The life of Charles Sumner, the scholar in politics

Front matter

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SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND

THE GIFT OF

Preface

In the two volumes assigned to him in the American Reformer Series, viz., the " Life of William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist," and that of "Charles Sumner, the Scholar in Politics," the Author has tried to give a comprehensive view of the forces, moral and political, which combined to achieve the downfall of slavery and the slave-power in the United States.

In the " Life of Garrison " his pages are mainly concerned with the moral aspect of the great struggle, while in the " Life of Sumner " the political side of the contest has chiefly occupied his attention. Garrison, more than any other man, embodied the moral forces of the conflict, the story of his life being essentially the history of the moral uprising against Slavery; while on the other hand Sumner was the impersonation of the political movement against the giant evil of the country.

Between these two volumes the Author hopes that he has measurably succeeded in conveying a tolerably comprehensive and vivid impression of that grandest chapter which America has yet contributed to the universal history of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. The period covered by the irrepressible conflict is, to his way of thinking, preeminently the moral age of the Republic; and to his mind Garrison and Sum-

VI PREFACE.

ner, with Wendell Phillips, constitute the three principal figures and actors, the elect and glorified spirits and leaders in that mighty battle of Right and Wrong. As this volume takes its place in the series, the earnest wish of the Author goes with it that the great example herein contained, of renunciation of self for fellow-men, of absolute devotion to duty, of incessant and uncompromising support of heaven-born ideas and principles, and of magnificent labors in the cause of a common humanity, without distinction of race, color, or condition, may be to many a savor of life unto life to the end that America, like the Divine Parent, shall have no respect to the persons of her children whether they be black or white, but shall treat all as equals throughout her broad lands, and before the genius of her laws.

Hyde Park, Mass.,

December 30, 1891.

CONTENTS,

Preface v-vi

CHAPTER I. Ancestry and Antecedents 9-26

CHAPTER n.

Preparation and Progress 27-56

CHAPTER HI.

Hercules in the Nenjean Forest 57-92

CHAPTER IV.

Period of Labor Begins 93-118

CHAPTER V.

Hercules Tests the Temper of His Weapons 11 9-145

CHAPTER VI.

The Lernaean Hydra 146-161

CHAPTER VII.

The Long Battle Begins 162-186

CHAPTER VIII.

The Conflict Thickens , 187-213

VIU CONTENTS.

CHAPTER IX.

Defender of Humanity 214-244

CHAPTER X.

Straggling for the Floor 245-259

CHAPTER XI.

Black Spirits and White - 260-30x3

CHAPTER XII.

Red Spirits and Grey 301-330

CHAPTER XIII.

Cathago est Delenda 331-363

CHAPTER XIV.

Reconstruction and Colored Suffrage 364-391

CHAPTER XV.

CHARLES SUMNER.

CHAPTER I.

ANCESTRY AND ANTECEDENTS.

Charles Sumner was born in the West End of Boston, January 6, 1811. The founder of the American branch of the family, William Sumner, emigrated from England with his wife, Mary, and three sons, about the year 1635, and settled in Dorchester, in the Colony of Massachusets Bay. There and in Milton the Suraners, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, made farming pay, turning out of the stony soil golden crops in more senses than one. For, while they increased their acres and builded new barns, they also laid up for their children goodly shares of virtue and intelligence." These goodly shares in the family bank of character and ability yielded every now and then an extra dividend in the shape of a Sumner of unusual force and distinction in society and the State.

One of these extra dividends upon the moral capital of the family was Job Sumner, the grandfather of our hero. A rather remarkable man, with a somewhat remarkable career, was Job Sumner, lO CHARLES SUMNER.

