The Caning

by Stephen Puleo

  When Sumner finished, disgusted South Carolina Senator James Chesnut rose and responded to Sumner's broadside only briefly: “After ranging over Europe, crawling through the back doors to whine at the feet of British aristocracy, craving pity, and reaping a harvest of contempt, this slanderer of states and men has reappeared in the Senate.” Explaining why Southern senators had listened quietly to Sumner's scathing speech (though many had not), Chesnut said he had hoped the Massachusetts senator, “after the punishment he had received for his insolence [the Brooks caning],” would have learned propriety and manners. Yet, clearly that had not occurred; Sumner had made his reappearance in the Senate none the wiser nor the better for his 1856 experience. Sumner, Chesnut said, was “the incarnation of malice, mendacity, and cowardice,” though it was unlikely that Southerners would physically attack him again, since they “were not inclined to send [him] forth the recipient of punishment howling through the world, yelping fresh cries of slander and malice.”

  Unflappable and insufferable, Sumner replied that he planned to print Chesnut's remarks in an appendix to his speech, both to ensure that the record was complete and to dramatically illustrate the barbarism he had just recounted.

  He had delivered the most comprehensive epistle against American slavery ever heard in the United States Senate; no speech had ever tackled the institution in its entirety. The Chicago Press and Tribune called it the “most masterly and exhaustive argument against human bondage that has ever been made in this or any other country, since man first commenced to oppress his fellow man.” Sumner's speech was so comprehensive, the Boston Traveller wrote, “it will supersede the necessity for another.” In the future, the paper said, any man who wishes to prove slavery “irrational and unconstitutional” would only need to cite Sumner's speech.

  Indeed, this was not a speech merely about violence associated with the extension of slavery into the territories, nor was it a screed against the individual components of the Fugitive Slave Law, or a warning against the insidiousness of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This speech did not simply address a small slice of the slavery debate, nor did it focus on nuance and legal technicalities.

  Rather, in four hours of oratory—after four years of virtual silence—Charles Sumner had indicted and repudiated the entire system of human servitude in the American South. He had dismantled its framework and, in the process, had impugned the morality of the entire region. Sumner was the first member of Congress to do so with such intemperate thoroughness, such resoluteness, and such utter disdain for any negative political ramifications from either friend or foe.

  He would also be the last. The “Barbarism of Slavery” would be the final major Congressional antislavery speech in the nation's history. In less than a year, the slavery debate would change venues once and for all, shifting from speeches in the halls of Congress to war-cries on the blood-soaked battlefields.

  * * *

  As they had four years earlier, Sumner's political allies feared for his safety.

  From the moment he vacated the Senate chamber after “The Barbarism of Slavery” speech, his friends insisted he submit to guards and escorts whenever possible. Henry Wilson and Anson Burlingame, both armed, accompanied him on the one-mile walk to his lodging immediately after the speech. In Washington barrooms and hotel parlors, Southerners talked of new violence against Sumner for his explosive words, and across the South, the speech generated fresh fury. One newspaper said Sumner's speech “was regarded as being more offensive than the one which created such a sensation before,” and if not for restraint shown by Southern slave-owners, “it might have been attended with similar results.”

  Some Southerners could not let Sumner's latest volley of insults stand. Four days after the speech, while Sumner was alone in his quarters, he was visited by a drunken Virginia slave-owner who forced his way into Sumner's room shouting violently that he was one of four men from his state who had come to hold Sumner responsible for his speech. Sumner ordered him from the room, but the man said he would be back with his friends to seek revenge. A nervous Sumner sent for Wilson, who immediately came to sit with him. About nine o'clock that same night, three other men came to his door, but when they learned that Sumner was not alone, they declined to enter. They left word that they would return in the morning for a “private interview” with Sumner, and if they could not have it, they would cut his “damned throat” before the next night. Faced with the threat, Sumner's friends agreed that he should not spend the night alone, despite his protests. Burlingame and another representative, John Sherman, slept in the front room that opened into Sumner's bedroom. The Virginians who threatened to cut Sumner's throat did not return the next morning.

