All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  The next day, February 25, Butler resumed his attack along a broad front on Sumner, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the North. “The pauperism, the lunacy, and the drunkenness of those States may be attributable to a very different cause, from the fact that they are a non-slaveholding population,” Butler said. He ascribed to Sumner “an ideal standard of morality, emblazoned by imagination and sustained in ignorance, or, perhaps, more often planted by a criminal ambition and heartless hypocrisy.” Once again, he referred to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “I appeal to those who hear me, if gentlemen who have gone to the South, who have lived amidst slaveholders, who have partaken of their hospitality, and have seen the administration of justice and all the graver forms of civilization there, are not better reconciled to the institution of slavery than that class and school of persons who read and take in their notions from ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’?” Abolitionism, he explained, was only one of “the isms which now pervade some portions of the North,” and were “the cankers of theoretical conceit.” “The most extraordinary development of that class of persons and that temper of society that gives rise to such isms,” he said, “is to be found in conventions of women, who step from the sphere prescribed to them by God, to enter into the political arena, and claim the rights of men.”

  Butler derided Sumner with a new scenario. If the South were “disposed to emancipate” the slaves and ship them to, say, Massachusetts, to “hand them over to the gentlemen’s philanthropy,” it would “resist them with the bayonet.” Emancipation, Butler declared, “would be the most cruel act that had ever been done under the authority, or the guise, or the forms of law.” The slaves would “inevitably perish,” given their “habits, their inclinations, everything connected with them.” “It would be a mercy to cut their throats sooner than condemn them to your philanthropy.”

  Butler concluded his two-day marathon with a flourish to prove that Sumner was little more than a preening hypocrite without moral or scholarly authority. Butler quoted one “Rev. Doctor Belknap,” from a document of the Massachusetts Historical Society dated 1795: “Negro children were reckoned an encumbrance in a family; and, when weaned, were given away like puppies.” Triumphantly, Butler proclaimed “the extract goes to show that the mind of Massachusetts was not always such as the gentleman would represent it now. It goes to show that she has been an anti-nigger State; and that when she had to deal with this class of persons practically her philanthropy became very much attenuated.” Thus, he displayed the fruits of his research, or someone who aided him, to expose that neither Sumner nor Massachusetts had reason for its assumption of moral superiority.

  But the surprise obscure quotation Butler used to clinch his argument was not proof of anything but his bogus scholarship and falsification of history. The “Rev. Doctor Belknap” he referenced was Jeremy Belknap, an important early abolitionist, pastor of Boston’s Arlington Street Church, and founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society. In 1795, St. George Tucker, a law professor at William and Mary and federal judge, wrote Belknap requesting information on the process of how Massachusetts had abolished slavery by 1788 so that Virginia could follow its example. Belknap consulted more than forty knowledgeable men, from John Adams to Prince Hall, leader of Boston’s free black community, in order to inform his history, “Queries Respecting the Slavery and Emancipation of Negroes in Massachusetts.” Belknap wrote that only a “few only of our merchants” were engaged in the slave trade. “It was never supported by popular opinion. A degree of infamy was attached to the characters of those who were employed in it.” That “Negro children” were “given away like puppies” was a practice Belknap attributed to cruel slave traders and against whom he himself had crusaded as one of the prominent petitioners responsible for passage of the act of the Massachusetts legislature that prohibited the slave trade and protected blacks from being “kidnapped or decoyed away from this commonwealth.” Drawing on Belknap’s work, Tucker wrote “A Dissertation on Slavery: With a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of It, In the State of Virginia,” which was rejected by the Virginia legislature, though he was sent a polite note.