He was a freshman at Harvard University when the Battle of Lexington was fought. The emergency, he perceived, demanded soldiers not scholars then, and boy though he was, and thirsting for knowledge, he promptly determined to meet the demand of the hour by making himself into a soldier. Accordingly, a few weeks later the young collegian forsook his studies and joined the American Army at Cambridge, subsequently commanded by Washington. That Job Sumner had in him the stuff of which soldiers are made is shown by the fact of his entering the Continental service as an ensign, and of his being mustered out as a major at the close of the war for independence.

Besides his military capacity, Major Sumner was also a man of affairs, and attained under the Confederation distinction as a civilian. In 1785, Congress entrusted him with a commission to adjust the accounts between the Confederation and Georgia. This business carried him South, where he resided during the last years of his life. These last years were spent by him, therefore, in the very heart of the slave system. The precise attitude of the man, during this time, toward the slave system cannot now be positively known. But that it was not a hostile one may reasonably be inferred from his long residence in Georgia, and from his undoubted popularity in the aristocratic circles there — a thing uite unlikely to occur were he at all suspected of being opposed to slavery. Indeed, this popularity of the commissioner was of so marked a character that there ran a tradition that shortly before his death he was the recipient of a very large vote in the legislature for the governorship of the State. But whether this last is fact or fancy.

ANCESTRY AND ANTECEDENTS. II

SO much maybe set down as morally certain- that Major Sumner's status in Georgia was the status of a friend of the master, not of the slave. He was not a man to look on the darker side of life in general or of Southern life in particular. He had no touch of the Puritan in his constitution, but was of a gay and social temper, a lover of music and hunting songs, with a strain of the cavalier instead in his disposition. Upon such an one the barbarism of slavery was not likely to produce any strong impression. On the contrary, upon him the power, the leisure, the outdoor sports, the stately manners, the lordly hospitality and the baronial splendor of the masters were calculated to exert an attraction amounting almost to fascination. All this magnificence was quite enough to dazzle and blind the moral vision of a mere man of the world, as was Major Sumner, to the other and uglier aspects of the question, to those social enormities which lay at the centre of the slave system and which made of it the "sum of all villainies." Job Sumner never lost his thirst for knowledge. He was a lifelong lover of good books and a reader of them also. His appetite for learning reappeared in his son, and drank deep of the Pierian Spring in the scholarship of his illustrious grandson. "Eloquence and manners " were the two principle points which he set up in the education of his heir. They with " wisdom and the languages " seemed to him to be " the grand pillars of all great objects and great ■ men." If he failed in respect of their acquirements in his own life, he meant to succeed, if possible, in respect of them in the life of his child. The ambition of the father for excellence and distinction descended with the paternal estate to the son, Charles Pinckney, whose name bears witness to the Southern slant of Job Sumner's early political inclination and sympathy.

The father of Charles Sumner was of another mould than the grandfather. Life did not run merrily with him. He was in truth a reversion to the stern and sombre type of the Puritan. The love of books, the scholarly tastes, the ambition for excellence and distinction he inherited from Major Sumner, and he bettered his inheritance. Fortune favored the son in this regard as it did not favor the father. For Charles Pinckney Sumner received the education of a gentleman. He graduated from Harvard College in the class of 1796. Subsequently he studied law, and began its practice in the office of Josiah Quincy, in Boston, about 1799. But, although a learned lawyer, he did not succeed in building up a lucrative business. His practice was in fact quite insignificant, altogether inadequate to the support and education of an increasing family. For, notwithstanding the gloomy and unsocial character of the young attorney, he was evidently of the general opinion of mankind that it is not well for man to live alone. And so, in pursuance of this sentiment, he wooed Relief Jacob, of Hanover, and wedded her April 25, 1810. She supplemented the deficiencies of the husband in all respects where these with another sort of wife might have affected disastrously the happiness of the family. She was a woman of sterling good sense, of splendid physical health, of an equable and a cheerful temper. She made a model mother to the children of Charles Pinckney Sumner.

