Slavery as a system of political power was nothing less than an all-encompassing criminal enterprise, from the highest office to the lowest.
Such is the Crime which you are to judge. The criminal also must be dragged into day, that you may see and measure the power by which all this wrong is sustained. From no common source could it proceed. In its perpetration was needed a spirit of vaulting ambition which would hesitate at nothing; a hardihood of purpose insensible to the judgment of mankind; a madness for Slavery, in spite of Constitution, laws, and all the great examples of our history; also a consciousness of power such as comes from the habit of power; a combination of energies found only in a hundred arms directed by a hundred eyes; a control of Public Opinion through venal pens and a prostituted press; an ability to subsidize crowds in every vocation of life,—the politician with his local importance, the lawyer with his subtle tongue, and even the authority of the judge on the bench,—with a familiar use of men in places high and low, so that none, from the President to the lowest border postmaster, should decline to be its tool: all these things, and more, were needed, and they were found in the Slave Power of our Republic.
Here Sumner was reversing the terms of those senators who called him a criminal for opposing the Fugitive Slave Act and instead implicating them in a vast crime. His quotation from Macbeth—“vaulting ambition”—alluded to the driven Douglas, the indispensable enabler.
In describing the crime, Sumner argued that Winthrop’s Puritan commonwealth and Washington’s American nation had been turned inside out and upside down. Rather than being governed by the spirit of Washington, “vaulting ambition” held sway. Reason was overthrown by folly, the Constitution trampled by force and corruption, the people themselves manipulated through a “prostituted press” (another sexual metaphor), and officials betrayed their oaths for the slightest nod from power. Winthrop’s “eyes of all the people” and Washington’s “eyes of the World” were transformed into “a hundred eyes” of oppressive control, which Sumner further described as a “Great Terrestrial Serpent,” slithering to “coil about the whole land.”
Sumner explained that his speech would expose the full extent of the “Crime Against Kansas,” the “Apologies for the Crime,” and the “True Remedy.” It was a report from the front lines, citing letters and newspaper articles; a master class in classical allusion, quoting Roman historians and poets; and a Puritan jeremiad condemning the fall from grace. In style Sumner adopted the formalities of Demosthenes, paragon of ancient reason, to render judgment with the wrath of John Milton.
The first part of his speech tore the mask off Southern honor. The second part demolished the defenses of the “tyrannical” (the Ruffians), the “imbecile” (Pierce), the “absurd” (Douglas’s popular sovereignty), and the “infamous” (Douglas’s slander), which he compared to the witches of Macbeth. “Tyranny, imbecility, absurdity, and infamy all unite to dance, like the weird sisters, about this crime.” In the final part, he posed “the Remedy of Injustice and Civil War”—“fratricidal, parricidal war with an accumulated wickedness beyond that of any war in human annals”—against that of “Justice and Peace.”
The crime he described was against more than a territory; it was a crime against the whole country. The offense he himself was committing in their eyes—the crime of delivering his speech—was to speak without hesitation or hedging against the Slave Power. “The severity of Sumner’s attacks is not altogether shown in their printed form,” wrote Anna Laurens Dawes, a biographer and daughter of a U.S. senator from Massachusetts who was a political contemporary of Sumner. “In manner as well as words, this Northern miscreant, this Yankee, showed an absolute and overwhelming scorn and contempt for the Southern chivalry; this was the insult that made injury a crime.” Sumner had already given offense, but he had barely begun to offend.
He decided to single out his chief tormentors “who had singled him out for special attack,” according to Senator Wilson. It was Sumner’s “occasion to repay them for their assaults.” But Sumner’s reprisal was intended to be far more than any personal rebuke, but to demolish each and every aspect of the Southerners’ social identity, political legitimacy, and rhetorical intimidation. He did not stop at the usual harsh condemnations. He defied the unspoken convention not to speak of the sexual hypocrisy at the core of slavery.
His particular targets were Butler and Douglas. “Before entering upon the argument, I must say something of a general character, particularly in response to what has fallen from Senators who have raised themselves to eminence on this floor in championship of human wrong: I mean the Senator from South Carolina and the Senator from Illinois who, though unlike as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, yet, like this couple, sally forth together in the same adventure.”
Using Cervantes’s Don Quixote as his text, Sumner depicted Butler as addled with delusions of his misplaced medieval code.
I regret much to miss the elder Senator from his seat; but the cause against which he has run a tilt, with such ebullition of animosity, demands that the opportunity of exposing him should not be lost. . . . The Senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him,—though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight: I mean the harlot Slavery. For her his tongue is always profuse in words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition be made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this Senator. The frenzy of Don Quixote in behalf of his wench Dulcinea del Toboso is all surpassed.
