On their side, Southerners had forgiven nothing. They sent threatening letters promising “another pummeling.”
Through an accident of history, Sumner was drawn into the debate over a raid of a Southern arsenal by the untamable abolitionist John Brown. After the attack by Preston Brooks, Brown had called on Sumner in Boston to ask if the senator still had the coat he had been wearing on the fateful day.
With effort, Sumner limped to a closet and brought out the coat, caked with his blood. Brown did not speak but held it with his lips pressed tight, while his eyes, Sumner recalled, “shone like polished steel.”
Now with Brown about to be hanged for his failed raid at Harper’s Ferry, Sumner granted that Brown must be punished, but he also recognized a kindred soul. Yes, he condemned Brown’s actions and the bloodshed, Sumner said, “but how can I refuse admiration to many things in the man?”
That spirit was on display when President Buchanan invited Sumner to the White House to urge that he endorse recent Senate propositions aimed at warding off civil war.
Sumner heard Buchanan out, then replied that the people of Massachusetts “would see their state sink below the sea and become a sand bar” rather than acknowledge that a human being could be treated as property.
• • •
With the presidential election of 1860 approaching, many men in Sumner’s Republican Party hoped to attract Northern Whigs and prevent Stephen Douglas from fanning emotions throughout the South. They certainly did not want Sumner’s intransigence on public display.
He, in turn, was contemptuous of their caution. He was resigned to the prospect of Henry Seward being the Republican nominee. But Sumner had never fully trusted Seward’s commitment to immediate and outright abolition.
When the Republicans met in Chicago, however, delegates passed over Seward to nominate a man who had served only one term in the Congress. Although Sumner did not know Abraham Lincoln, he decided to spell out the principles that Lincoln must embrace.
The result was a four-hour oration on June 4, 1860, titled “The Barbarism of Slavery.” Sumner began mildly, alluding indirectly to the recent deaths of Preston Brooks and Senator Butler—“tombs that have been opened since I spoke.”
After assuring his audience that he was not motivated by vindictiveness, Sumner laid into the slave-owning states, with special disdain for South Carolina. And, he argued, if the African race was indeed inferior, as the slave owners claimed, “then it is the unquestionable duty of a Christian Civilization to lift it from its degradation, not by the bludgeon and the chain,” but by a “generous charity.”
Republican politicians deplored Sumner’s unrepentant diatribe. His friends began sleeping on his parlor floor to protect him against further retaliation. When Lincoln was sent a copy of the speech, he would not be drawn into the controversy. “I have not yet found time to peruse the speech,” Lincoln wrote in his note of thanks, “but I anticipate much both of pleasure and instruction from it.”
• • •
Although Sumner still had not met the Republican nominee and knew little about him, when the election returns were counted he celebrated Lincoln’s victory with a partisan group called the Wide-Awake Club. Throughout the campaign, its members had been demonstrating for Lincoln in Northern cities by carrying torches on long poles to light up the night sky.
Even though they could not vote, the female Wide-Awakers at Mount Holyoke College were no less enthusiastic. The young women were described as “laughing and shouting and drinking lemonade” as they carried a banner that read, “PRESIDENT—ABRAHAM LINCOLN. Behind a homely exterior, we recognize inner beauty.”
When Wide-Awakers in Concord reached the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the exuberant crowd spotted Sumner and shouted to him for a speech. At that point, Sumner still hoped that South Carolina’s threat to leave the Union would prove idle, but his remarks acknowledged that a cataclysm might be coming:
“A poet has said that the shot fired here was heard round the world, and I doubt not that this victory, which we have achieved in our country, will cause a reverberation that will be heard throughout the globe.”
• • •
As the consequences of Lincoln’s election became inevitable, Sumner could sound torn—never about abolition, but about the fate of the Union. “Much as I desire the extinction of Slavery,” he wrote in a letter to an English correspondent, “I do not wish to see it go down in blood.”
At other times, he seemed to take a fatalistic satisfaction in the crisis. When South Carolina became the first state to secede, Sumner predicted that “Virginia will go, and will carry with her Maryland and Kentucky. They will all go.”
At their first meeting, the president-elect managed to reassure Sumner that he would be steadfast. All the same, Sumner concluded that Lincoln lacked the social grace and dignity to lead the nation. But he had to admit that his conversation could flash with extraordinary insights.
Lincoln was also taking the measure of his guest. Commenting on Sumner’s imposing height, he suggested that they stand back to back to see who was taller.
Sumner declined with a reproach: This was “the time for uniting our fronts against the enemy and not our backs.”
Lincoln, who admired Sumner’s idealism, took the rebuff in good part. He told the story afterward with the glint in his eye that his friends recognized. He had found Sumner’s remark “very fine,” Lincoln said. “But I reckon the truth was . . . he was afraid to measure!”
In the same teasing tone, Lincoln reminded listeners that he had “never had much to do with the bishops down where I live. But do you know, Sumner is just my idea of a bishop.”