  While Sumner tried to prevent the episode from reaching the newspapers, he was unsuccessful. In Washington and throughout the country, the violent threats against Sumner prompted offers of assistance. On June 9, his friend Edward Pierce wrote from Boston: “We have just heard of the threat of violence made to you last evening. Be careful, very careful.” A veteran from Duxbury, Massachusetts assured Sumner: “I am ready to shoulder my musket and march to the Capitol, and there sacrifice my life in defense of Free Speech and the Right.”

  Sumner's friends still feared for his safety. His personal secretary, A. B. Johnson, arranged for protection during the night at Sumner's quarters, and designated a series of armed escorts to follow closely behind Sumner, revolvers in hand, as he walked to and from the Capitol. In many cases, these armed bodyguards were citizens of Kansas, who had visited Washington for the debate on her statehood, and who volunteered to protect Sumner in return for his unwavering efforts to ensure that their land remain free.

  Still, Sumner bristled at the need for protective measures and said they further illustrated the barbarism of slavery and the arrogance of slave-owners that had succeeded in poisoning the atmosphere in Washington. “All this [bodyguards and escorts] has been done without any hint from me, and hardly with my approval,” he said. “Think of such precautions in a place which calls itself civilized!”

  Sumner's great antislavery speech elicited raw hatred from his enemies, and it also drew initial criticism from his friends. At best, his oration received a tepid response even from Republican quarters in the North, including many newspapers, many of whom sought to distance the party from its controversial senator. When Sumner sent a copy of the speech to Abraham Lincoln, expressing his “earnest hope that what I said may help our great cause,” Lincoln—ever the cagey politician—replied cautiously a week later that he had yet to read the speech, “but I anticipate both pleasure and instruction from it.” Things had changed since 1856, when Sumner's beating provided the incentive and ammunition for the meteoric growth of the Republican Party. With Lincoln's nomination, and a real chance for the presidency, most Republicans feared that Sumner's remarks would alienate moderate voters. In the words of Iowa Senator James W. Grimes, Sumner's speech “sounded harsh, vindictive, and slightly brutal…. His speech has done the Republicans no good.”

  Sumner deeply resented the “cold shoulderism and heartlessness” with which fellow antislavery Republicans viewed his ideas. He felt that with all he had been through, he deserved better. “I have become so accustomed to paving-stones from friends, that I shall soon be able to bear them almost as well as the open attacks of enemies,” Sumner wrote. When Republicans denounced his remarks as “ill-timed” or “in bad temper,” they furnished “weapons to the enemy.” Perhaps sensing that his abrasive personality contributed to the criticism, Sumner wrote: “Others, who have become equally obnoxious, have had earnest [newspaper] presses to beat back the enemy. I have none; not one that does not give the enemy something to hurl at me.” Yet he was willing to accept the abuse from so-called friends: “Perhaps I deserve it. At all events, I have labored for the Truth, & I accept the consequences.”

  Perhaps he had developed a deeper inner strength and an even stronger belief in the rightness of his cause during his convalescence—in any case, de
spite the criticism, Sumner remained undeterred. Far from regretting or apologizing for his speech, he declared that he “would not have had it otherwise. Were I put back to the day when I made the speech, I would make it again.” His critics needed to understand that strong language was necessary to portray slavery in its proper barbaric context. “That speech,” he declared, “will yet be adopted by the Republican Party.”

