Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation

by Zaakir Tameez

“I cannot be consoled for the loss of Shaw,” he wrote. “That death will be sacred in history and in art.”

Optimistic that suffering would lead to liberation, Sumner hoped for more of it.

BY THIS TIME, Sumner was at the height of his power in Washington. First seen by even his friends and mentors as a foolish youth wasting his brilliance on a hopeless cause, for more than a decade he had been one of the lone voices in Washington agitating for a unified antislavery North to fight the slave oligarchy of the South. Now he emerged a battle-scarred political veteran, proven to have been right all along. In retrospect, the blows that had struck his head were the first blows of the Civil War.

Once considered an unhinged radical, Sumner now seemed like a prophet. Most of his colleagues treated him as a martyr-like hero whose opinions deserved the utmost respect, if not agreement.

When Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Sumner had been vindicated. To nearly anyone, he could justly say, I told you so. By this time, he and Lincoln had become “the two most influential men in public life,” according to one eminent early twentieth-century historian.

Mary Lincoln grew increasingly fond of Sumner in the spring of 1863. With her husband always busy, she often insisted upon having Sumner’s company and sometimes made Lincoln do the asking. “Mrs. L. is embarrassed a little,” President Lincoln once wrote to Sumner. “She would be pleased to have your company again this evening, at the Opera,

Despite his power and influence, Sumner still had serious rivals in shaping public policy. First among them was William Seward. As secretary of state, Seward enjoyed an even closer working relationship and friendship with Lincoln than Sumner. In the spring of 1863, another spat between him and Sumner began.

Under Seward’s plan, Lincoln would offer cash money or salvage prizes to private northern vessels that successfully attacked private southern ships. All the high seas would turn into a civilian war zone. One of Seward’s Senate allies, who introduced a bill to authorize these letters, said it was time “to let slip the dogs of war.”

Sumner opposed the plan on moral and strategic grounds. In a speech on the Senate floor, he decried the idea that the Union should encourage “privateers” to attack “the commerce of an enemy” with “booty” as the incentive. Even though letters of marque were popular in the past, Sumner noted that European countries increasingly viewed the practice as a barbaric and uncivilized way to conduct naval warfare. He also warned it might provoke Britain’s fearsome navy.

The culprit of new Confederate sea power was the world’s greatest naval empire, Great Britain. Although British law forbade the sale of warships to foreign countries, a rich shipbuilder and member of Parliament named John Laird exploited a loophole in the law to sell vessels to the Confederacy. Concealing his work by claiming the ships were being sold to fake buyers like the Pasha of Egypt, Laird collaborated with southern diplomats to orchestrate the scheme that led to the construction of the Alabama and the Florida

In a letter to the Duchess of Argyll, he portended that “the best educated, the best-principled, and the wealthiest” Americans would join hands with “five hundred thousand Irish-Americans” to fight Great Britain if they kept helping the Confederate Navy.

Eager to stop a potential war but intent on halting the sale of warships, Sumner prepared a speech to lambaste Great Britain for its complicity with southern slavery. Perhaps wanting to set himself apart from Seward, Sumner didn’t even bother to consult with the secretary of state before drafting his address.

Having wisely prevented Seward and others from upsetting the British with letters of marque, Sumner now let his own anger, and ego, get the better of him.

The senator’s verbal attack on the British was pointed, inflammatory, and personal. Blasting Britain’s early decision to stay neutral in the Civil War as “a betrayal of civilization itself,” Sumner declared that the country was at risk of “unpardonable apostasy” if it decided to help the Confederates outright. That was because the “corner-stone” of the South was slavery, and Britain had abolished slavery three decades before.

At the time, leading international law jurists said that nations should recognize rebellious states if and when they achieved de facto independence. But Sumner—who used to teach the law of nations at Harvard—broke with the prevailing doctrine and argued that de facto independence should not suffice for the Confederacy’s international recognition because it was battling “against Human Rights.”21 This was a novel idea. No international law jurist had ever argued for the rule that Sumner proposed. He asserted that nations should recognize revolutions and support them with arms only when that recognition was “sincerely made for the protection of Human Rights.”

His idea, entirely unfamiliar to his era, is closely akin to the modern practice of requiring new states that join the United Nations to adopt the morality and human rights–centric framework of the United Nations Charter.

“If Ireland were in triumphant rebellion against the British Queen, complaining of rights denied,” he warned, “it would be our duty to recognize her as an Independent Power.” At the time, the Irish were living under a centuries-long British subjugation and had tried many times to revolt. The British feared another uprising after a seven-year-long potato famine, caused in part by British control over the food supply, that had killed more than a million Irishmen (and prompted more than a million to flee to the United States). Sumner implied that any potential Irish revolution would be justified so long as the Irish were not bent on creating “a new Power” to presumably subjugate other people.