Sumner’s description of Butler in thrall to “the harlot Slavery” was his riposte to Butler’s lascivious portrait of Sumner panting after an African princess. Sumner ridiculed Butler and implicitly his pornography in order to expose the cruelty behind the courtly lord. “The asserted rights of Slavery, which shock equality of all kinds, are cloaked by a fantastic claim of equality. If the Slave States cannot enjoy what, in mockery of the great fathers of the Republic, he misnames Equality under the Constitution,—in other words, the full power in the National Territories to compel fellow-men to unpaid toil, to separate husband and wife, and to sell little children at the auction-block,—then, Sir, the chivalric Senator will conduct the State of South Carolina out of the Union! Heroic knight! Exalted Senator! A second Moses come for a second exodus!”
Sumner threw back at Butler his pejorative words “sectional” and “fanatical,” intended to discredit Republicans as hostile to the accepted basis of the Union, which was slavery. “To be sure,” said Sumner, “these charges lack all grace of originality and all sentiment of truth; but the adventurous Senator does not hesitate. He is the uncompromising, unblushing representative on this floor of a flagrant sectionalism, now domineering over the Republic,—and yet with a ludicrous ignorance of his own position, unable to see himself as others see him, or with an effrontery which even his white head ought not to protect from rebuke, he applies to those here who resist his sectionalism the very epithet which designates himself.”
Sumner turned to Douglas, portraying him as the dutiful assistant to his befuddled lord. “As the Senator from South Carolina is the Don Quixote, so the Senator from Illinois is the squire of Slavery, its very Sancho Panza, ready to do its humiliating offices. This Senator, in his labored address vindicating his labored report,—piling one mass of elaborate error upon another mass,—constrained himself, as you will remember, to unfamiliar decencies of speech.”
But Douglas was more than the dutiful subordinate encouraging his superior’s delusions. It was Douglas, according to Sumner, who was the originator of the infected debate. “I will not stop to repel imputations which he cast upon myself; but I mention them to remind you of the ‘sweltered venom sleeping got,’ which, with other poisoned ingredients, he cast into the caldron of this
debate.” Here Sumner shifted his metaphoric description of Douglas from Cervantes to Shakespeare, quoting the witches’ incantation over their boiling pot from Macbeth.
“Of other things I speak,” said Sumner. “Standing on this floor, the Senator issued his rescript requiring submission to the Usurped Power of Kansas; and this was accompanied by a manner—all his own—befitting the tyrannical threat. Very well. Let the Senator try. I tell him now that he cannot enforce any such submission. The Senator, with the Slave Power at his back, is strong; but he is not strong enough for this purpose.”
Sumner was warming to his subject. Butler and Douglas were accessories “to the final Crime”—the crime against democracy. Here Sumner described the crime as sexual and the sexual as treasonous.
If that be the best government where injury to a single citizen is resented as injury to the whole State, what must be the character of a government which leaves a whole community of citizens thus exposed? In the outrage upon the ballot-box, even without the illicit fruits which I shall soon exhibit, there is a peculiar crime, of the deepest dye, though subordinate to the final Crime, which should be promptly avenged. In other lands, where royalty is upheld, it is a special offence to rob the crown jewels, which are emblems of that sovereignty before which the loyal subject bows, and it is treason to be found in adultery with the queen, for in this way may a false heir be imposed upon the State; but in our Republic the ballot-box is the single priceless jewel of that sovereignty which we respect, and the electoral franchise, where are born the rulers of a free people, is the royal bed we are to guard against pollution. In this plain presentment, whether as regards security or as regards elections, there is enough, without proceeding further, to justify the intervention of Congress, promptly and completely, to throw over this oppressed people the impenetrable shield of the Constitution and laws. But the half is not yet told.
Sumner told the story of the crushing of democracy in Kansas as fully as he could piece it together from his sources, but he also referred to other stories about other places. He invoked two notorious incidents whose mere mention would have alarmed his Southern listeners. Both of these stories lifted the flimsy cover of Southern honor to reveal the rape of black female slaves and the reality of mulatto children. This was “the half” that was not yet told.
In pointing to slavery’s “dread of which mothers have taken the lives of their offspring,” Sumner highlighted the horrific case of Margaret Garner that had recently been the subject of sensational reports filling newspapers across the country. Garner was a twenty-three-year-old mulatto slave who was likely the daughter of her Kentucky plantation owner, John P. Gaines, a former congressman. He sold his estate and slaves to his brother Archibald, who would have been her uncle, and likely and repeatedly impregnated Garner, who gave birth to four children. She fled in January 1856 with other slaves in a dash for freedom to Ohio, but was cornered in a farmhouse by slave catchers and federal marshals. She killed her two-year-old with a knife and attempted to kill the other children and herself before she was captured. Her sensational trial, just three months before Sumner spoke, featured the testimony of Lucy Stone, the abolitionist and feminist, who had become Garner’s confidante as she awaited judgment. “The faded faces of the Negro children tell too plainly to what degradation the female slaves submit,” Stone told the court. “Rather than give her daughter to that life, she killed it.” “The murdered child was almost white, a rare child of beauty,” recalled Levi Coffin, the conductor of the Underground Railroad, who had arranged the slaves’ escape, in his memoirs. (Garner was returned to slavery and died of typhoid. Her story was the inspiration for Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, published in 1987, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.)