Children came promptly to the pair. Nine months after their marriage the young wife was delivered of twins — a boy and a girl. The boy was he who is the subject of this book. At the end of ten years there was a family of four boys and two girls. With an increasing family of children there fell upon their bread-winner increasing cares. The wherewithal to fill so many mouths, both of the mind and of the body, became a problem doubtless of no little perplexity and difficulty to the fathe". His practice of the law proving unequal to the exigency, Mr. Sumner abandoned it in 1819, after the arrival of the fifth mouth, and before the advent of the sixth, and accepted the office of a deputy sheriff for Suffolk County, from which he derived an income of something less than a thousand dollars a year. Now, small as is this amount, it was certain, and in all matters, touching the support of a poor man's family, a bird in hand is worth two in the bush. ' The condition of the Sumner family was distinctly bettered by this change. The two ends began then to meet much more easily and comfortably, thanks always to the housewifely management and thrift of the mother.

The tide of fortune, which had made so feeble a beginning for the Sumner family, flooded in 1825 when the ex-attorney at law received the appointment of high sheriff for Suffolk County. There was from that time a decided access of the circulating medium in that household. Mr. Sumner's annual income from this source more than doubled, and during some years more than trebled the amount of the receipts from the office of deputy sheriff. The contracted circumstances of the family gave place to

■ampler living and prospects. Directly after his promotion to the shrievalty, Mr. Sumner moved his family from the small frame-house, where eight of his nine children were born, and which was then standing on the southeast corner of what to-day are known as Revere and Irving streets, then May and Buttolph, to the more commodious dwelling, number sixty-three Hancock street, as the numbers now run. Five years later, in 1830, Mr. Sumner's improved circumstances enabled him to purchase number twenty on the same street as a homestead, which was so occupied thereafter until the death of his widow in 1866. The augmented resources of the father bore other fruits, indicative of his increased official and social importance in the city. Twice a year he entertained at dinner the judges, members of the bar, and other distinguished gentlemen. But perhaps the most considerable result, which the favorable turn in the father's affairs produced, was the sending to Harvard of his eldest son. For that event exercised no slight influence in the elevation of the Sumner name and character to the national regard and renown, to which they subsequently attained in the life and labors of that selfsame eldest son.

Mr. Sumner occupied the post of sheriff for a period of nearly fourteen years, until in fact within two weeks of his death on April 24, 1839. The Sumner courage, independence, and devotion to duty, which developed to such magnificent proportions in the son, the father possessed to a marked degree. Where duty called him no danger, however stern, was able to deter him from appearing. This trait of the man found striking illustration in 1837 when on the occasion of a riot in Broad street he read amid a shower of missiles the Riot Act to the rioters. At the time of the Broadcloth mob which drew Garrison through the streets of Boston his courage and devotion to duty were put to the severest test in the strenuous resistance which he as sheriff offered to that pro-slavery mob of gentlemen of property and standing in the community. But not once did he flinch in that emergency, but stood stoutly for law and order on that memorable October afternoon in 1835, throwing himself and his deputies intrepidly between the murderous rioters and their object, and earning thereby the publicly expressed thanks of the great Abolitionist whom he so bravely protected.

