The Caning

by Stephen Puleo

  Southerners were horrified that Brown's actions and his death had seemingly provided the final strand of thread to unify the numerous Northern antislavery factions. To compare Brown to Christ would have been an anathema to the South at any time; for the North to do so in the highly charged environment of late 1859 and early 1860 was seen by many below the Mason-Dixon line as a call to arms.

  Moderates in the South held little sway, so virtually the entire region was suspicious of any Northerners, but particularly Republicans, who criticized Brown. Virginia's James Mason said those Republicans who condemned Brown did so “only because it [his attack on Harpers Ferry] failed. Albert Gallatin Brown of Mississippi was equally skeptical of Northern criticism of John Brown: “Disguise it as you will,” he said, “there is throughout all the non-slaveholding states…a secret, deep-rooted sympathy with the object which this man had in mind.”

  Jefferson Davis warned his Southern colleagues in a December 8 speech that, after the appalling Northern reaction to the John Brown episode, the federal government could no longer be counted on to uphold slavery's constitutional safeguards. “John Brown, and a thousand John Browns, can invade us, and the Government will not protect us,” Davis said. If the South could not be protected “in our property and sovereignty,” then it was released from its allegiance to the American promise and “we…will protect ourselves out of the Union.” Nor was the South afraid to fight if it came to that, Davis asserted: “To secure our rights and protect our honor we will dissever the ties that bind us together, even if it rushes us into a sea of blood.”

  In the South's view, enough was enough. What began with Northern overreaction to Charles Sumner's beating had continued with abolitionist calls to ignore the Supreme Court's ruling in Dred Scott; had worsened with increased federal interference in the affairs of Kansas and the subsequent defeat of the Lecompton Constitution in the House; and had spawned lengthy and detailed debates about slavery between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, two leading candidates for president in 1860, neither of whom represented Southern interests.

  Now the culmination: Northerners had placed the messiah's crown upon John Brown, who had been feared and reviled across the South, perhaps considered even more despicable than Sumner because of Brown's long reliance on wanton violence to achieve his goals. “Abolitionism [is] a cancer eating into our very vitals,” Virginia's Governor Wise told his state's assembly on December 5, 1859. The situation had deteriorated to such an extent that even President Buchanan could no longer be counted on to defend Southern rights. “We must rely on ourselves,” Wise told Virginia lawmakers. “I say then—To your tents! Organize and arm!”

  John Brown was a martyr in the North, a madman in the South. His raid, capture, trial, and execution had set up the most ominous sectional standoff yet: secessionist fury now fully swept the South, while an ardent desire to end slavery, once and for all, now unified the North.

  Charles Sumner was still in Europe when John Brown raided Harpers Ferry–“the great event,” as Sumner described it—but he was back on American soil and in his Senate seat in Washington shortly after Brown's execution. Sumner had arrived in Boston on November 21, relieved to be back on terra firma; he was seasick for twelve of the sixteen days of his “long and dreary” voyage. He told Samuel Gridley Howe after he reached his home: “My head still tosses and this brick house is going up and down like a ship.” Overall, though, he was feeling better, telling John Greenleaf Whittier he was “at last…well again,” though he hastened to add that his physicians urged him to use caution and gradually resume “my old activities.”

  Sumner's return to Washington occurred as the debate over John Brown and Harpers Ferry approached a crescendo. Southern lawmakers demanded investigations of the raid, and warned that anyone who had assisted Brown in any way would be brought to justice. South Carolina Congressman Lawrence Keitt, one of Preston Brooks's accomplices in 1856, cut short his honeymoon in Europe when he learned of the Harpers Ferry raid, causing his new bride to complain: “Disappointed, disappointed. And the cause Politics. How I hate the word.”

  Upon his return to the United States, Keitt denounced what he called the “indissoluble connection” between the Republican Party and John Brown's raid. Then Keitt learned that his brother, while lying in a sickbed at his Florida plantation, had had his throat slit by one of his slaves. Keitt's brother died and vigilantes hanged his attacker on the spot. While mourning his brother, Keitt also expressed grave concerns about the confluence of events: “Our Negroes are being enlisted in politics. I confess, this new feature alarms me.” He vowed to promote secession across the South.

  After the Harpers Ferry Investigating Committee was established, Congress subpoenaed many Northern witnesses and supporters, including Massachusetts Free-Soil lawyer John Andrew, who was questioned primarily on his role in obtaining legal counsel for Brown. Andrew testified on February 9 that he thought Brown's raid was illegal, but so, too, was Preston Brooks's attack on Charles Sumner, which, Andrew said, had been “if not justified, at least winked at throughout the South.”

  Andrew's remarks reminded lawmakers and the public of the role the four-year-old caning episode played in the bitterness that consumed Washington in 1860. Charles Sumner contrasted the rancor in the nation's capital with his restful European tour. “What a difference between this place and Rome!” he lamented. He longed “for an hour, one brief hour” to stroll along Rome's streets or visit the Vatican. The situation was made worse when it became clear to Sumner that, in addition to the generally poisoned atmosphere in Washington, Southern hostility toward him personally had not abated either. Some Virginians talked of kidnapping him. Another Southern letter writer warned him that he was “spoiling fast for another licking,” and told Sumner not to harbor any illusions of safety by betting that Southerners would refrain from attacking him again for fear of Northern reprisals. “What in Hell do we care for the Vengeance of the Yankees?” he asked. “Why, a dissolution and a fight is what we are after. And if giving you another pummeling will be the means of bringing it about, then here gos [sic] it.”