  At midnight on May 24, Sumner rose to speak against final passage of the Douglas bill. He presented a scroll two hundred feet long signed by clergymen from across New England as a petition against the “great moral wrong” of Douglas’s Nebraska Act. Harriet Beecher Stowe financed the protest out of her royalties from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Douglas had excoriated the “political preachers” for “desecrating the pulpit, and prostituting the sacred desk to the miserable and corrupting influence of party politics.” Sumner, however, held up the clergy as moral examples to his adversaries within the Senate, Butler, Mason, and Douglas. “Perhaps the Senator from South Carolina, who is not insensible to scholarship, might learn from them something of its graces. Perhaps the Senator from Virginia, who finds no sanction under the Constitution for any remonstrance from clergymen, might learn from them something of the privileges of an American citizen. And perhaps the Senator from Illinois, who precipitated this odious measure upon the country, might learn from them something of political wisdom.

  “Sir, the bill you are about to pass is at once the worst and the best on which Congress ever acted,” Sumner said. “Yes, Sir, Worst and Best at the same time. It is the worst bill, inasmuch as it is a present victory of Slavery. . . . Sir, it is the best bill on which Congress ever acted; for it annuls all past compromises with Slavery, and makes any future compromises impossible. Thus it puts Freedom and Slavery face to face, and bids them grapple. Who can doubt the result? It opens wide the door of the Future, when, at last, there will really be a North, and the Slave Power will be broken,—when this wretched Despotism will cease to dominate over our Government, no longer impressing itself upon everything at home and abroad.”

  Two nights later, on May 26, in Boston, free blacks and members of the Vigilance Committee attempted to enter the courthouse to free a fugitive slave, Anthony Burns, who was being held there. In the scuffle, a guard was killed. Boston was put under martial law as armed police and soldiers escorted the chained Burns to a ship in the harbor to return him to slavery.

  The pro-Pierce newspapers in Washington pointed the finger of blame at Sumner. “Boston in arms against the Constitution,” decried the Union, “and an Abolition fanatic, the distant leader, safe from the fire and the fagot, he invokes from his seat in the Senate of the United States, giving the command. Men shot down in the faithful discharge of duty to a law based upon a Constitutional guaranty, and the word which encourages the assassin given by a man who has sworn on the Holy Evangelist and the presence of his Maker to support the Constitution of the country. But our Charles Sumner tell us a new era has been inaugurated.” The Star threatened, “Let Sumner and his infamous gang feel that he cannot outrage the fame of his country, counsel treason to its laws, incite the ignorant to bloodshed and murder, and still receive the support and countenance of the society of this city, which he has done so much to vilify. While the person of a Virginia citizen is only safe from rudeness and outrage behind the serried ranks of armed men, Charles Sumner is permitted to walk among the ‘slave-catchers’ and fire-eaters’ of the South in peace and security.”

  “Southern Men Threatening Personal Danger to Senator Sumner” ran the headline on the front page of the New York Times of May 31. “A strenuous and systematized effort is making here and in Alexandria, to raise a mob against Senator Sumner, in retaliation for the Boston difficulty. The Union newspaper’s article on Sunday last is said to have been written by Senator Douglas. It looked directly that way. The Star of this evening has two articles, the incendiary purpose of which cannot be mistaken. Senator Sumner himself has been several times warned today of personal danger, and assured that persons bearing close relation to the Administration are inciting the people to violence against him.”

  The article in the Washington Union “said to have been written” by Douglas excoriated Sumner for his speech against Douglas’s bill an
d issued a thinly veiled threat. “So infamous was this speech of the abolition agitator and incendiary that Judge Douglas rose in his place, and in substance declared it to be an invocation to civil war; predicting that if blood was shed in consequence of the harangue, the dark deed would be laid at the door of Sumner; and declaring his opinion that in the event of a rising against the guarantees of the constitution in Boston, he hoped that the punishment would not fall upon the misguided instruments of fanaticism, but upon the reckless and inhuman instigator to riot and to murder. This rebuke, terrible and sudden, and overwhelming as it was, was felt to be fully deserved by nearly every American citizen on the floor of the Senate.”

  “If you really think there is any danger worth mentioning, I wish you would telegraph me instantly,” Joseph R. Hawley, chairman of the Free Soil Party of Connecticut, wrote Sumner. “I will come to Washington by the next train, and quietly stay by. I have revolvers, and can use them—and while there should not be a word of unnecessary provocation, still, if anybody in Alexandria or Washington really means to trouble you, or any other free Democrat there, you know several can play at that game.” Sumner did not summon bodyguards, and he continued to walk around Washington unarmed. (Hawley would become a Union general, governor of Connecticut, and U.S. senator.)

