All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  In mourning Whigs wore black armbands on the streets of Boston. A prominent Cotton Whig lawyer and state senator, Benjamin R. Curtis, closely attached to Webster, wrote a letter signed by every Whig member of the legislature charging Sumner of “an indictable offense” and “guilty” of a “criminal” and “factious conspiracy” for making the coalition with Democrats that elected him. A few months later Fillmore would appoint Curtis to the Supreme Court.

  “He was sent to work out his own course absolutely,” wrote Sumner’s friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Unitarian minister and abolitionist. “He had no party; he was to create a party. He had no firm following. The abolitionists watched him with hope, but not without distrust; they had seen so many fail. His opponents were prepared to denounce him as a man of one idea, if he devoted himself to the slavery question alone; or as a demagogue, if he took up any other.”

  Sumner soon encountered the overriding reality that his Massachusetts colleague Senator John Davis explained to him, “At Washington slavery rules everything.” The freshman senator spent his first months clearing his throat. He spoke on several subjects of minor note, but not on slavery. “Surely,” editorialized Garrison, “this is ‘the play of Hamlet, with the part of Hamlet omitted by particular request.’ ” Sumner was carefully waiting for the right opportunity, but none arose. On July 27, 1852, he decided to introduce a bill to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act. The next day the Senate refused consent to allow him to speak on his motion. Andrew Butler of South Carolina said Sumner was “pledged to agitate.” So Sumner was silenced. “You may speak next term,” James M. Mason of Virginia ordered him. “I must speak this term,” Sumner insisted. “By God, you shan’t,” said Mason. “I will and you can’t prevent me,” Sumner replied. But they could and did. Seward wrote his wife: “When will there be a North? The shutting of the doors against Sumner was wicked and base. . . . Indignation pervaded me to the finger ends.”

  Sumner’s silencing was his rude introduction to the implacable power of the F Street Mess. He had railed against the Slave Power from the distance of Boston, but now he encountered it within the chamber of the Senate. In his first direct conflict, after readying himself for years, he found his voice throttled. He understood that behind his adversaries loomed the shade of John C. Calhoun.

  Sumner would envision the future as a clash between the legacies of Calhoun and John Quincy Adams. In a speech campaigning in 1860 for Lincoln, he said, “Never was great conflict destined to involve a great country more distinctly foreshadowed. All that the Republican party now opposes may be found in John C. Calhoun; all that the Republican party now maintains may be found in John Quincy Adams. Choose ye, fellow-citizens, between the two.”

  Sumner, meanwhile, wrote a lengthy appeal to President Fillmore to pardon the two pilots, Daniel Drayton and Edward Sayres, who had been imprisoned for attempting to help seventy-six fugitive slaves escape from Washington aboard a schooner named the Pearl in 1848. The pardon was granted on August 4. Fearful that the men would be arrested on warrants from Virginia, Sumner personally met them at the jail with his carriage and arranged for them to travel that night immediately north. “Here was a point on which Sumner was able to assist us much more effectively than by making speeches in the Senate,” wrote Drayton.

  Sumner awaited his opening. When the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Robert M.T. Hunter, of Virginia and the F Street Mess, routinely introduced the appropriations bill Sumner leaped at his chance. On August 26, 1852, he proposed an amendment that would deny funding for the Fugitive Slave Act. “I am to be heard—not as a privilege, but as a right,” he declared. For three and half hours he spoke on his theme of “Freedom National, Slavery Sectional,” making a forensic and florid case that slavery was not established in the Constitution as a national institution, that it was forbidden in the territories by the Ordinance of 1787, and that slavery’s legitimacy was “constantly misunderstood.” “As Slavery assumes to be national, so, by an equally strange perversion, Freedom is degraded to be sectional, and all who uphold it, under the National Constitution, are made to share this same epithet. . . . These terms, now belonging to the commonplaces of political speech, are adopted and misapplied by most persons without reflection. But here is the power of Slavery. . . . It changes word for word. It teaches men to say national instead of sectional, and sectional instead of national.”

