Jones’s deputies raided homes in Lawrence in a dragnet to round up those named in his warrants. The proslavery delegate to the Congress installed through the fraudulent November 1854 election, John W. Whitfield, who had been observing the investigating committee’s hearings, claimed it was “unsafe for himself and witnesses to remain there, and requested the Committee to adjourn to some other place,” according to a contemporary historian. Congressman Oliver, the pro-Ruffian voice on the committee, made a motion to suspend its work, but the other two members voted to continue. The chairman, Congressman Howard, wrote Speaker Banks that the evidence they had collected so far “deeply implicated” the Ruffians in election fraud. “Some of the most important facts have been proven by leaders of the invasion & even by candidates elected.” “We were frequently threatened through anonymous letters,” wrote John Sherman. “On one occasion, upon going in the morning to the committee room, I found tacked on the door a notice to the ‘Black Republican Committee’ to leave Kansas upon penalty of death.”
On May 5, the territorial chief justice appointed by Pierce, Judge Samuel Lecompte, convened a grand jury to charge the free state leaders with “high treason” for resisting the “bogus legislature,” and in case there was “no resistance” declared that their “intention” was enough to indict them for “constructive treason.” These crimes that would seem to carry capital punishment had no legal basis and were wholly fictitious. It was simply impossible for treason to be committed against a territory. Attached to the indictments, Lecompte’s grand jury also issued a bill to suppress the two newspapers published in Lawrence, the Herald of Freedom and Kansas A Free State, which were charged with sedition, “advising assassination,” and “demoralizing the public mind,” and another bill to destroy the Free State Hotel as “a stronghold of resistance to law.” One of the grand jurors, a covert free state man, alerted the people of Lawrence to the indictments before they were disclosed. “What a sweet scented jury it was!” he said. “There were at least fifteen bottles of whiskey in the room all the time.”
Judge Lecompte, the founder of the proslavery town of Lecompton, which he developed as a real estate speculation and got the legislature to designate the capital, also invested in railroad companies with his partner, John Calhoun, the federal land agent. “To the charge of a pro-slavery bias,” Lecompte declared, “I am proud, too, of this. I am the steady friend of Southern rights under the constitution of the United States. I have been reared where slavery was recognized by the constitution of my state. I love the institution as entwining itself around all my early and late associations.”
John Calhoun, surveyor general of the Nebraska and Kansas territories (no relation to John C. Calhoun), was more powerful than the territorial governor. He had the authority to draw the fine lines of the map, chart new towns and apportion land, deciding which interests would be granted real estate, railroads, and schools, and controlled several hundred federal patronage jobs, the greatest number in Kansas, his own political machine. Calhoun had been the most prominent Democrat in Sangamon County, Illinois, elected to the state legislature and three times mayor of Springfield. He was a longtime close ally of Douglas. After the Nebraska Act was enacted, Douglas pressed Pierce to name Calhoun to the post in Kansas, the biggest plum Douglas was able to extract from the president, the most strategic favor he could receive, placing his trusted man where he could help secure his enormous gamble. Through Calhoun a piece of the politics of Illinois was exported and implanted in Kansas. Abraham Lincoln had as complicated a relationship with Calhoun as did Douglas. In his first decent-paying job in the river town of New Salem, Illinois, Lincoln had apprenticed with him as a surveyor. Calhoun had also been a schoolteacher whose students included William Henry Herndon, later to become Lincoln’s law partner. Lincoln had most recently debated Calhoun on September 9, 1854, on the Nebraska Act, in which he had put Lincoln on the defensive, falsely assailing him for “affiliation with abolitionism” and the secretive nativist Know Nothing Party. Calhoun declared the free state men were “vile abolitionists . . . so vile they would lick the slime off the meanest penitentiary in the land,” and “would bow down and worship the devil if he would only help them to steal a nigger.”