An incident in the summer of 1836 evinced the manly stuff of which his independence was made. There had been an attempt to return two female fugitive slaves under the Act of 1793 in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. On account of some technical defect in the proceedings Chief Justice Shaw was of opinion that there was not sufficient authority to hold the women, and so remarked in a judicial aside, which being caught by Samuel E. Sewall who was acting as counsel for the fugitives, was quickly communicated by him to their friends of which there were not a few in the court-room at the moment. Whereupon the women were suddenly spirited out of the room and the clutches of the slave-catchers. Of course the baffled slave-catchers were enraged ; so also were their sympathisers in Boston. Such a miscarriage of pro-slavery justice in 1836 was a rank offense in the nostrils of those gentlemen of property and standing, who not one year before had overturned law and order in the city for the sake of putting Abolition down. They were now, however, terribly scandaUzed by the rampant lawlessness of the two wretched women and their friends in evading the execution of a statute on which depended the peace and stability of the Union. Great failures, or little ones for that matter, require a scapegoat, a victim of some kind, on whose head all blame for them may be laid. Sheriff Sumner was in this case selected as the victim, and on his head was charged the responsibility for the escape. Had he not absented himself at the time from the particular room in the court-house where the fugitives were under examination ; had he provided an adequate force in anticipation of a rescue — well the dignity of the law would have been sustained, and the property of the dear South faithfully returned under the Constitution. He was besides accused of having expressed to Samuel E. Sewall sympathy with the women, to which he thus boldly replied: " Whether I addressed Mr. Sewall, as it is said, I cannot tell; but I should be ashamed of myself if I did not wish that every person claimed as a slave might be proved to be a free man, which is the purport of the words attributed to me." And again at another time he wrote: " It seems to me as if there were some persons in Boston who would have been gratified to see those women (after being liberated from one unlawful detention) seized in the court-house, in the presence of the judge, and confined till proof could be sent for to Baltimore, and from thence to be sent to Boston, to make them slaves. I hope the walls of a Massachusetts court-house will never witness such a spectacle."

The pro-slavery tide of the city ran so strongly against the sheriff in consequence of his alleged responsibility for the escape of the two women, that Mr. Sumner tendered to Edward Everett, who was then Governor of the State, the resignation of his office. But it is to the credit of the eloquent doughface executive that he did not sacrifice the brave old man to the pro-slavery clamor of his constituents. The love of liberty of Charles Sumner's father cropped out prominently in this episode of the slave women. But more than forty years before, when he was a senior at Harvard College, it cropped out in a poem no less distinctly.

" No sanctioned slavery Afric's sons degrade. But equal rights shall equal earth pervade,"

sang the young disciple of democracy. He was, indeed, thorougly anti-slavery, seasoned, so to speak, in the grain and fibre of him, with a love of freedom and equality. At a time when the prejudice against color was universal, and most barbarous and atrocious, he seemed singularly devoid of all taint of its inhumanity. To the colored people whom he met on the streets of the city, as it was with the white people, he was no respecter of persons, returning salutation for salutation in his stiff, ceremonious manner. He opposed the spirit of caste, was entirely willing to occupy a seat on the bench by the side of a negro judge, was opposed to the exclusion of colored children from the public schools of the city, also to the statutory prohibition of the intermarriage of the blacks and the whites. He was particularly pronounced against the lawless demonstrations in the North toward the Abolition movement. He was, in fine, a man who was immovably anchored to liberty, to law, and order. As early as 1820, he entertained startlingly bold views in regard to the conflict between freedom and slavery in the Union. "Our children's heads," he was once heard to say, " will some day be broken on a cannon-ball on this question." Little dreamed he at the time that the head of his nine-year-old boy would be broken among the first of the heads of the then rising generation, which he foresaw were destined to so tragic a fate. His Puritanic abhorrence of vice led him as early as 1830 to take public and advanced ground in favor of temperance, and for the divorce of the State from the Rum Power. During his studentyears at Harvard he eagerly anticipated the time "when futile war shall cease thro' every clime." Take what we already know of him in connection with the laboriousness and thoroughness with which he pursued knowledge, and does it not seem that Charles Pinckney Sumner was designed by nature for a part greater than the one played by him in society and the State ? The design was defeated by some defect of character, or environment, or possibly of both. But nature in this instance was but temporarily balked of her purpose. For what was wanting in the sire she mixed with no niggard hand into the mental and moral qualities of the son, who bore not the whole, but a part only of the father's name, as if to mark a difference which controls character and destiny.