  “Slavery,” Sumner pledged to Theodore Parker, “will be discussed with us as never before.” And then he wrote defiantly: “The threats to put a bullet through my head, and hang me, and mob me, have been frequent. I have always said, ‘Let them come; they will find me at my post.’ ”

  After Southern senators objected to receiving the petition of New England clergy against the Fugitive Slave Act, Sumner spoke again on June 26. Butler sharply attacked him, “whose whole style, tone, and character does not become a Senator.” And he demanded, “I would like to ask the Senator, if Congress repealed the Fugitive Slave Law, would Massachusetts execute the constitutional requirements, and send back to the South the absconding slaves?” “Do you ask if I would send back a slave?” “Why, yes,” said Butler. “Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?” Sumner replied. Butler mocked his scholarship as effeminate, “the prettiest speeches I ever heard . . . too delicate for my taste.” Then he chastised Sumner for saying it was “a dog’s office to execute the Constitution of the United States.”

  Two days later, Sumner again spoke. “I choose to call things by their right name,” he said. “And where a person degrades himself to the work of chasing a fellow-man, who, under the inspiration of freedom and the guidance of the north star, has sought a freeman’s home far away from the coffle and the chain, that person, whomsoever he may be, I call a Slave-Hunter.” Sumner called out Butler. “In fitful phrases, which seemed to come from the unconscious excitement so common with the senator, he shot forth various cries about ‘dogs,’ ” Sumner said, observing that Butler “has helped to nurture there a whole kennel of Carolina bloodhounds, trained, with savage jaws and insatiable scent, for the hunt of flying bondsmen. No, sir, I do not believe that there is any ‘kennel of bloodhounds,’ or even any ‘dog,’ in the Constitution of the United States.” Then Sumner swiveled to address Mason, Butler’s “associate leader in the wanton personal assault to which I have been exposed. . . . With imperious look, and in the style of Sir Forcible Feeble, that Senator has undertaken to call in question my statement that the fugitive slave bill denied the writ of habeas corpus, and, in doing this, he has assumed a superiority for himself which, permit me to tell him now in his presence, nothing in him can sanction.” Two days later, on June 28, Senator Clement Clay of Alabama took the floor to describe Sumner as “a sneaking, sinuous, snake-like poltroon,” “a leper,” “a filthy retile,” and compared him to the Charles Dickens character Uriah Heep of “mean, yet affected honor.” Clay proposed to ostracize and expel him, “if we cannot silence him; of disabling, if we cannot disarm him. . . . If we cannot restrain or prevent this eternal warfare upon the feelings and rights of Southern gentlemen, we may rob the serpent of his fangs. We can paralyze his influence by placing him in that nadir of social degradation which he merits.”

  But the effort to remove Sumner from the Senate was abortive; “his triumph was complete,” according to the New York Times. “Indeed,” its correspondent noted, “it was only a few months ago, at a dinner party in this city, composed chiefly of Southern gentlemen, that one of the guests was covered with confusion in consequence of the open contempt he drew upon himself, by the avowal that he arrested the first ‘nigger’ under the Fugitive Slave act. Every Southern gentleman present freely expressed his abhorrence of such a ‘duty’; and yet it is because of Senator Sumner’s declaration that he will not be made a slave catcher, that the vials of personal abuse have been poured out on him.”

