Charles Sumner

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Preface

Time has dealt very differently with the leading characters in the great drama of the nineteenth century. At the end of the war, in the opinion of the best informed and most judicial historian of the period, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Sumner were " the two most influential men in public life." On the very day of his death, the President intimated that the thwarting of his reconstruction policy had been due to Sumner's opposition.

To-day Lincoln's name is a household word ; his memory is revered hardly less in the South than in the North ; the new generation understands and appreciates him far better than did the men among whom his work was done. But Sumner's figure has been crowded into the background. Ask intelligent men of affairs born since 1860 for an account of his character and career, and few will recall more than that he was an anti-slavery orator, whose assault by Brooks in the Senate chamber greatly intensified the bitterness between North and South. What manner of impress Sumner is making upon yet younger America was tested a few months ago in the examination of applicants for admission to a Massachusetts college. Not one in ten of those boys in the commonwealth which Sumner had so long and so honorably represented, showed any intelligent knowledge of the man. One replied : " Charles Sumner was always held in respect even

6 PREFACE

by the people of the South. Fort Sumner, Charlestown, was named in his honor," — an honor which several of the other papers also accorded him ! Of six histories of the United States in use in leading secondary schools, two leave Sumner insensible at Brooks's feet, two others have not a word to say of any act of Sumner's after the assault, while the others go little further than to state the bare and barren facts that he held tenaciously to a peculiar theory of reconstruction, that he strove to secure equal civil rights for the freedmen, and that he quarreled with Grant.

Some reasons for this lessened interest in Sumner are not far to seek. Unlike Lincoln, he outlived his best days. His most characteristic and beneficent labors belonged to the epoch closed by the war ; their fruits were merged in its triumphs. His later years brought misfortunes in full train : domestic sorrow, racking illness, the loss of friends and ceaseless struggle over the problems of reconstruction, with some of which he was little fitted to cope. Sumner had his foibles and faults ; no attempt has here been made to gloss them over. He made mistakes, some of which were fraught with disaster. Nevertheless, I believe that he deserves of his country a more grateful remembrance than has been accorded him, and that both a true historical perspective and the inculcation of virile American ideals call upon the writers and teachers of history to bring Sumner forward into clearer light.

The task of writing a brief biography of Sumner is made difficult not by the lack of material, but

PKEFACE 7

rather by its abundance. From the hour of his election to the Senate, Sumner never doubted that he was an historic personage. He devoted an enormous amount of time to editing his Works: in these fifteen volumes of his speeches he meant that we should read his life as he saw it related to the great events in which he was taking part. Thousands of letters written by him are preserved. In the Sumner Collection in the library of Harvard University are 40,000 letters received by him from men of leading in many lands, as well as newspaper clippings and documents in rich profusion.

Sumner was fortunate in having as his biographer Mr. Edward L. Pierce, who for thirty years had been his intimate friend. His Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner is a marvel of research hardly equaled in painstaking conscientiousness and completeness by any other biography of recent years. Its four bulky volumes represent nineteen years of almost unremitting labor, and contain but a quarter part less reading matter than the Nicolay-Hay biography of Lincoln. But the very completeness of Mr. Pierce's work bars its use by any but the specialist. It is ' ' conceived on a scale which assumes in the reader an interest in the subject, and an indifference to toil, commensurate with those of the author. . . . Life simply does not suffice for literature laid out on such a Brobdingnagian scale ; all sense of proportion is absent from it." 1 Mr. Pierce himself justified the scope of his work on the ground that a complete biography would prove "a thesaurus which

1 C. F. Adams, Lee at Appomattox and Other Papers, p. 147.

8 PKEFACE

can be drawn upon by the authors of briefer lives. ' ' Certain it is that more than one biographer of Sumner has sunk his shafts deep in Pierce's Memoir while paying surprisingly scanty royalties of acknowledgment for the ore extracted.

Whatever value may be possessed by any later life of Sumner must consist far less in its discovery of new material than in its perspective, its point of view. Thirty -five years, a full generation, have passed since Sumner's death. His work has been put to the test in the searching fires of reconstruction. Day by day our dealings with the peoples of our new insular possessions are bringing into question doctrines which Sumner held to be absolute and impregnable. Experience in South Africa is proving to-day how rapidly trust may make friends out of conquered foes. The time may have come for a new attempt to tell the story of Sumner's life and to appraise his service.

Unfortunately the second volume of " The Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe " and " The Diary of Gideon Welles" were not available until most of this book was in type.

