would extend grace to a few of those who schemed against him, like Dana (who was pleasantly surprised that his friend harbored no ill will), Sumner was deeply resentful of Seward. In December, he joined other Radicals in Congress to try to persuade Lincoln to remove the secretary of state.

On September 22, 1862, the president announced his intention to emancipate all of the South’s slaves on New Year’s Day. (Sumner had advised him several times in the past to choose New Year’s or the Fourth of July as the day to issue an order.)

Abraham Lincoln had promised to sign the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day, but Democrats, border state voters, and some Republican centrists were pressuring him to renege on his commitment.

That Christmas may have been the happiest of Sumner’s life. He could take righteous satisfaction in having succeeded after a year and a half of advocacy. Shortly after the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, he had told Lincoln that he was legally permitted to emancipate slaves during wartime in his capacity as commander in chief.

He was even more gratified when Lincoln sought his input on the draft proclamation on December 27. The president wrote his revolutionary order in a stiff, logical, and legalistic tone to drive home that it was a military measure and not a moral one. But Sumner and Secretary Chase pleaded with Lincoln to add a little bit of pathos.

In his final proclamation, Lincoln closed by saying that the act was “sincerely believed to be an act of justice,” and he invoked “the gracious favor of Almighty God.”

Sumner earned the honor of being gifted the pen that Lincoln used to sign the proclamation.

But its impact was still enormous: if the North won the war, more than three million enslaved people in the South would be free—a number greater than the total white population who had been liberated from King George in the Revolutionary War. Moreover, Lincoln wanted their help to win. To the surprise of many observers, his order invited suitable ex-slaves to be “received into the armed service of the United States.”

Ever since the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, community members had lived under the constant threat of abduction. Work also became scarce after Irish refugees mass-migrated into the city during the 1850s and took jobs that were previously reserved for Blacks.

Sumner was one of the rare white antislavery men whom Black Bostonians trusted.

One of his favorite spots was a local barbershop. When he “could not be found at his home or office, he could usually be located at Smith’s shop,” an early twentieth-century historian reported. “Fond of Smith and the gossip [prevalent] … there,” Sumner enjoyed his visits to the shop, which served as a social hub for Black locals and white abolitionists. He also liked the service: long before he was a senator, in 1844, he received an invoice for fifty-one shaves and one haircut from the owner, John J. Smith.

Founded by William Lloyd Garrison, the radical multiracial society regularly accused Sumner of being too moderate. Despite his political differences, the senator kept good ties with Garrison and regularly visited the office.

To add insult to injury, Black soldiers would be paid less than white ones. Enraged, Morris and other educated Black Bostonians announced a boycott: their self-respect wouldn’t allow them to be enlisted as underpaid grunts. They wanted officer appointments for themselves and equal pay for all others.

“True, all that could be desired was not yet granted,” the abolitionist Wendell Phillips told Morris in a public meeting. “But if you cannot have a whole loaf, will you not take a slice?” Morris wouldn’t budge. “Equality first, guns afterwards,” one of Morris’s allies insisted.

Breaking with Morris’s principled boycott, some Black leaders like Lewis Hayden and Frederick Douglass offered to help with recruitment.

DESPITE BEING SYMPATHETIC to friends like Morris, Sumner expected Black men to join the Union Army right away.

It was ironic for Sumner, who notoriously hated compromise, to ask Black men to settle for less.

“I find the African ready to be our saviour,” he once declared. He told a friend that he wished to see “200,000 negroes with muskets in their hands.”

Sumner recognized an inextricable connection between military service and civil rights. Today, the connection between duties and rights is less obvious. But in mid-nineteenth-century America, it was a core part of the republican theory of citizenship. Government was of the people and for the people. That meant that only people who gave to the government would get benefits from the government. Citizenship was a reciprocal relationship.

A few years before the Civil War, one local Black abolitionist, William Cooper Nell, wrote a book about Black service during the American Revolution, documenting stories of some of the five thousand Black men who fought for the Continental Army. After the war, in 1780, Massachusetts’s white voters extended voting rights to Black men as a meaningful but insufficient token of gratitude.

What postwar rights did Black Americans dream of? Sumner had been laying out some of those rights over the past year, through his bills to allow Black people to testify in court, file for patents, and work for the national bureaucracy without discrimination. It was clear to those who knew Massachusetts history that Black service in the army should also lead to the right to vote.

In February 1863, Sumner responded to the call of freedpeople for land ownership by proposing what was probably the first bill in Congress to redistribute land to Black Americans. The bill would impose a draft on three hundred thousand able-bodied men of age who were formerly enslaved. (At the time, Congress was debating a bill, which eventually passed, to conscript all eligible whites.) As a reward for their involuntary service, after the war, Black privates would receive ten acres of land and officers would get twenty-five acres.

DURING THE WAR, abolitionists had been forming freedmen’s aid commissions to gather food, supplies, and clothing to send southward with missionaries who taught schools and ran churches in newly free communities. However, they wanted a government body to propel the private philanthropy.

When Stanton assembled the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission (AFIC), he chose Howe as one of the commissioners—likely on Sumner’s recommendation. Howe, along with social reformers Robert Dale Owen and James McKaye, traveled across the South to interview freedpeople.

Much like Pierce’s report from the Sea Islands, the AFIC’s report proposed a total reimagining of the South premised on Black autonomy. Some historians have characterized this report—coupled with the AFIC’s final report in May 1864—as the “blueprint” for the project of Radical Reconstruction that Congress would undertake in a few years.

The crux of the proposal was for the United States to confiscate the land of white rebels and redistribute it to Black southerners.

The AFIC argued that aid should be temporary. Many Republicans believed in self-reliance as a core virtue. They feared that long-term aid would lead to dependence. With a tinge of racial prejudice, the AFIC commissioners feared that Black freedpeople would turn into a “burden” and wouldn’t work if they got too much aid. But to their credit, the commissioners were also convinced of the ability of African Americans to secure their own independence.

By May 1863, Massachusetts had successfully raised its first Black regiment: the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts. Departing for South Carolina under the leadership of a young white colonel named Robert Gould Shaw, whose abolitionist parents were close friends with Sumner, the regiment bravely fought and lost a deadly battle at Fort Wagner in July. The northern press heralded Shaw for a heroic charge against the Confederate troops that led to his own martyred death.