  Sumner argued that the slave was “a person” and therefore entitled to the right under the Constitution of trial by jury. If that were the case, the Fugitive Slave Act was unconstitutional and a dead letter. With ironic approval, he quoted Senator Butler’s remark that “a law which can be enforced only by the bayonet is no law.” At the heart of his speech, Sumner laid out an incremental strategy for confining slavery to the South that would eventually cause it to “disappear.” By denying that the Congress had power to extend slavery and by thwarting the admission of new slave states, the political power behind slavery would inexorably atrophy. Sumner was hardly making an original argument, but rephrasing the old ones going back to the beginnings of antislavery politics in the Liberty Party. His approach contrasted with the radical abolitionists who condemned the Constitution as a pact with the devil and demanded immediate emancipation. Sumner’s scenario of slowly strangling slavery, his invocation of Washington and Jefferson as true “abolitionists,” and incorporation of the Declaration of Independence’s proclamation that “all men are created equal” as the fount of national policy provided the basic arguments that other antislavery speakers, especially Lincoln, would adopt.

  When Sumner took his seat after finishing this exhaustive review of history, law, and morality, Southern senators and their allies compared him to a dog, accused him of inciting sexual perversion and murder, and declared him unfit. “The ravings of a maniac may sometimes be dangerous, but the barking of a puppy never did any harm,” said Senator Jeremiah Clemens of Alabama. Senator George Badger of North Carolina described Sumner as a slave of free blacks in the abolitionist movement. “This agitation,” he said, “was got up and maintained for mischievous purposes. . . . They and their societies are oppressed now by the comparatively few people of color they have among them.” Senator Henry Dodge of Iowa claimed that Sumner’s real agenda was race mixing. “The idea of equality and amalgamation of those races in the United States of America is utopian in the extreme, and I think wicked and disgraceful. . . . If their doctrines can be brought into practical operation (and they are prepared and are panting for the experiment), they would introduce black-skinned, flat-nosed, and woolly-headed Senators and Representatives, in this Chamber and in the House of Representatives.” Douglas argued that Sumner’s opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act was itself a violation of his oath of office to defend the Constitution and therefore “has no right to hold office under this Government.” Senator John B. Weller of California charged that Sumner’s rejection of the Fugitive Slave Act instigated “forcible resistance” and would “bring upon the head of the learned Senator from Massachusetts the blood of murdered men. He who counsels murder is himself a murderer!”

  Sumner’s amendment was overwhelmingly voted down. The Congress adjourned. His first attempt to make an impression ended. It was an election year, and he went home to campaign.

  At the Massachusetts Free Soil Party convention Sumner mounted the platform as the keynote speaker to the applause of the delegates and guests, who included Captain Drayton of the Pearl, whose pardon for the crime of attempting to transport fugitive slaves he had arranged. “The rising public opinion against Slavery cannot flow in the old political channels,” Sumner said. “It is impeded, choked, and dammed back. But if not through the old parties, then over the old parties, this irresistible current shall find its way. It cannot be permanently stopped. If the old parties will not become its organs, they must become its victims. The party of Freedom will certainly prevail.” But Sumner’s exciting rhetoric fell flat in the torpid atmosphere. The Free Soil Party suffered defecti
ons from Democrats and Whigs, who returned to their natural political homes, and it lost half the vote it had four years earlier. Even more perilous for Sumner, his enemies, the Cotton Whigs, regained control of the legislature, ousting the fragile coalition that had put him into the Senate. If the results of 1852 were a sign of things to come it was that Charles Sumner would be a one-term wonder and his political career would be finished.

  CHAPTER SIX

  CYCLOPS

  This Congress is the worst—or rather promises to be the worse—since the Constitution was adopted; it is the ‘Devil’s Own,’ ” Sumner wrote his friend Samuel Gridley Howe on December 8, 1853, at the convening of the 33rd Congress. The Mephistophelian drama began at once. With that the laws of political gravity were removed, the planets teetered out of their orbits, and the tidal waves flooded in.