Ironically, half the point of Sumner’s speech was moot by the time he delivered it. Although the news hadn’t yet reached American shores, the British government had banned the departure of the new southern warships and redoubled its stated promise to stay neutral. When Sumner’s inflammatory and superfluous speech crossed the pond, it shocked the British press.

“His usual fault—not to measure the weight of words,” said Sumner’s friend Carl Schurz. “But it had its effect in opening English eyes to the gravity of the situation.”

Ironically, Seward came out ahead: British statesmen started to see him as their friend and Sumner as their foe.

Charles and George Sumner weren’t close in their youth. An adventurous, energetic, and gregarious fellow, George was in some ways the opposite of Charles. He didn’t care much for books, and as a Democrat for much of his life, he often disagreed with Charles on politics. But as George grew older, he grew closer to Charles, as evidenced by the many letters they started to write each other.

George died on October 6, 1863. “This change afflicts me more than I had anticipated,” Sumner confessed. He was buried in a private family funeral attended by a few close friends, including Longfellow and the Howes, at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

His mother, Relief, suffered from failing health. With no spouse, Sumner felt alone in Washington when he wasn’t with her in Boston. “Life is weary and dark, full of pain and enmity,” he later confided in Longfellow. “I am ready to go at once. And still I am left.” He must have suffered from depression.

Yet Sumner took little interest in the battle. In fact, aside from policies related to slavery and naval affairs, he almost never had opinions about how the war was being waged.

Later describing Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as a “decisive precedent,” Sumner would come to treat it as a quasi-legal text that guaranteed liberty and equality for everyone. “The battle itself was less important than the speech,” he argued. “Ideas are more than battles.”

In the October 1863 volume of The Atlantic Monthly, Sumner anonymously laid out his legal theory for reconstruction. Celebrating that the war had defeated “the dogma and delusion of State Rights,” he said that America was governed by We the People rather than We the States. Giving readers a history lesson on how different American actors conceived of sovereignty, Sumner pushed the theory that the Constitution vested sovereignty in the people, whose will was best expressed by their representatives in Congress. To secure liberty and equality for freedpeople, he called for temporary congressional rule over the rebel states, which he said had reverted to territorial status.

He argued that a little-known constitutional provision, which required the United States to “guarantee … a Republican Form of Government” in every state, granted Congress the power to secure liberty and equality for freedpeople, including protecting and expanding their legal rights. For Sumner, the so-called Republican Guarantee Clause was the “key-stone clause” that would form the bedrock of his postwar constitutional philosophy.

In December 1863, Lincoln invoked the sleeping giant. Announcing his first proposed political framework for Reconstruction, Lincoln said that any rebel state could be readmitted after 10 percent of its voting population took an oath to the Constitution and the Union. Residents in readmitted states would regain all property rights, “except as to slaves.”

While his policy seemed overly lenient to traitors and made no concrete promises to freedpeople, Lincoln included the caveat that every newly admitted state was expected to have a “republican form of government.”30 Radicals latched on to the wiggly phrase. A few weeks later, Sumner’s ally in the House, Ohio’s Radical congressman James Ashley, drafted a bill that purported to give some substance to the constitutional requirement for republican government.

Recently, he had received a letter from Joshua Giddings, one of the few true abolitionists ever to have served in Congress. Almost seventy years old, Giddings was just a few months away from his death. He told Sumner that many years before, when John Quincy Adams thought he was dying after a terrible stroke, Adams imparted some final words to Giddings. Believing his own time was coming to an end, Giddings relayed those same last words to Sumner: “I have more hope from you than from any other man.”

When the war began, he had stopped attending evening parties in Washington. He didn’t understand how others could find moments for levity during a situation of such gravity.

Spending a lonely Christmas Day in the capital at the end of 1863, Sumner visited some military hospitals. Walking past the rows of injured bodies, he was amazed at the state of “our poor soldiers” and the misery inside. While he was impressed with the dignity of the injured Union troops, he was repelled by the character of the Confederate soldiers being held as prisoners in the Washington hospitals. They “seemed in a different scale of existence. They were mostly rough, ignorant, brutal, scowling.”

SOMETIME IN LATE 1863, CHARLES SUMNER TOLD FRANCIS LIEBER that he wanted to draft a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery permanently.

Sumner’s idea was not new. His friend Wendell Phillips, a leading abolitionist, had proposed such a constitutional amendment in a public oration in mid-November. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison privately wrote to Sumner seeking much the same thing.