Former governor Reeder, elected the free state delegate to the Congress, was assisting the investigative committee in gathering and questioning witnesses when he was informed of the “high treason” indictments. He believed it was a plan to “paralyze the Free-State party . . . to pick up all our leaders, including all the State officers, members of the Legislature, etc., or an offense not bailable, and keep them shut up for six months, and until after the next election.” The committee concluded in its official report that “the obstruction which created the most serious embarrassment to your committee was the attempted arrest of Gov. Reeder. . . . Subsequent events have only strengthened the conviction of your committee, that this was a wanton and unlawful interference by the judge who issued the writ, tending greatly to obstruct a full and fair investigation.” The intent, the report stated, was to remove Reeder from providing “local information which would enable us to elicit the whole truth, and it was obvious to every one that . . . would necessarily hinder, delay, and embarrass” the committee.
On May 7, a deputy served Reeder with a subpoena to appear before the Lecompton grand jury. Reeder told him it was “irregular” and he would not obey it. The deputy returned the next day with a posse to present Reeder with an arrest warrant for contempt while he was examining witnesses before the committee. Reeder claimed privilege as an elected delegate to the Congress. He conferred with Howard and Sherman, who agreed; but Oliver, the Missourian, insisted he had no privilege. Reeder said that he had received information that “my life was not safe from private assassination in Lecompton.” That evening he, Howard, Sherman, and Robinson decided that he and Robinson should escape to inform sympathetic officials in Washington of the true state of affairs in Kansas. They also vouchsafed with Robinson “the testimony already taken by the Congressional Committee as there was great danger that it might be seized and destroyed.”
Reeder fled disguised in a borrowed overcoat and cap, traveling by night to a series of safe houses as though a fugitive slave in an underground railroad until he was ferried across the Mississippi into Illinois. In Chicago a crowd called for him to appear on the balcony of the hotel where he was staying, and he “was received with cheers upon cheers.” That evening he took the train to Bloomington, where he found himself on May 29 among the throng assembling for the founding convention of the Illinois Republican Party and to hear Lincoln speak.
Robinson escaped from Lawrence along with his wife, but was captured in Lexington, Missouri, and shipped as a prisoner to Lecompton, where he was held captive for four months. John Sherman believed that those who caught Robinson knew he was carrying the committee’s documents. “We believe that a knowledge of that fact caused the arrest,” he recalled. But Sara Robinson, who hid copies of those documents in her clothes, continued traveling to St. Louis where she arranged for the delivery of the testimony personally to Speaker of the House Nathaniel Banks in Washington. Then she went on to Bloomington, arriving at the opening of the Illinois Republican convention, where she encountered Reeder, “to my surprise,” he observed—the two escapees from Kansas fortuitously coming in time to hear the keynote speaker, Abraham Lincoln.
When Reeder eluded arrest, the chagrined deputy consulted with the U.S. Marshal, J.B. Donaldson, who issued a proclamation on May 11 that “there is every reason to believe that any attempt to execute these writs will be resisted by a large body of armed men,” and summoned a posse to assemble at Lecompton. Bands of Ruffians and several hundred of the newly arrived Southerners were instantly deputized and put on the federal payroll as members of the marshal’s posse comitatus. This provisional army surrounded Lawrence, whose leaderless residents appealed to Governor Shannon for protection. He declared that he would in “no way interfere” and “not interpose to save”
those who “resist” from “the legitimate consequences of their illegal acts.” A Committee of Public Safety in Lawrence issued a statement that the assertions of the U.S. marshal were false, and that the claim of Senator Douglas and others that they were “rebels and traitors” was a “slanderous charge.” The free state men retreated from the town while the Ruffians mustered for their attack.
The fog of impending violence also lowered over Washington. “The border-ruffian policy, which was filling Kansas with alarm and bloodshed, had its representatives in Washington, walking its streets, hanging around its hotels, and stalking through the capitol,” recalled Senator Henry Wilson. Menace lurked in the debates.
When Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, antislavery crusader and former Whig congressman, traveled to Washington to cover the spectacle, on the evening of January 29, as he walked down the street with his hands in his coat pockets, he heard a loud voice behind him. “Is your name Greeley?” “It is,” he replied. Congressman Albert C. Rust, a proslavery Democrat from Arkansas, suddenly smashed Greeley to the ground with the metal head of his cane. It was a gesture of Southern honor enforcing punishment of an insolence abolitionist who needed to be beaten to a proper station of subservience. “Greeley defended himself as well as he could, but suffered severely, although he is not disabled,” reported the New York Times. There was no punishment for Rust.
Greeley’s caning in January had aroused little outcry. On May 8, Congressman Philemon T. Herbert, a Democrat from California, but originally from Alabama, and ardently proslavery, provoked a squabble with a waiter at the Willard Hotel when he arrived too late to be served breakfast, cursed him as a “damned Irish son of a bitch,” pulled out a pistol, and shot him dead. The Southern press defended Herbert for upholding the prerogative of “white men” dealing with “menials,” as the Charleston Standard put it. In the House, the Democrats thwarted an attempt on the part of some anti-Nebraska members to launch an inquiry. At his trial a sympathetic jury acquitted Herbert of manslaughter. (During the war he served as a Confederate colonel.) “Members of Congress went armed in the streets,” wrote Henry Wilson, “and sat with loaded revolvers in their desks.”
“The tyranny of the slave oligarchy becomes more revolting day by day,” Charles Sumner wrote his friend William Jay, a founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society and son of the nation’s first chief justice, on May 6. “For some time I have tried for the floor. . . . I shall expose this whole crime at great length, and without sparing language.” Sumner was receiving a stream of correspondence from abolitionists in Kansas on the “warlike” confrontation. On May 17, he wrote Theodore Parker, the preeminent Unitarian minister of Boston, abolitionist leader, and idol of William Herndon. “Alas! The tyranny over us is complete. Will the people submit? When you read this, I shall be saying to the Senate, ‘They will not!’ . . . I shall pronounce the most thorough philippic ever uttered in a legislative body.”
CHAPTER FIVE
THE PURITAN AS PROPHET
Since Charles Sumner was elected to the Senate in 1851, he had been denied and scorned, refused committee assignments, banished as an outcast, deemed unworthy, unclean, and untouchable. He was the constant object of slander yet accused of being the defamer. It was not an irony that the tribune against slavery was the worthiest man from Massachusetts, the most learned in the Senate, his height at six feet two inches the measure of his rectitude, his gaze an image of engaged intellect—Sumner “with his fine presence and lofty carriage, his careful, well-arranged dress, and his deep, rich voice,” as his friend Charles Francis Adams described him.
Charles Sumner, 1855
From his admirers, Sumner’s virtues inspired deep respect and loyalty. His friend, the antislavery poet James Greenleaf Whittier, dedicated a poem to him in 1855: “In the white light of heaven, / the type of one / Who, momently by Error’s host assailed, / Stands strong as Truth.” But Sumner repelled others as cold, forbidding, and arrogant. His integrity was “unsullied and unassailable,” but his “self-esteem was limitless,” recalled Hugh McCulloch, Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury, who ran afoul of his censorious judgment. Sumner could be brittle, prickly, and unforgiving. Those unfortunate to be at the receiving end of his criticism regarded him as conceited, condescending, and harsh. His magnificent bearing, intellectual gifts, and ivory principles aroused resentment from the common run of politicians, even some on his own side. They interpreted his ornate public style as high-handed. They recoiled from his imperious sterling example and his disdain for the ordinary gestures of political life, making them feel as though they were inferior, vulgar, and squalid, which they didn’t like to be reminded.