  And he was right. Again, as in 1856, members of the general public became his earliest and strongest allies. In general, Sumner did not possess sharp political instincts, and his own self-centeredness usually prevented him from understanding what truly lay in the hearts of his fellow citizens, but in this case, he had spoken for a majority of Northerners. Hundreds of letters poured in from ordinary men and women in the North (450 in the first thirty days), virtually all supportive of Sumner, a groundswell that buoyed his spirit and reinforced his resolve. P. L. Page of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, summed up the general tenor when he wrote, “Notwithstanding the opinion of some politicians, [I] am glad you delivered it just as it is. It is terrible but truthful.” What Sumner's speech demonstrated, Page correctly concluded, was that, “it is not this or that measure, merely, that we have to contend with, but with the Monster slavery.” New York's Hiram Barney said he was “mortified” by Republican criticisms of Sumner's speech, calling it the “most valuable anti-slavery document that I have ever seen.” A Pittsburgh man reassured Sumner and urged him to stand strong against the criticism: “Behind you stand a million of your fellow-citizens in whose hearts your speech finds an echo.”

  Without a doubt, the people of the North were far closer to Sumner in their disdain for slavery than they were to the cautious approach favored by Republican Party leaders. Even the usually unintuitive Sumner grasped this and he stayed on the offensive during the critical summer and fall of 1860.

  After the Congressional session ended on June 28, Sumner spent his time addressing one Republican rally after another, writing letters condemning slavery and urging support for Republican candidates, telling voters the choice in November was between Northern civilization and Southern barbarism, between the ideas of John Quincy Adams and John C. Calhoun, between the glorious Pilgrim ship Mayflower and the first slave ship, “with its fetters, its chains, its bludgeons, and its whips…choose, ye, fellow-citizens between the two.”

  In an extraordinary demonstration of the support for Sumner and his recent “Barbarism of Slavery” speech, more than three thousand people jammed the Cooper Institute in New York City on the evening of July 11 to hear his remarks before the Young Men's Republican Union of New York, one of the largest crowds ever to assemble at that location. “More than one-third of the vast hall had been reserved for ladies, and it was completely filled,” one account marveled. “The windows of the upper floor opening upon the basement were crammed with people.” When Sumner appeared on the rostrum at eight o'clock, he received thunderous and enthusiastic applause “which defie[d] all description.” One newspaper called the reception a welcome “as we have rarely seen given any man…. He was greeted with cheer after cheer, the audience rising and prolonging their salutations through many minutes, with continuous shouting and waving of handkerchiefs.”

  Sumner spoke for two hours, keeping the New York audience spellbound “without a movement and almost without a breath” throughout his oration. In his remarks, entitled “The Origin, Necessity, and Permanence of the Republican Party,” he reiterated the themes he espoused in “The Barbarism of Slavery,” and added political sections on the importance of supporting the Republican ticket in the upcoming fall elections. The Republicans, he stressed, were the party of the Constitution, America's cherished founding document, which slave-owners were trying to co-opt to suit their dastardly agenda. When the Constitution was adopted, Sumner said, the word “slave” was not “allowed to pollute its text; and this was in declared deference to the prevailing opinion, which regarded Slavery as temporary, destined soon to pass away.” The Founders would be appalled to learn that the Constitution, “from which they had carefully excluded the very word, would be held in defiance of reason and common sense, to protect the thing” that most statesmen found offensive even seven decades earlier.

  When he had finished, the crowd erupted. For Sumner, the speech was a personal triumph. The New York appearance was his first before a live audience, outside of Congress, since his beating, and the audience responded as though he were a returning hero. They longed to hear him, to be near him, to voice their unequivocal support for his perseverance; they knew how long he had suffered, and admired the fact that his pain had not compromised his principles one iota. Newspapers printed his New York remarks in their entirety, and the Young Men's Republican Union distributed more than 50,000 copies of a pamphlet edition. The New York speech was circulated as far away as California, where the Republican committee in that state published 10,000 copies in pamphlet form. William Seward wrote to Sumner: “Your speech in every part is noble and great. Even you never spoke so well.” Later he called Sumner's New York address and an August address to the Massachusetts Republican State Convention “masterpieces.”