At the sprightly age of twenty-one, he even tried to persuade a friend that Story’s dense fifteen-hundred-page work was an “entertaining and informing … light law-book.”

There was a tension between Sumner’s obedience to the Constitution and his visionary, idealistic politics. One of the great contradictions of his political career was that he defended a document that obstructed his two paramount goals: liberty and equality for Black America.

He said an anonymous senator planned to propose an amendment to the Constitution to abolish slavery. Before the senator did so, Wright explained, he would need help from the Garrisonians. While the senator worked on the inside, abolitionists needed to mobilize on the outside. Pulling out Sumner’s note, Wright read a resolution that asked attendees to organize a mass petition drive to rally thousands of ordinary Americans behind a movement to liberate the Constitution from slavery and bring it in line with the Declaration. Wright’s resolution passed unanimously.

For decades, white women had leveraged petitions to express their voices, which American democracy otherwise excluded. It was customary at the time for state legislatures and Congress to read petitions on the floor and to channel them into committees, where they occasionally morphed into bills that had the potential to become law. Petitions were a politically active white woman’s best friend.

Anthony explained that she and her colleague Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been working on an antislavery petition for months—long before Sumner or anyone else had the idea.

After the convention, the Women’s National Loyal League took charge of the petition movement with Anthony and Stanton at the helm.

Sometime in 1864, Ashley’s wife gave birth to the couple’s third son; they named him Charles Sumner Ashley.

On February 8, he presented his draft to the Senate: “Everywhere within the limits of the United States, and of each State or Territory thereof, all persons are equal before the law, so that no person can hold another as a slave.” When Sumner asked the Senate to refer the draft to his select committee, he was instantly rebuffed by the cool, lawyerly chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lyman Trumbull.

A centrist whose main motivation for abolishing slavery was to preserve the Union, he had often tussled with the abolitionist Sumner due to their different perspectives—albeit collaborating with him on many bills. “The relationship of Trumbull to Sumner was analogous to the leaders of two absolutely independent guerrilla bands,” Trumbull’s biographer wrote. “They fought a common enemy, but each in his own way.” Trumbull demanded

From the moment he started to speak, Trumbull had the upper hand. He was better liked and more effective at passing laws than Sumner. Plus, it was understood that constitutional amendments generally belonged in the Judiciary Committee.

Sumner then gave a short speech, later published as a famous pamphlet, The Prayer of One Hundred Thousand. “The prayer speaks for itself,” he insisted. “Here they are, a mighty army, one hundred thousand strong.”

A MASTER AT public engagement, Sumner nonetheless lacked the skills to navigate the inner halls of Congress to help draft and pass what became the Thirteenth Amendment. But that didn’t stop him from having some other legislative successes. In spring 1864, he pushed for bills to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; to hire Black federal postal workers; and to open federal courts to Black testimony. The passage of all three bills (which Sumner introduced) indicated Republican openness to some forms of racial egalitarianism. Still, most Republicans were willing to go only so far: the Senate voted down a fourth bill, which Sumner vocally supported but had not introduced, that would have granted suffrage to Black men in the Montana Territory.

Augusta may have known that in 1863, Sumner had persuaded Congress to amend some streetcar charters to hold “that no person shall be excluded from the cars on account of color.” To circumvent the spirit of Sumner’s provision, however, some streetcar companies offered separate cars to Black passengers. The corporate evasion of Sumner’s provision was effectively a form of proto–Jim Crow. By limiting Black Washingtonians to inferior streetcars that came along less frequently than those for whites, streetcar companies were effectively imposing a badge of inferiority that hearkened back to the days of slavery, which had only recently been abolished in the capital. After receiving Augusta’s letter, Sumner angrily read it out loud on the Senate floor, demanding that the Senate clarify that his provision required all streetcars to be open to all residents irrespective of color.

Even William Lloyd Garrison, one of the most firebrand white abolitionists in the country, urged Sumner to put “concentrated effort upon the proposition to abolish slavery, instead of looking after its details.”

Ever since the army started recruiting colored troops under unequal terms, Black civil leaders, particularly in Boston, had pressed Sumner on equal pay. In the capital, Black freedpeople openly hosted parades, marches, and conventions in the call for equal rights. They demanded funding for public schools and government jobs. They were so steadfast that Sumner was confronted daily by locals who expected him to do more to integrate streetcars.

The Senate approved one of Sumner’s proposed changes to a streetcar company charter to specify that “there shall be no regulation excluding any person from any car on account of color.” The change was especially significant because streetcars were used by all Washingtonians, including many members of Congress, as a mode of transportation.