  A discouraged Sumner wrote of the nation's capital city: “This is a barbarous place. The slave-masters seem to me more than ever barbarians—in manner, conversation, speeches, conduct, principles, life. All things indicate a crisis.” He wrote to a friend in January: “There is now little intercourse between the two sides…the bonds of union are weakening. I should not be astonished if the Gulf States went off, a Gulf squadron, and hoisted the black flag.”

  Politically, Sumner also fretted about his uncertain role in the Republican Party. He still desired to speak after such a long absence, but party leaders preferred that he remain silent. They felt confident about a Republican victory in the 1860 election and did not want Sumner doing or saying anything that would alienate moderates, or provide Stephen Douglas with an opening that would allow him to placate or defend the South, and thereby unify Northern and Southern Democrats. A divided Democratic Party was exactly what Republicans wanted.

  Thus, even while Sumner expressed chagrin that his party now cared more about elections than principles, even while he urged his home state of Massachusetts not to take “any backward step—not an inch, not a hair's breadth” on the issue of slavery, he agreed to remain quiet at least until Republicans nominated their presidential candidate.

  Yet, the decision gnawed at Sumner, precisely because the Republicans had a good chance to triumph in November—winning the election became less of a concern for him than convincing his party to remain faithful to its founding principles. Success had clouded the good judgments of many men, and Sumner sought to play the role of his party's conscience to prevent the seductive lure of national power from obscuring the clarity of the Republicans' singular vision: the abolition of slavery.

  At first, Sumner found this difficult to accomplish, especially when party managers all but ignored him during the winter and spring of 1860. Sumner felt like an outcast in his own par
ty, a party built on core beliefs that he had articulated for years. “Nobody writes to me now & I feel solitary enough here,” Sumner confided to Samuel Gridley Howe in late April. Feeling more confident than ever in his unwavering antislavery views, Sumner desired again to speak publicly on the “Barbarism which I see about me, & which shews itself in speech, & sentiment.” But even close personal friends like Howe and Longfellow worried about Sumner's vindictiveness, believed he was “too full of fight” for the current times, and recommended “against saying a word not qualified by benevolence and charity.” Other correspondents urged him not to dwell on his sufferings when he finally did speak and to refrain from taunting his Southern tormenters and further inflaming tempers. “You have floored those dirty fellows,” pointed out T. P. Chandler, “and I would not stop to piss on them while they are down.”

  Sumner alternated between despondency and anger at these admonitions. “I feel…the little faith of our own men in the true principles of our cause,” he wrote solemnly to Howe, yet in a second letter to his good friend, his tone became fiery: “There is a time for everything, and when crime and criminals are thrust before us they are to be met by all the energies that God has given us.” Those energies, Sumner said, included “arguments, sarcasm, scorn and denunciation. The whole arsenal of God is ours, and I will not renounce one of the weapons—not one!”

  In May, Sumner was surprised when the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln for president at their convention in Chicago—Sumner and other party leaders felt all along that the nod would go to Senator William H. Seward. Nonetheless, Sumner wrote, he believed Lincoln was a “good honest anti-Slavery man,” who, while inexperienced in the inner workings of government or Washington, “those who know him speak of him as a person of positive ability, & of real goodness. We think he will be the next President.”

  For Sumner, Lincoln's nomination meant something else. The senator from Massachusetts was no longer shackled by his promise to Republican leaders to remain silent on the slavery issue. He simply needed the right opportunity, the right occasion, the right moment to voice his opinion, to remind the Republicans and the North of their true course and their true cause.

  His time finally arrived in June, two weeks after Lincoln's nomination, when the Senate took up a bill seeking, at long last, to admit Kansas to the Union as a free state. How fitting that the topic of Kansas provided the impetus. After four years of silence, Charles Sumner felt compelled to speak.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE FINAL SPEECH

  An eerie combination of déjà vu and nervous anticipation gripped the Senate chamber when Charles Sumner walked in a few minutes before noon on Monday, June 4, 1860, resplendent in formal dress—including white gloves—and clutching a sheaf of galley proofs that contained the 35,000-word text of a speech he entitled “The Barbarism of Slavery.”

  Four years after he was nearly beaten to death, Charles Sumner had served notice that he finally was ready to deliver a major speech—an “elaborate speech,” some press reports teased—and the city was abuzz. The Senate galleries were almost full, though not as shoulder-to-shoulder jammed as they were four years earlier for “The Crime Against Kansas.” But curiosity abounded in Washington.

  Would Sumner have the physical strength to engage in one of his patented lengthy and impassioned orations? Would he mention his own beating and his subsequent suffering as he struggled to recover? Would he refer to the deceased assailant Preston Brooks or Brooks's second cousin whom Sumner libeled, the late Senator Andrew P. Butler? Would he moderate his position on slavery at all given the concerns expressed by Republican Party leaders? Indeed, would he be speaking for himself only or for Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans in general? And how would the South respond?