  Senator Andrew Pickens Butler

  The outsiders at the fringe, the two Free Soil senators, Chase and Sumner, were suddenly thrust to the center. They requested that Douglas postpone introduction of his revision to repeal the Missouri Compromise as part of the Nebraska Act for a week, giving them the opening on January 24 to issue an “Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress,” denouncing the move as “a criminal betrayal of precious rights.” On the Senate floor four days later, Douglas assailed the “abolition confederates” for “an atrocious plot against the cause of free government,” and as “the pure, unadulterated representatives of Abolitionism, Free Soilism, Niggerism in the Congress of the United States.” He accused “the freesoilers and Abolitionists” as “the guilty parties” for violating the Missouri Compromise he would now repeal. “Why, then, should we gratify the abolition party in their effort to get up another political tornado of fanaticism, and put the country again in peril, merely for the purpose of electing a few agitators to the Congress of the United States?” Sumner replied that the “Appeal” described “the act, and not its author,” and called it “a soulless, eyeless monster—horrid, unshapely, and vast . . . and this monster is now let loose upon the country”—a line paraphrased from Virgil in The Aeneid to describe the Cyclops.

  Sumner resumed his opposition with a full-blown oration, which he entitled “The Landmark of Freedom,” on February 22. As a matter of “Public Faith,” he argued against overthrowing the Missouri Compromise, urging that senators “not wantonly and flagitiously discard any obligation, pledge, or covenant, because they chance to possess the power,—that they will not substitute might for right.” In 1860, six years after Sumner introduced these ideas and words into the national debate, Lincoln would memorably restate them in his Cooper Union address: “Let us have faith that right makes might.”

  After his disquisition on the legislative history of the Missouri Compromise and constitutional history of slavery, Sumner tore into Douglas. Sumner quickly shredded the perverse illogic of popular sovereignty. “By no rule of justice, and by no subtlety of political metaphysics, can the right to hold a fellow-man in bondage be regarded as essential to self-government. The inconsistency is too flagrant. It is apparent on the bare statement. It is like saying two and two make three. In the name of Liberty you open the door to Slavery.” Then he called Douglas a “human anomaly, a Northern man with Southern principles. Sir, no such man can speak for the North.”

  When Sumner had entered the Senate, Andrew Butler enjoyed a little light banter with him about Roman history and Latin. Butler flattered himself with these exchanges with the Harvard professor, whom he otherwise consigned to irrelevance. Sumner’s mockery of Douglas was taken as a presumptuous and rude break with senatorial protocol. Southerners were granted full sway to deride “abolitionists,” but now the New Englander was stepping out of place.

  Two days after Sumner’s oration, Butler rose to correct, rebuke, and humiliate him. He intended to give the professor a lesson on the subject of equality. Quoting Sumner’s phrase, “Oh, Liberty! What crimes have been committed in thy name!,” Butler instructed that “fanatical organization” would result in “breaking down the distinction between the black and the white man, and elevating one, or degrading the other to an equality, the horrors of the French Revolution, in all their frantic ferocity and cruelty, will be nothing compared to the consequences which must flow from such a state of things.” Butler chided Sumner for “another remark,” which “struck me as inappropriate. It was that in which he chose to draw a contrast between the civilization of the South, and that which must necessarily exist in the northern States, where they have not the institution of slavery.” After referring to “General Washington, a slaveholder,” Butler appealed to the authority of the Almighty. “Inequality seems to characterize the administration of the Providence of God. . . . Abolitionists cannot make those equal whom God has made unequal, in human estimation.” Butler offered his evidence. “All history refutes it. Who ever heard of the African astronomer, statesman, general, poet?”

  Having made his points historical and theological, Butler raised the sexual. He had prepared a graphic and pornographic coup de grâce to disgrace the Puritan. “Let us suppose,” he began, “the case of a young man who never saw one of this race, and who might therefore be regarded as having no prejudice whatever. Take the case of a young gentleman of a romantic disposition, of high imagination, with all the gifts that could be bestowed upon him by nature.” In other words, suppose it was Sumner. “Suppose it were proposed to him, that, if he would consent, he could marry an empress or a princess whose dowry was islands and provinces, who was possessed of the Archipelago of the South. Now, sir, just imagine that young gentleman to have such a proposition brought to him.” Here the Congressional Globe recorded: “[Laughter.]” “The negotiation commences. The lady is to be introduced to him in a palace highly decorated and prepared for such an occasion. Remember, this young man never saw a black woman before, and therefore he has no prejudice at all. She may have observed all the rules of Marie Antoinette when she passed the confines of France. She may adopt her dress. She may have her ankles covered with pearls, and her fingers with rings of rubies and diamonds.” Then Butler undressed her. “The young gentleman is standing near the altar of Hymen, of course with a palpitating heart. His betrothed is led out to him. He sees her white teeth; but lo! She has a black skin and kinky hair. [Laughter.] Now, what do you suppose that youth would say?”