  From a health perspective, Sumner believed that his New York speech in July, when coupled with his June oration in the Senate, proved he had turned an important corner. “I feel at last completely restored,” he wrote to one friend. He even took the opportunity to write to Dr. Brown-Séquard, who had subjected him to the painful fire treatments in Europe, to apprise him of the “completeness of my convalescence.” His June speech in the Senate had taken four hours to deliver and required intense preparation, yet Sumner endured it “without one touch of my old perverse complaints.” And then he had addressed the New York audience without any symptoms aside from simple fatigue. “I think you will agree that the experiment has at last been most successfully made, and my cure completely established,” he wrote to Brown-Séquard.

  By late summer and early fall, thanks to the rousing popular support Sumner was receiving, Republican leaders had changed their tune. Those who shied away from Sumner in June now sought his support. The congressional Republican Committee circulated “The Barbarism of Slavery” speech as a campaign document. From New York, Illinois, Ohio, New Jersey, and Maine, Sumner received invitations to speak and stump for candidates. And if he could not personally travel afar to campaign, could he write a letter supporting Republican candidates?

  Despite his newfound popularity, Sumner refused to campaign outside of Massachusetts, believing he needed to stay close to home in order to reassert his leadership among the state's Republicans. But his clear and strong voice carried throughout the North nonetheless.

  At the Republican state convention in Worcester on August 29, Sumner met his Massachusetts constituents for the first time since he had resumed his duties. The Mechanics Hall audience roared as he ascended the platform and the cheers delayed his remarks for more than ten minutes. He expressed his unequivocal support for John A. Andrew as governor and Abraham Lincoln as president; Lincoln, he said, was nominated by Republicans not just because of his “unimpeachable integrity,” but because “he had made himself the determined champion of the Prohibition of Slavery in the Territories…avowing openly his hatred of Slavery.”

  And on October 11, before an open-air mass meeting of Republicans in Framingham, Sumner delivered another impassioned constitutional argument against slavery and urged voters across the North not to be cowed by Southern threats to secede if Republicans were victorious in November. In a speech entitled “Threat of Disunion by the Slave States and Its Absurdity,” Sumner reminded voters that the Deep South slaveholding states had threatened to secede, again and again since the nation's founding, if they did not get their way. Their threats began “even while the Constitution was under discussion…. The cry from these States was then, ‘We will not come in [to the Union].’ Ever since it has been, ‘We will not stay in.’” From the Missouri Compromise to the Nullification Acts in South Carolina to the Compromi
se of 1850, the South had deviously and opportunistically wielded the threat of disunion as a weapon to bend the North to its will.

  And they were threatening once again to leave the Union if Abraham Lincoln was elected in November. “You are called to surrender your principles, your votes, and your souls,” in order to placate the South, Sumner told the audience. Whether it was true or not, Sumner said the Southern threat was absurd on its face as an argument to benefit slavery. First, much of the upper South was opposed to disunion and would likely resist it, weakening the overall Southern position. Second, if the lower South—the “Gulf Squadron” as those states were known—left the Union, how would their absence benefit slavery?

  No, Sumner urged, Republicans needed to ignore Southern secession threats and stand fast for the antislavery principles upon which the party was founded; for these principles are inherent and encapsulated in the formation of the United States Constitution, as described in its preamble. Using his most powerful constitutional language yet to refute the whole notion of Slavery, Sumner said: “[The Constitution's goal] is to establish justice; but Slavery is injustice. It is to insure domestic tranquility; but Slavery insures domestic discord and insurrection. It is to provide for the common defense; but Slavery causes common weakness. It is to promote the general welfare; but Slavery perils the general welfare. Finally, it is to secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity; but Slavery sacrifices these blessings.”

  Because the Republican Party was the only party that opposed slavery, it was, in Sumner's view, by definition the only constitutional party. Republicans' first duty, then, was to “stand straight” and not wilt under the threat of disunion, whether those threats come from the South or from misguided Massachusetts politicians.