From that time on, Lincoln tried to shield Sumner’s sensibilities. John Eaton, an army chaplain, recalled the day that Lincoln had been lolling comfortably with a long leg twisted over the arm of his chair. When Sumner was heard approaching, Lincoln instantly snapped to, rose to his feet, and prepared to return his visitor’s bow.
Sumner had come to recommend a name for a consulship. Lincoln thanked him warmly and saw him out. Returning to Eaton, Lincoln sank back in his chair, resumed straddling its arm, and explained his hasty attempt at propriety:
“When with the Romans, we must do as the Romans do!”
Sumner’s patronizing of the new president persisted to the day he was walking home from the inaugural. He had been pleased with Lincoln’s address, and he observed to a Massachusetts colleague that the speech could best be described as “a hand of iron and a velvet glove.”
But, Sumner added, Lincoln might not recognize Napoleon’s famous phrase.
• • •
The president was soon to disappoint Sumner in a more substantial way. Sumner felt he could legitimately expect appointment as secretary of state, since few Americans matched his wealth of experience or his contacts overseas. And yet Lincoln chose Henry Seward, the man he had just defeated for the Republican nomination.
As Lincoln’s term unfolded, however, the president and Sumner adjusted to each other. Mary Lincoln reported that she sometimes overheard them in her husband’s office, where they would talk and “laugh together like two schoolboys.”
• • •
When Lincoln struggled with the proclamation that would define his presidency, he did not turn to Charles Sumner for advice. Instead, the president called together his cabinet on July 22, 1862, and even then he confided the purpose of the meeting only to Secretary of State Seward and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles.
Overcoming his lingering reluctance, Lincoln was ready to declare that slaves within every state rebelling against the Union were free “thereforward and forever.” The result would put an end to slavery for three and a half million black men, women, and children but not for the 425,000 within the states that had not rebelled, since they did not fall under the president’s war powers authority.
First reading of the Emancipation Proclamation
Before reading his proclamation aloud, Lincoln announc
ed that his mind was made up and that he “had not called them together to ask their advice.”
When he had finished reading, most cabinet officers were stunned into silence or quietly indicated their support. Only Salmon Chase, despite his reputation as a fervent abolitionist, recommended caution. He would have preferred a more sweeping decree, Chase said, but he recommended that discretion be left to the generals on the ground to free the slaves within their occupied territory “as soon as practical.”
Speaking last, Henry Seward raised one consequence that Lincoln admitted he had not considered: Given the reverses suffered lately by the Union army, Lincoln’s action might look like a desperate last resort.
The list of the North’s defeats was indeed sobering, beginning with the first major battle of the war at Bull Run in Northern Virginia. When the troops of Confederate general Thomas Jackson had stood fast and forced the Union army to retreat, both North and South had been shocked into accepting that the war would be a long one. From that day, the general had been called “Stonewall” Jackson, and now a second battle at Bull Run promised to go no better.
Seward recommended that the president wait for a battlefield success. Then, when “the eagle of victory takes flight,” Seward said, Lincoln could “hang your proclamation about his neck.”
Lincoln was persuaded. He returned the two foolscap pages to his pocket and hoped for a military success.
• • •
That moment was slow in coming. In mid-September 1862, General Lee made a daring decision to carry the war to the North. By invading Maryland, he intended to tie down the Union forces that were defending Washington.
Lee did not know that a letter outlining his tactics had been left behind when his army vacated an earlier camp at Frederick City. Recovered by a Union soldier, the letter had been sent to George McClellan, the thirty-six-year-old commander of the Army of the Potomac.
Although McClellan was admired for his meticulous planning, he was proving to be sluggish on the ground. But with Lee’s strategy in his pocket, he moved to vanquish Lee’s vastly outnumbered Confederate troops.
The battle was fought at Antietam Creek, near the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland. When fighting ended on September 17, 1862, the number of American casualties was greater than in any other single day in the nation’s history.
Nearly 24,000 Union and Confederate soldiers had been killed or wounded or were missing in action. Despite the disparity in the number of troops committed to battle, the losses on both sides proved to be close—about 12,500 of McClellan’s men against 11,500 of Lee’s.
But McClellan’s critics pointed out that the general—always worried about being outnumbered—had held back from battle two corps of his reserves that totaled more than Lee’s entire force. McClellan’s caution had enabled Lee to withdraw to fight again.
• • •
Five days after the battle, Lincoln issued the first of a two-part proclamation. He set a deadline of January 1, 1863, for freeing slaves in any state that did not return to the Union.
Lincoln’s ultimatum infuriated the South. Jefferson Davis swore that if freed slaves were recruited as soldiers, he would never recognize them as legitimate combatants and would punish black troops harshly along with their white commanders.
The Union army responded by publishing a code of conduct that protected prisoners of war and forbade torture. The pamphlet warned against mistreating Negro troops and held that the rules of war allowed for “no distinction of color.”