  Butler turned to Sumner to deliver his punch line. “Will the gentleman from Massachusetts allow me to borrow one of his quotations, and say, that if he could speak Latin, he would instantly exclaim: “Monstrum, horrendum, informe, cui lumen ademptum!” “[Laughter.]” Here Butler threw back at Sumner his reference to Virgil’s Cyclops: “A monster, horrid, unformed, and blind.” Sumner had used Virgil to describe the horror of slavery, but Butler turned the quote against Sumner to depict the sexual licentiousness of a black woman. “He would certainly insist that she was lumen ademptum, that the light of the sun had never shown upon her; and I have no doubt he would regard her as the daughter of Nox.” Butler’s reference to Nox was to the Greek goddess of darkness. “But sir, I rather think he would not have stopped to talk Latin at all; and he would not have required an engineer to show him the straightest way out of that palace.” “[Laughter.]”

  Butler came to the moral of his lascivious story. “Equality! Equality! I should like to see a play written on this subject. I have no doubt that the honorable senator from Massachusetts, with his taste and talent, could draw up one describing the scene which I have mentioned. He could depict the negro princess in search of a husband, and could take this scene as a practical illustration of its results!”

  But it was not strictly a play that was on Butler’s mind. “Here allow me to notice one remark which was made by the Senator from Massachusetts, which I think even common prudence or common delicacy would have suggested to him that he ought not to have made. He said that, wherever slavery existed, it was followed by sterility, ignorance, and the want of civilization, and that where it was it banished civilization. In what ar
e the South inferior to the North.” Sumner’s remarks “may furnish materials for the theater,” said Butler. “They may furnish materials for what I understand is a very popular novel—‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ ”

  Butler may have been more familiar with Uncle Tom’s Cabin than he hinted. It was the greatest best-seller in the country’s history, inspired a host of proslavery tracts and novels in reaction, and had been adapted into a play that was a sensational attraction staged in theaters across the country as well as in London and Paris. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author, was known to be a friend and political ally of Sumner. Butler’s mis en scène of the young black woman as the seductress of the naive New Englander was a mockery, “of some little ridicule,” as he explained, and also one of the plot lines of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  The exact Latin line that Butler cited, “lumen ademptum,” was the very one that Stowe used to open her chapter on “The Slave Warehouse,” describing a New Orleans auction where Uncle Tom and a beautiful mulatto slave girl named Emmeline are sold to the cruel Simon Legree. Before he purchases Emmeline, separating her from her mother, to be held as a sex slave, with his heavy, dirty hand he “drew the girl towards him, passed it over her neck and bust, felt her arms, looked at her teeth . . .” When Emmeline escapes from Legree’s plantation as a fugitive, fleeing north to freedom, Uncle Tom, who refuses to divulge where she has gone, is whipped to death, achieving Christian martyrdom.

  Butler offered his own counter-Tom morality play of unnatural attraction and natural repulsion in which the black woman was the seductress and the white man the innocent victim. That the man was a Northerner was part of the humor; that he was supposed to be Sumner made it hilarious. Southern men supposedly would have known to flee from the presence of the black temptress. The reality, however, was that black female slaves were exploited sexually by their masters, sold as concubines or “fancy girls,” raped without legal consequence, and bore a slave population in the South before the Civil War of 10.4 percent mixed race, according to the historian John Hope Franklin. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was enacted, 46.5 percent of runaway slaves were identified as mulatto. Butler’s perverse sex fantasy was intended to knock down the Puritan as a means of upholding Southern honor. His quotation from Latin was intended to strike down Sumner’s erudition. His colorful description of a naked woman with “black skin and kinky hair” was his triumphant conclusion bashing the idea of equality. It was a verbal caning.