Among the many who have helped me from their personal knowledge of Sumner, I wish to mention here with special gratitude Dr. Edward Everett Hale, whom we all mourn, Dr. Samuel A. Green, President Andrew D. White, and Mr. Arnold B. Johnson, who during most of Sumner's public life was his secretary and intimate friend.

G. H. H.

Contents

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Chronology .

I. Parentage and Youth .

Chapter I

Charles Sumner caine but slowly to a knowledge of himself. His life was more than half spent before he recognized his real task. The career which then suddenly opened before him was a surprise even to himself, yet it was no accident. From the beginning, both heredity and environment, physical, intellectual and moral, had been developing in him a unique combination of powers of mind and heart. When the crisis came which called him to service, it found him fully armed for the fight.

William Sumner, the first of Charles Suinner's American ancestors, was a native of St. Edburg in the county of Oxford, England. At the age of thirty he moved with his wife and three sons to the town of Dorchester in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In this little community, which had been founded only five or six years, William Sumner soon came to be a man of influence. He was admitted to the freedom of the colony in 1637 and acquired a] grant of land. He was elected to important offices in town and colony, and for many years acted as a commissioner to " try and issue small causes." From him in the seventh generation descended Charles Sumner.

With two exceptions the intervening ancestors need not here be noted. These Sumners of Dorchester and Milton were generally farmers, in moderate circumstances, and with families of patriarchal numbers. Among all these sturdy forebears of Charles Sumner there is but one to whom life offered much of variety or romance. Charles Sumner's grandfather bore the singularly inappropriate name of Job. When he was seventeen years old, his father died, leaving a widow and twelve children. After working a year upon a neighbor's farm, Job Sumner determined to get a liberal education. The preparation cost him a hard struggle, but he finally secured admission to the freshman class of Harvard College. Six months had not passed when the news of Lexington entered this scholarly retreat. Forthwith the college betook itself to Concord, in order that its dormitories might be turned into barracks for the Continental Army. But books had lost their lure for Job Snniner ; he remained behind, and joined the army, receiving the rank of ensign. As a reward for distinguished service in command of one of the armed vessels on Lake Cham plain, he was presently made a captain. In 1779 it fell to him for some time to have charge of the guard over Major Andre, who was then under sentence of death, and for whom he came to have a sincere regard. In 1783 Major Job Sumner was in command of the forces which guarded New York during the evacuation of the British troops, and at the end of that year it was from Sumner's detachment that Washington received the last military salute of the Revolutionary Army. Though he had never entered her class-rooms since the outbreak of the war, in 1785 Harvard College was proud to enroll him in the class to which he had belonged, and to confer the degree of Master of Arts upon " Major Job Sumner, . . . who, during the war, behaved with reputation as a man and as an officer. "

In 1785 he was appointed by Congress "a commissioner for settling the accounts between the Confederation and the State of Georgia," a task which occupied him until the time of his death in 1789, aged thirty-five. At his funeral in New York the regard for him as a public servant was shown by the attendence of the Vice-President, the Secretary of War, and the senators and representatives in Congress from Massachusetts.

Job Sumner was a red-blooded man. He loved the life of a soldier. He made friends readily, entertained freely, and was easily imposed upon, his generosity of mind and of purse leading to his being seriously embarrassed through imprudent loans to friends. That he touched life at many points is indicated by the variety of his reading. In those days of few books, his collection included an eightvolume edition of Shakespeare, "Don Quixote," " Junius," " The Wealth of Nations," " Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson," a "History of England," and Lord Chesterfield's " Letters to his Son." The last is significant, for in this brave, adventurous and capable man nothing is more admirable than the anxious solicitude and shrewd sense which appear in the Chesterfieldian letters written to the teachers to whom he had entrusted his son's education.

From the academy at Andover this son, Charles Pinckney Sumner, entered Harvard College and was duly graduated in 1796. A number of effusions, for the most part in stiff and stilted verse, are the principal memorials of his student days. They deal with lofty themes and show genuine fineness of feeling. Four lines from "The Compass" are significant, for they hold up the very ideals, peace and freedom and equal rights, to which his famous son's life was to be devoted :

"More true inspir'd, we antedate the time When futile war shall cease thro' every clime ; No sanction'd slavery Afric's sous degrade, But equal rights shall equal earth pervade.''