When Lincoln’s deadline came and went, his second proclamation freed the slaves in the ten states of the Confederacy. But while invoking his authority under Article II of the Constitution, Lincoln exempted the border states that had not seceded—Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware. Also exempted were the state of Tennessee, back again under Union control, and the city of New Orleans, together with thirteen Louisiana parishes.
• • •
Claiming victory at Antietam had not improved George McClellan’s standing with Lincoln. On November 5, 1862, the president removed him from command of the Army of the Potomac and two days later appointed Ambrose Burnside to replace him.
Only two years older than McClellan, Burnside wanted to prove his eagerness to fight. On December 13, he provoked a battle at Fredericksburg, Virginia, where his casualties ran to 12,653 men, almost 1,300 of them killed. Lee’s losses were less than half that number—5,377, with 608 dead.
The fiasco led Radical Republicans to step up their scornful criticism of the president’s conduct of the war. Lincoln lamented, “If there is a worse place than hell, I am in it.”
He sent Burnside to the Army of the Ohio to repair his reputation and, with severe misgivings, appointed Joseph Hooker, a major general approaching fifty but unflagging in his enthusiasm for liquor and for the women available at military encampments.
• • •
Further Union losses served to test the alliance between the president and Charles Sumner during the months leading to Lincoln’s re-election campaign. Early in January 1864, during a second battle at Cold Harbor, northeast of Richmond, Virginia, Ulysses Grant had lost nearly 7,000 men to General Lee’s 1,500.
Dispirited, Sumner became sympathetic to a movement by other Radicals to replace Lincoln, even after he had been nominated by the Republicans for a second term.
Sumner’s rift with the president was repaired, however, during the intense debate over a constitutional amendment to outlaw slavery. Although abolition was the crusade of his lifetime, Sumner had not been leading the congressional charge. Instead, it was Missouri senator John Henderson who submitted a joint resolution for the amendment in January 1864. Henderson, no Radical Republican, was a Democrat who had stayed loyal to the Union.
As variations on the amendment were put forth, Sumner found all of them wanting. In a speech on April 8, 1864, he denounced his colleagues for their past inaction:
Since “nothing in the Constitution” supported slavery, Sumner said, no amendment had been necessary. Congress could have acted on its own. But because members had been too timid, he grudgingly acknowledged that an amendment might now be called for.
In the end, Sumner voted for a version cobbled together by the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that would add the United States to the expanding list of nations that banned slavery.
France’s revolution had ended slavery in 1794. England first abolished the slave trade in 1807, then outlawed slavery itself in 1832. As America was launching its civil war, Russia had freed its serfs in 1861, and the Netherlands ended slavery in its colonies two years later.
The pending amendment reversed the intention of an amendment offered by Congressman Thomas Corwin of Ohio that had passed Congress in the last days of the Buchanan administration. If ratified by the states, Corwin’s proposal would have forbidden any future amendments to abolish or restrict slavery.
Corwin’s Thirteenth Amendment would have been the first change in the Constitution in almost sixty years. It had passed both houses of Congress, and in his first inaugural address, Lincoln had seemed to endorse its sentiments.
By April 1864, however, the president had become committed to an amendment that would end slavery. With a vote of thirty-eight to six, the Senate approved the measure on April 8, 1864. When Democrats in the House blocked passage, Lincoln saw to it that the amendment was added to the Republican platform during his re-election campaign.
That election produced enough gains for the Republicans for Lincoln to predict its inevitable passage in the next Congress, but he pressed former Whigs who had become wavering Democrats to switch their votes even before that. He sent aides to lobby for the amendment with a stirring admonition:
“Remember that I am President of the United States, clothed with immense power, and I expect you to procure those votes.”
On January 31, 1865, the amendment passed the House 119 to 56, and Lincoln signed it the next day, the final step on the path he had begun with the Emancipatio
n Proclamation.
The president’s home state of Illinois hastened to become the first to ratify the amendment on the day he signed it. By the night that Lincoln was shot, Arkansas had become the twenty-first state to ratify, and eight months later, with Georgia’s ratification on December 6, 1865, the amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution.
A few states rejected or tabled the change and ratified it only later. The state of Mississippi did not add its approval until 1995 and neglected to notify Washington until February 2013.
The language of the amendment was terse:
1.Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
2.Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Charles Sumner had already moved on. He was preparing to confront the discrimination that he expected the newly freed slaves to face, and he protested a system in the District of Columbia that designated separate streetcars for black passengers. Sumner called it “a disgrace to the city, and a disgrace to the National Government, which permits it under its eyes.”
He achieved only limited success—barring discrimination on a single railway—but he did win equal pay for the black soldiers who had been recruited since 1862.
Sumner’s crusading continued to come at a price. One of his friends, a Polish translator in the Senate, lamented that he “is attacked by political enemies and is obnoxious, nay at times, nauseous, to men of the same party principles as his.”
That same friend acknowledged that Sumner’s manner was at least partly to blame—“his petty schoolmaster-like conceit, and by the everlasting pompous display of his rhetorical superiority and undigested erudition.”
After Lincoln Page 3