Charles's childhood was not unlike that of a hundred other boys of his class in Boston during the same period. He first attended a private school, and

ANCESTRY AND ANTECEDENTS. I9

afterward the famous Latin School of the city where he was not especially distinguished above his mates as an apt scholar. Indeed, his average standing was, perhaps, not much, if any, above mediocrity during the five years of his attendance upon this school. He was weak in mathematics, but strong in the Latin and Greek classics, particularly in the former, which is evinced by the number of prizes which he won for translations from that language into English in the years 1824 and 1826. If he was not among the first of his class in the prescribed studies, he was considerably in advance of the foremost in the knowledge which comes from general reading, especially in the departments of history and English literature. His appetite in respect of these subjects was precocious and enormous. Like Edmund Burke he had his furor kistoricus, which comprehended the study of geography as well. This and his passion for Belles Littres lasted him through life. But, unlike Burke, he took not to mathematical subjects, nor to those of logic or metaphysics, which seemed to indicate thus early a lack of versatility and symmetry of faculties. His knowledge of books in general, and of history in particular, was the wonder of his mates. The watershed of his mind, so to speak, if wanting in the direction of the exact sciences and of speculative studies, was of amplitudinous proportions toward the quarter where lie the humanities. Metaphorically, the winds were always blowing and the floods ever descending along this slant into his mind. The boy proved the father of the man in this regard, and in other regards as well.

Quite early he developed a remarkable capacity for sustained labor along lines of his own choosing. If he attacked a book of history he went at it with an earnestness and a thoroughness which left no page unappropriated, no place unlocated on the maps spread out before him. Even when a mere slip of a boy he did nothing by halves. The pursuit of knowledge was even then a delight, and to be thorough a necessity of his nature. There was nothing intermittent and gusty in his energy and industry. Constancy was an attribute of the boy as it was later of the man. In truth, this precocious capacity for sustained labor, together with the thoroughness and constancy with which the boy pursued a given subject, were, as we look back over those early years, nor more nor less than the obscure dawn of the man's future noon.

The boy possessed a natural disinclination to the games of childhood. There was an infinite amount of study in him but precious little sport. This was at once his strength and his weakness. For, while it served to place him en rapport with great men and their ideas and deeds, it operated also to exclude him too much and too early from the real, the actual, in our work-a-day world. In this isolated state knowledge from a hundred sources in the world of letters streamed into his mind, but altogether too little found its way there directly from that vast reservoir of all knowledge — -life itself. His playfellows he sought in the realm of fancy and genius. With them he found himself in touch. This idiosyncrasy of the boy left its limitations upon the man. The boy had no capacity for play, the man none for humor. A certain versatility and spontaneity of thought and feeling, accordingly, he always lacked. And, lacking them, he failed to reach the highest rank in eloquence, either popular or parliamentary.

At the age of fifteen he entered Harvard College. This was not, however, the original object of his desire which was for a military education. This wish of the boy was seconded by his father who endeavored to find an opening for him into the National Academy at West Point. The ill success of these endeavors, together with the favorable turn which the affairs of Mr. Sumner took, through his appointment to the Suffolk shrievalty, probably determined him to give Charles a liberal education. And so, ot course, he was sent to the College at Cambridge. Here the youth grew in mental stature but away from the curriculum standard and toward the innate forces and biases of his mind. His inaptitude for metaphysical studies was palpable,and in mathematics he was a flat failure. For himself, and as regards any comprehension of those subjects, they were " Mathematics piled on mathematics ! Metaphysics murdered and mangled ! " during the entire four years of the course. To this circumstance was undoubtedly due the fact that in rank he stood well down toward the middle of his class. In a class of forty-eight he was not among the sixteen who were elected into the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Notwithstanding this failure of young Sumner to take high rank in his class, his industry along lines of general knowledge was extraordinary. The qualities which we have already noted as belonging to him, his capacity for sustained labor, his thoroughness and constancy, as also his indisposition to mingle with his mates in their sports and pastimes, received during these years the most emphatic demonstration and development. His joy was in exploring a library or delving into works of history and general literature. In his chosen field he was probably without a peer among his fellows. His indefatigable and prodigious industry made marvel for youths not of his class. Wendell Phillips, who was in the class just below him, used to recall how, when he and others of the students were wont to return from Boston in the small hours of the morning, and to make those hours jocund with song and merriment, they would see the solitary light burning in Sumner's window, and would know by that sign that the young scholar was still poring indefatigably over his books. In his senior year, he won the second Bowdoin prize of thirty dollars, taking for his theme "The Present Character of the Inhabitants of New England, as Resulting from the Civil, Literary, and Religious Institutions of the First Settlers," in whose composition his wide reading must have stood him in good stead. Other qualities than those already remarked upon began during his four years at Harvard to disclose themselves saliently in his fast-forming character. One of these was a constitutional inability to abandon a position when once it was taken. The elements were so mingled in him of Saxon phlegm and Puritan seriousness as to interpose an almost insurmountable barrier to changes of opinion. One of his classmates recorded years afterward that " Sumner was not in the habit of changing his opinions or purposes. He adhered to them as long as he could. If he had an idea that