Neither Seward nor Lincoln, however, was among those who permitted themselves to feel aggrieved by Sumner’s manner. Seward, who was well-educated, amiable, and foxy, maintained his relationship through thick and thin, though he was sometimes irritated by Sumner’s impolitic ineptitude, once telling him, “Sumner, you’re a damned fool.” Lincoln, unlike nearly all the others, with his acute sense of human nature, had sympathy for Sumner’s morbid sensitivity. He knew Sumner far better than Sumner knew himself. Lincoln as president never allowed Sumner’s perceived slights, real or not, to create an impenetrable wall of alienation. Lincoln strategically reached out to Sumner with just the right little touch to pull him out of his high dudgeon, like the night of the second inaugural in 1865, when Lincoln directed his carriage to pick up a sulking Sumner at his home and gave him the place of honor of escorting Mary on his arm into the ball. Lincoln had a natural empathy for the inner hurt that Sumner masked by withdrawing behind his condescension. “Mr. Lincoln,” recalled Shelby M. Cullom, a Republican congressman from Illinois, “was the only man living who ever managed Charles Sumner, or could use him for his purpose.”
Sumner took painstaking care to be comprehensive in his criticisms, to display the astounding scope of his knowledge, and leave no part of his righteous indignation unexpressed. He was determined to smash to dust his opponents’ claims through the accumulation of his dazzling erudition. He had emerged by challenging the political powers and social conventions of Boston, splitting and overthrowing the establishment of the Whig Party, an experience that was not only formative but also his template for action once he was elected to the Senate. Considered an inflexible figure in Washington, he agonized over criticism from his abolitionist friends in Boston that he was ever hesitant or craven. Upon his election to the Senate, Theodore Parker, who presided as pastor of the leading Unitarian congregation of Boston as an antislavery beacon, the church of the Transcendentalists, and who was the keeper of the flame of his grandfather, Captain John Parker, who fired the first shot, “the shot heard ’round the world,” on Lexington Green, reminded Sumner of his calling in a letter on April 26, 1851: “You told me once that you were in morals, not in politics. Now I hope you will show that you are still in morals although in politics. I hope you will be the senator with a conscience. . . . I expect you to make mistakes, blunders; I hope they will be intellectual and not moral; that you will never miss the Right, however you may miss the Expedient. . . . I consider that Massachusetts has put you where you have no right to consult for the ease or the reputation of yourself, but for the eternal Right.” But no one was more demanding on Sumner than he was himself, measuring his public actions by an unbending moral yardstick to speak unvarnished truth to the Slave Power.
Sumner was absorbed by politics, played the game by his own lights, yet disdained the idea of a political vocation as belittling. Standing for Massachusetts was his greatest calling. Sumner felt in his soul that he had been confided the greatest trust in representing the higher law of Pilgrims’ pride. Speaking at Plymouth Rock on August 1, 1853, he declared, “Better the despised Pilgrim, a fugitive for freedom, than the halting politician, forgetful of principle, ‘with a Senate at his heels.’ Such, Sir, is the voice from Plymouth Rock, as it salutes my ears. Others may not hear it; but to me it comes in tones which I cannot mis
take.” Few listening to him echo his words off the famous Rock could mistake that he aligned the Pilgrims with the movement to protect fugitive slaves and that the “politician, forgetful of principle” he rebuked was the recently deceased Daniel Webster, fallen archangel of Massachusetts for his soiled embrace of the Fugitive Slave Act. If Sumner was “despised” for following his inner voice, he was compensated in the knowledge that he was true to the eternal verities of the Puritan compact.
Sumner’s exalted oratory served exalted ends. He considered criticism of his flouting of political regularity and its niceties as high praise. “He possessed none of the instinct or experience of the politician, nor that sagacity of mind which appreciates and measures the importance of changing circumstances, or the possibilities and opportunities of the day,” wrote his political friend Carl Schurz. “He lacked entirely the genius of organization. He never understood, nor did he value, the art of strengthening his following by timely concession, or prudent reticence, or advantageous combination and alliance. He knew nothing of management and party maneuver. Indeed, not infrequently he alarmed many devoted friends of his cause by bold declarations, for which they thought the public mind was not prepared, and by the unreserved avowal, and straightforward advocacy, of ultimate objects, which they thought might safely be left to the natural development of events. He was not seldom accused of doing things calculated to frighten the people, and to disorganize the antislavery forces.”
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