  In late 1854, he engaged in an unusual act to demonstrate the injustice of slavery. He purchased a seven-year-old slave girl whose skin complexion was that of a white child in order to emancipate her. Her name was Mary Mildred Botts. After the Anthony Burns affair, an escaped fugitive slave living as a free black in Boston, John Botts, was fearful that slave hunters would capture him. Working with the attorney for the Boston Vigilance Committee, John A. Andrew, abolitionists raised the money to buy his freedom and that of his wife and three children still held on a plantation in Virginia. Andrew, who was an activist in the Free Soil movement and would become governor of Massachusetts during the Civil War, contacted Sumner, who served as the agent for the transaction. In a letter to the New York Times, Sumner described “a child about seven years old, who only a few months ago was a slave in Virginia, but who is now happily free by means sent on from Boston, which I had the happiness of being entrusted with for this purpose. She is bright and intelligent—another Ida May. I think her presence among us will be more effective than any speech I can make.”

  Sumner’s reference to “Ida May” was well understood. Ida May: A Story of Things Actual and Possible was a best-selling antislavery novel published in 1854. Inspired by Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it told the melodramatic story of a beautiful white girl from a wealthy family living in Pennsylvania snatched by slave hunters who blacken her face and sell her into slavery. After many frightening episodes Ida May’s long-lost father suddenly appears to rescue her. The notion of the girl’s true whiteness made slavery seem even more barbarous. (The author, Mary Hayden Green Pike, was married to Frederick Augustus Pike, Speaker of the House in the Maine legislature, cofounder of the state Republican Party, and elected to the Congress during the Civil War. Her brother-in-law James S. Pike was the crusading antislavery Washington correspondent for the New York Tribune.)

  Sumner had “created quite a sensation in Washington,” the New York Times reported under the shocking headline: “A WHITE SLAVE FROM VIRGINIA.” Purchasing the slave girl and the other members of her family, “he had thus become a slaveholder,” the proslavery Washington Star jibed. “This, by the way, gave rise to some scurrilous rumors in reference to Mr. Sumner, which, in justice to him, we contradict.” The newspaper referred to malicious gossip that the chaste Sumner was a pedophile. In fact, Sumner had the girl safely escorted by a guardian he designated to the offices of the Times in New York for the journalists to see her for themselves. She was, the Times reported, “a young female slave, so white as to defy the acutest judge to detect in her features, complexion, hair, or general appearance the slightest trace of negro blood.” She was then taken to Boston where she was reunited with her father, the happy ending of Ida May but with a twist.

  Mary Mildred Botts

  In the curious and poignant case of Mary Mildred Botts, Sumner advanced the political use of a startling new medium to establish indisputable facts—photography. Before she arrived in Boston, Sumner send a daguerreotype of her to his allies in the state legislature, who displayed the astonishing picture at the State House. No one could doubt her existence. She was not a character from a novel, but a real-live girl.

  Fact collection was one of the most effective techniques of
the antislavery movement. Theodore Weld, John Quincy Adams’s assistant, who resided at Abolition House, the boardinghouse where Lincoln would take a room when he was a congressman, was the pioneer of the fact-based method. With the help of his wife, Angelina Grimké and her sister Sarah Grimké, abolitionists from a prominent South Carolina slaveholding family, he produced American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, published in 1839. Harriet Beecher Stowe had buttressed her startling novel with A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story Is Founded in 1853. Sumner now provided through the incontrovertible evidence of photography a new level of fact-based argument, the visual proof of the ambiguity of race, showing a slave as the picture of a lovely white girl, not only possible but actual. But the question of skin color was also a question of sexual domination. Mulatto children were the offspring of masters and slaves. Pointing to the nearly white skin of slaves, he revealed the lurid reality of sexual control. Establishing the malleability of racial identity, Sumner further undermined the rationale for slavery.

  Two months after Mary Mildred Botts had appeared as a freed girl in Boston, throughout a week in May 1855, Sumner delivered a lecture he entitled “The Antislavery Enterprise” to packed halls in New York City, reported day after day in the New York Tribune and in newspapers across the country. He denounced “the house of bondage” for its “deadly injury to morals, substituting concubinage for marriage, and changing the whole land of Slavery into a by-word of shame, only fitly pictured by the language of Dante, when he called his own degraded country a House of Ill Fame.” The Slave Power was sexual power: slavery was rape; slaveholders were rapists. Shaming Southerners, Sumner excited hatred of himself to a fever pitch.