A and B stood the highest of any in the class, nothing could change his opinion, except their having the third or fourth part at the commencement." There went along with this mental immovability or inertia a certain dogmatism and finality of action. He was thus strongly held to an original bent or belief. Where, metaphorically, he sat down, it was safe to say that there he would ever afterward be found.

That enlargement of the ego, which seems to be an indispensable ingredient in the constitution of powerful personalities, kept pace from this period with the growth of the youth. Whatever else our young collegian may have lacked from the hand of Nature, he was assuredly not deficient in self-confidence and self-esteem. Humility was not one of his cardinal virtues. On the contrary, an unconcealed pride, of self and consciousness of power formed the basis of his character. Here, in a sense, in later years resided the man's centre of gravity.

There are other characteristics which were found in the youth, which later were found in the man. There was no mystery as to how he should be classified. He was always and distinctly of the vertebrated breed of men. Man's crowning quality he possessed beyond the ordinary lot, ability to stand mentally and morally erect and alone. Strong was the Saxon passion for personal liberty in his veins. While a student, he dared to disregard a college regulation which infringed his individual right to determine the exact color of his waistcoat. He was admonished that a buff-colored waistcoat was not white, but Sumner contended that it was " white, or nearly enough so to comply with the rule." His insistence and persistence,

CHARLES SUMNER.

it is said, finally carried the point, and he continued to wear the waistcoat of his choice, the admonitions to the contrary notwithstanding. It was a case of color blindness with a vengeance. Sumner refused then to distinguish buff from white, as he refused subsequently to distinguish black from the selfsame hue.

His will even then had the character of adamant. A resolution once formed by him was, humanly speaking, as sure of execution as that day would follow night. " If he appointed a certain evening to go into Boston," a classmate records, " he would go even in a violent snow-storm." And to go into Boston from Harvard square in those days under the circumstances, and before the age of horse-cars, on one's own two legs, was an altogether formidable achievement. Between a fixed purpose and its end he allowed no difficulties to daunt or deter him. The youth's will was dictator. It it said do this, it was done; go there, there he went. This received signal illustration the year after his graduation when he devoted himself to making up his deficiencies in a branch of knowledge for which he had literally no taste or talent. But by sheer strength of will he compelled himself to wrestle with the roots of algebra and the problems of geometry until Jacob-like he had wrested from them the blessing which comes from earnest struggle and self-sacrifice. He never became proficient in either, but the trial added, without doubt, to the muscularity of his faculties, moral and intellectual.

Although impatient of the narrowness and intolerance of the Puritans, he was, nevertheless, a true son of them in respect of the supremacy of the moral

ANCESTRY AND ANTECEDENTS.

sense. Their severe, uncompromising standard in matters of morality was his own. Right, duty, conscience, were from childhood with him not mere fine words but supreme realities. They could hardly be otherwise in the case of any child of Sheriff Sumner.