Upon leaving college, the young man seemed to have no decided bent ; he taught school for a few years, then studied law, and in the year 1799 took a desk in the office of Josiah Quincy. Shrewd Job Sumner had urged that at the academy his son should learn "eloquence and manners, as well as wisdom and the languages," adding, "I lay great stress on the first two accomplishments, because I think them very essential, and by far the most difficult for Charles to attain. " Conscientious in all things, he did attain eloquence and manners, but both were heavy and came only with obvious effort. Like John Quincy Adams and many other young men, he broke away from the Federalist party ; his speeches and letters show that the feeling which chiefly dominated his politics at this period was opposition to the aristocratic and sectionalizing tendencies of the Federalists, who seemed to him " disposed to erect New England into a separate government." In later life, perhaps because of his official position, he ceased to take much interest in party politics.

In the spring of 1810 Mr. Sumner was married to Relief Jacob, in the modest frame house which he had hired at the southeast corner of what are now Revere and Irving Streets, in Boston. Here all but the youngest of their nine children were born. Years later they removed to No. 20 Hancock Street, which remained the home of the family until 1867.

Mr. Sumner's legal practice was not successful. He was deeply learned in the law, but his painstaking study and note-taking did not fit him for effective court or office practice. As a result, he came to be mainly a collector of small bills. By 1819 his children numbered five ; his income was making no gain, and the problem of educating his sons and daughters became a pressing one. With a hope of bettering his finances, he dropped his practice to become a deputy sheriff, — an office which, however, then yielded less than one thousand dollars a year. The turn in the tide of his affairs came in 1825 when Governor Lincoln appointed him Sheriff of Suffolk County, a position which he continued to hold by appointment of successive governors until a few days before his death in 1839. He had nothing of Job Sumner's ease and cordial friendliness with strangers, and neither courted nor won popularity ; but men upon the bench bore witness to his fidelity and efficiency, and the governors kept him in office because of his sterling merit, notwithstanding some popular opposition.

For his services as sheriff, including the custody of the county jail, he received from 82,000 to 83,000 a year, which enabled the family to live far more liberally and even to make some accumulation. He took his new duties, like everything else, most seriously ; he delved into the remote history of the development of the office both in England and America, and showed true Sumner tenacity in maintaining with dignity his own opinion as to the nature and scope of the sheriff's powers in opposition to the view taken by the Supreme Court.

He renounced his early connection with the Masons, and took an active part in the anti-Masonic movement. The temperance question aroused his interest, and he lectured upon it, denouncing the licensing of liquor-selling as immoral. He was an early and urgent advocate of public school improvement. But the cause which appealed to him most strongly was the anti slavery movement. He did not publicly ally himself with the Abolitionists, but he was outspoken in his condemnation of slavery, and unusually far-sighted as to its consequences. A neighbor recalled his remarking as early as 1820, " Our children's heads will some day be broken on a cannon-ball on this question." In private and in official intercourse he treated negroes with studied courtesy and kindness. Charles Sumner's extreme views of human equality came naturally to the son of a man who condemned social aversion to the negro and the exclusion of negro children from the public schools j who said that he should be l i entirely willing to sit on the bench with a negro judge " j and who put himself on record against the law prohibiting the intermarriage of blacks and whites.

With Sheriff Sumner religion was less a matter of creed than of honorable living. In his early years he attended Trinity (Protestant Episcopal) Church, but after 1825 the family occupied a pew in King's Chapel (Unitarian). He had no sympathy with sectarianism, and condemned in word and practice the fanatical antagonism of his day against Roman Catholics. The dominant note in his character was an almost morbid conscientiousness. In his home, not less than in his official duties, he was formal and punctilious ; his children's manners and education received his anxious care. He aroused in them his own love of history and of varied knowledge. But, especially in his later years, life took on a gloomy tone. He gained no new friends and " his rigid and cheerless nature was not one which makes a happy home." The love which he received from his children had more of dutifulness than of warmth.

Upon the maternal side, the first of Charles Sumner's American ancestors was Nicholas Jacob, of Hingham, England, who established himself in Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1633. From him descended a line of thrifty farmers, the fourth of whom was David Jacob, Sr., a man of broad acres, who was often called to office, and who served during the Revolution on the Committee of Public Safety. His granddaughter, Relief Jacob, at the time when Charles Pinckney Sumner married her, had for some years been supporting herself as a seamstress, and from this early experience she brought to her new home a talent for shrewd household management, much needed where the income was so small and the family rapidly growing. Mrs. Sumner was a most devoted mother. It fell to her lot to care for three of her daughters through long and fatal illnesses ; of her nine children but two, Charles and his youngest sister, survived her. Yet through her long and arduous life she kept her poise as a woman of strength and cheer, the family's unfailing source of help and encouragement.

Charles Sumner and a twin sister were born January 6, 1811, the eldest of Sheriff Sumner's nine children. The Boston of his boyhood days he recalled in after years as a "neat, trim, well-ordered place " of about 40,000 inhabitants. It was a prosperous and conservative community, with Faneuil Hall still the scene of its town-meeting government.