  To Sumner, the political considerations of his speech were secondary. He viewed the battle over slavery as a “solemn battle between right and wrong, between good and evil.” The transcendent debate was between slavery and freedom, and that debate should not be tempered, diluted, or abandoned, regardless of politics or policy considerations. He had held these views for two decades. The debate about Kansas entering the Union as a free state provided merely an excuse. Charles Sumner was about to deliver an all-out assault against American slavery, party and politics be damned.

  It is not merely that Charles Sumner refused to give an inch of ground during his four-hour address—though he certainly did not—but that he broke new ground in the annals of antislavery oration. Reading from printed galleys because he thought memorizing the speech, as he usually did, would prove too taxing, Sumner unleashed his full rhetorical arsenal. When it came to the subject of slavery, the twin political pillars of conciliation and compromise were simply foreign notions to him: he had never backed down or wavered and he would not start now.

  He answered the question on everyone's mind quickly: How much emphasis would he give to the Brooks assault? “I have no personal griefs to utter… I have no personal wrongs to avenge,” he began in a strong, moderate voice. In the only reference he made to the deaths of Brooks and Butler, he said: “The years have intervened and the tombs have been opened since I [last] spoke… Besides, what am I—what is any man—compared with the Question before us?”

  Then, without further preliminary, Sumner launched into a searing indictment of slavery and slave-owners, a polemic unsparing in the forcefulness of content and tone, virtually every sentence and paragraph clubbing into submission the South's proslavery arguments, chastising the men who profiteered from the shackled misery of other men, and berating the Southern economic system that perpetuated such an injustice. While Senate Republicans listened intently, if warily, Southern Democrats walked around, pretended to read newspapers, grumbled, ridiculed him, and even left the chamber in disgust.

  None of it fazed Sumner. He was not necessarily speaking to his colleagues in the Senate chamber or the spectators in the gallery, but rather, to the millions who would read his speech in the coming days and to historians who would dissect his words and ideas in the years to follow. Again, his language, at once stinging and eloquent, roiled the chamber with a rancorous turbulence that had long been missing while his chair remained vacant. He summoned all the passion of the powerful Massachusetts abolitionist movement, of which he served, in practical terms if not in formal name, as standard-bearer and champion on the national level. It was as if he knew this was a speech for the ages; at the least, a clarion call to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln to stand up and be counted. Invoking religious themes in a way he had never done, Sumner referred to slavery as “nothing less than a huge insurrection against the eternal law of God.” Between slavery and freedom, Sumner declared, there was an “essential incompatibility…. If you are for the one, you can not be for the other; and just in proportion to the embrace of Slavery is the divorce from Civilization.”

  Indeed, Sumner said, a slave society was no civilization at all; he scoffed at the slave-owners' essential argument that slavery was a beneficent institution. No, Sumner declared, far from it. “Barbarous in origin; barbarous in its law; barbarous in all its pretensions; barbarous in the instruments it employs; barbarous in consequences; barbarous in spirit; barbarous wherever it shows itself, Slavery must breed Barbarians,” he said. The insidious, evil nature of Southern slavery was contained in the devilish laws that governed the institution. A Southern negro might be “marked like a hog, branded like a mule, yoked like an ox, maimed like a cur, and constantly beaten like a brute; all according to law,” he said. Yet, “by the license of Slavery, a whole race is delivered over to prostitution and concubinage, without the protection of any law.”

  Sumner's arguments transcended the moral and the religious; the practical consequences of slavery, too, were debilitating and destructive to a society. In relentless statistical detail—a shift from his lyrical and emotional rhetoric—Sumner compared the populations of the North and South. He concluded that slavery had “stunted” progress in the South, “in population, values
of all kinds, manufactures, railroads, canals, charities, the post office, colleges, professional schools, academies, public schools, newspapers, periodicals, books, authorship, [and] inventions.” He could not resist singling out South Carolina for ridicule to prove his thesis, pointing out that a smaller percentage of its white population than of Massachusetts' free negroes attended school. And in what could only be a sign of the mental deficiencies of Southern slave-owners in general, they seemed to not just accept their backward situation, but to flaunt it, “to exult in [this] unfortunate condition, and to go to any lengths to protect it.”

  Finally, Sumner dashed the Southern argument that slavery was protected by the Constitution, claiming that this long-standing Southern canard was so unfounded as to border on the delusional. The Constitution, Sumner said, contained “not one sentence, phrase, or word—not a single suggestion, hint, or equivocation, even,” to justify the South's claims. The Constitution's true purpose and principle, Sumner stressed in an argument he had made in the past, was to make “Freedom national and Slavery sectional” to establish “the law of impartial Freedom without distinction to color or race.”

  By the time a drained and weary, albeit triumphant, Sumner concluded his speech, his Senate colleagues, North and South, had borne witness to two simple facts: During his lengthy absence, the outspoken senator from Massachusetts had lost neither his antislavery zeal nor his ability to infuriate his opponents.