Its population was homogeneous as compared with that of to-day, and wide social contrasts were unknown. As a man of education and a holder of responsible office, Charles Pinckney Sumner associated with cultivated people, but his narrow means and possibly his politics constituted a barrier to the family's moving among those of most wealth and influence.

The first steps in the boy's education were taken in a private infant school taught by his mother's sister in a room of the Sumner house. It was at first the father's intention to have him taught only in English branches, that he might the sooner be fitted to eke out the family's slender income. But when he found that with chance pennies the boy had bought from a classmate some elementary Latin books and had been studying them to good purpose, he relented, and in August, 1821, Charles was entered for a five-year course at the Boston Latin School. Among his schoolmates here were not a few with whom he was to be closely associated in later life : Robert C. Winthrop, George S. Hillard, James Freeman Clarke, Samuel F. Smith, and Wendell Phillips. They remembered him as an overgrown and a rather awkward boy, — " Gawky " Sumner, the fellows dubbed him. He was pure of mind and speech, thoughtful and retiring, fond of his fellows, and well liked by them. He cared little for most sports, but was enthusiastic over swimming. He was always a bookworm, and, although his standing in his class was rather low, he frequently surprised the boys with stray bits of information which he had come upon in his browsing. Perhaps at the instigation of his father, who was an inveterate filler of note-books, at fourteen years of age he compiled a summary of English history from Caesar's invasion to 1801, in nearly ninety manuscript pages. It is a relief to note that he was still enough of a boy to embellish it with the title : " A Chronological Compendium of English History, by Charles Sumner. Copyright secured. Boston, 1825." A year later he was reading Gibbon, and copying passages which struck his liking. Meantime, although his scholarship did not show any exceptional promise, he won several prizes for translations and for English composition. As one of the six boys to receive Franklin medals at the end of his course, it was his privilege to attend the banquet that afternoon in Faneuil Hall, at which most of the dignitaries of the new city were present, and to listen to an address by President John Quincy Adams. Three weeks earlier he had crowded his way into that famous hall to hear a part of Webster's oration on Adams and Jefferson. The associations of that historic forum and of those famous statesmanorators cannot have failed to make a deep impression upon a boy of his latent powers.

As the end of his Latin School course drew near, his father was much perplexed over the problem of his further education, particularly as there were now seven other children whose future must be considered. Accordingly he sent a long letter of inquiry, in the boy's writing, to the head of the " American Literary, Scientific, and Military Academy" at Middletown, Conn. He referred to his eight children, " to all of whom I wish to give a useful but not what is commonly called a learned education. My means enable me only to think of usefulness." He added: "But, sir, if I send him at all, it must be on a footing of those who seek employment," and he made careful inquiries as to the nature of the employment there available ;— whether it would be disagreeable to the boy's feelings, or of such a menial nature that it would " injure him in the estimation of those lads who are now his associates, among whom he is destined to earn his living, and, I hope, sustain a respectable rank." Three weeks after the sending of this letter, however, a new face was put upon the situation by the appointment of Charles Pinckney Sumner to the position of Sheriff of Suffolk County. This opportune appointment led him to look upon Governor Lincoln as his " greatest earthly benefactor" for the reason that without it he would " not probably have sent a son to college." He now made application to the Secretary of War for a West Point cadetship for his son, giving Daniel Webster and Joseph Story as his own references. In this letter he says of the boy : "He is exceedingly well acquainted with history and geography, both ancient and modern. He knows the scenes of many of the distinguished battles of ancient and modern times, and the characters of the heroes who figured in them. He has a strong sense of patriotic pride, and a devotion to the welfare and glory of bis country. He is now at the Latin School in Boston, and in August next will be qualified to enter the University at Cambridge. He prefers the Academy at West Point." Years later Mr. Sumner again declared that it had been Charles's wish to enter West Point, " but I perceived it to be a hopeless undertaking to procure his admission." This youthful aspiration for the life of the soldier is the more interesting in one who in his inaturer years became a most passionate apostle of universal peace. With the betterment in the family finances, Sheriff Sumner seems to have given up his former belief that for Charles "the life of a scholar would be too sedentary and inactive." In September, 1826, Charles Sumner was enrolled as a freshman in Harvard College, with which thereafter to the day of his death he was so intimately associated that his schoolboy longings for West Point seem almost incredible.

He was now fifteen years of age, one of the youngest in his class. His rapid growth had made him somewhat ungainly in bearing ; he was difiident, yet by no means lacking in dignity. Excellently trained in the Latin School, he soon distinguished himself particularly in translations from the classics. In history, literature and forensics he excelled, showing great earnestness and self-possession in debate. But for mathematics and kindred subjects he had not the slightest aptitude. It is recalled that in one recitation he flunked dismally. Baying : " You know

I don't pretend to know anything about mathematics!" "Sumner! Mathematics! mathematics!" cried the instructor. "Don't you know the difference? This is not mathematics ! This is physics ! " Disgusted by his failures, he soon began to slight the irksome subjects, devoting himself with zest to miscellaneous literature. This prevented his attaining high rank — he was barely above the average of his class — but none of its members was more widely read, and his phenomenal memory made the harvest of this reading always available. One somewhat unfortunate result was that from this time on his conversation, letters and addresses became overweighted with quotations, particularly from the classics. In the junior and senior exhibitions he had inconspicuous parts ; in the former, a Greek dialogue, he extolled the profession of the orator ; in the latter, he gave a somewhat discriminating and favorable characterization of Napoleon. In his senior year Sumner won a prize of thirty dollars by an essay of considerable merit ; its chief defect was a lack of condensation, for, as one of his classmates said, Sumner was always "too full of matter." With this prize money he bought books, — Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," Byron's Poems, "Pilgrim's Progress," Hazlitt's " Select British Poets" and Harvey's " Shakespeare." ■

1 These last two were constantly upon his desk in later years. At his death, the Shakespeare was found open at the page where he had marked the lines :

4< Would I were dead ; if God's good will were so : For what is in this world, but grief and woe ? "

Half the members of Sumner's class were assigned parts upon the commencement stage. But for his father's urging, Sumner would have declined to accept his part, a discussion of " The Religious Notions of the North American Indians."

As a college student Sumner was on good terms with the faculty as well as with fellow students. On only one subject is there record of any friction. Sumner was always tenacious of his own opinion, and then, as in later life, he liked individuality in his own attire. He affected a " cloak of blue camlet lined with red," and a buff-colored waistcoat. Now among the rules of the college as to student's dress was the requirement that the waistcoat be of " blackmixed, or black ; or, when of cotton or linen fabric, of white." Accordingly Sumner was several times summoned before the " Parietal Board" and once received formal " admonition for illegal dress." But he persistently maintained that his waistcoat was near enough " white " to comply with the rule, and after repeated efforts to swerve him, the board fiually dropped the matter.

In later years his Harvard friends recalled him as a fellow "of buoyant spirits and refreshing sociality, sensitive and considerate, and always ready to take people at their best." He was an enthusiastic member of the Hasty Pudding Club, and retained a friendly interest in it even after he became senator. During his senior year, he and eight of his intimates in the class formed a secret society called " The Nine." Its meetings were held at the rooms of the members, who in turn presented essays and other literary exercises for mutual criticism.

At the end of his junior year, with four of his classmates he set out upon a tramping trip to Lake Champlain. They left Cambridge in fine fettle one afternoon in the middle of July. At Amherst they found the college still in session ; they attended evening prayers and at five o'clock the next morning the college bell again called them to chapel. Striking to the north, they visited Bennington, for, as Sumner phrased it, "We came to visit a spot hallowed in American history, — and to tread that field, sacred to liberty, where the cause of the Colonies first began to brighten." Upon the ground they studied the positions of the American and British forces. The pilgrims then passed on to Whitehall, Ticonderoga and Saratoga. At West Point Sumner presented to the superintendent a letter from his father, introducing this youth who a few years before had preferred the Military Academy to Harvard College. His point of view had already changed, for while he was making a pilgrimage of famous battle-fields, and here marveled at the perfection of the cadets' drill, he acknowledged that his enthusiasm was now ' ' for the mild arts of peace. ' '

This episode in Sumner's student days is of no slight significance as an earnest of his future. He entered upon the trip with a zest which did not flag to the end ; to the various historic scenes he brought a thorough knowledge of the events with which they were associated and a kindling imagination that thrilled him with patriotic fervor. One and another of his companions dropped away ; he alone clung to the plan as originally made, and by himself ascended Mt. Defiance and hunted out the scenes of Burgoyne's retreat and surrender. He was everywhere a keen observer ; industrial methods and opportunities, particularly the advantages of the great canals, impressed him. He was in fine physical .vigor : the heat of summer, the chances and changes of farmhouse hospitality had no terrors for him. In a single day he tramped alone thirty -seven miles. This tour was a prelude and a preparation for those extended and broadening European travels of a few years later which were to contribute most essentially, though unexpectedly, to his equipment for the noble public service that lay before him.