In Sumner’s aside characterizing one of his “hostile” tormentors, Senator James M. Mason of Virginia, “who, as author of the Fugitive Slave Bill, has associated himself with a special act of inhumanity and tyranny,” he raised yet another sensational case. “Of him I shall say little,” said Sumner, “for he has said little in this debate, though within that little was compressed the bitterness of a life absorbed in support of Slavery. He holds the commission of Virginia; but he does not represent that early Virginia, so dear to our hearts, which gave to us the pen of Jefferson, by which the equality of men was declared, and the sword of Washington, by which Independence was secured: he represents that other Virginia, from which Washington and Jefferson avert their faces, where human beings are bred as cattle for the shambles, and a dungeon rewards the pious matron who teaches little children to relieve their bondage by reading the Book of Life. It is proper that such a Senator, representing such a State, should rail against Free Kansas.”
The “pious matron” was Margaret Douglass, a Southern widow and Bible teacher who established a school for black children in Norfolk, Virginia, and in 1854 was sentenced to prison for one month to serve “as an example,” according to the judge. In her speech to the court, she spoke plainly about the sexual reality of her mixed race pupils. “Ask how that white blood got beneath those tawny skins. . . . Blame the authors of this devilish mischief, but not the innocent victims of it.” After she was released from jail, Douglass wrote a book in which she stated that sexual predation was at the root of the degradation of the South.
In this truth is to be found the grand secret of the opposition to the instruction of the colored race. . . . It is the one great evil hanging over the Southern slave States, destroying domestic happiness and the peace of thousands. It is summed up in the single word—amalgamation. . . . The white mothers and daughters of the South have suffered under it for years—have seen their dearest affections trampled upon—their hopes of domestic happiness destroyed, and their future lives embittered even to agony. . . . Southern wives know that their husbands come to them reeking with pollution from the arms of their tawny mistresses. . . . Is there any wonder then that people addicted to these habits are rapidly returning to a state of semi-barbarism? The female slave, however fair she may have become, by the various comminglings of her progenitors, or whatever her mental and moral acquirements, knows that she is a slave, and as such, powerless beneath the whims or fancies of her master. . . . How important, then, for these Southern sultans, that the objects of their criminal passions should be kept in utter ignorance and degradation.
Abolitionists widely circulated Douglass’s book, and Southern authorities widely resented it. The infamous case of the Virginia schoolteacher and her startlingly frank opinions would have been very familiar to Senator Mason of Virginia.
Images of rape permeated Sumner’s speech. He quoted from the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses to compare Kansas being raped by the Slave Power to a damsel being raped: “Oh, help, she cried, in this extremist need . . .”
Sumner’s exposé of the sexual underside of slavery was his most profound offense. No senator had ever openly discussed the salacious side of slavery from so many different angles. Abolitionist pamphlets and books like Douglass’s were routinely banned from the U.S. mail in Southern states or forbidden by local authorities from circulating. But nobody could stop a senator from rightfully holding the floor. Once Sumner spoke, his words were in the Congressional Globe and reported far and wide. Breaking the existing gag rules, unofficial and official, he was breaking precedent and protocol. He was opening a new rhetorical front against slavery. The slave South was hardly the highest stage of civilization, but a vast brothel.
Sumner’s picture of the domestic life of slavery resonated for years throughout the South. “Sumner said not one word of this hated institution which is not true,” wrote Mary Chesnut, the wife of James Chesnut of South Carolina, a U.S. senator and leader of the secession movement, in her diary a month before the war began in March 1860. She was especially fixated on Sumner’s remark about “the harlot Slavery.”
Men and women are punished when their masters and mistresses are brutes and not when they do wrong—and then we live surrounded by prostitutes. An abandoned woman
is sent out of any decent house elsewhere. Who thinks any worse of a Negro or Mulatto woman for being a thing we can’t name. God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system and wrong and iniquity. Perhaps the rest of the world is as bad. This is only what I see: like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the Mulattos one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—and every lady tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds or pretends so to think—.
When Butler drew a picture of an imaginary naked and beckoning black woman on the floor of the Senate in order to humiliate Sumner he was acting as a Southern gentleman, but when the Puritan depicted the sexual degradation of slavery he was cast as a belligerent. Sumner sought to strip Butler of the pretensions that composed his distinguished and refined personage. On a subtle level, Sumner cited in passing St. George Tucker, the antislavery Virginian, a scholarly dismissal of Butler’s counterfeit learning. On a less subtle level, he said, “With regret I come again upon the Senator from South Carolina, who, omnipresent in this debate, overflows with rage at the simple suggestion that Kansas has applied for admission as a State, and, with incoherent phrase, discharges the loose expectoration of his speech, now upon her representative, and then upon her people.”
Butler had intervened in the debates on Kansas thirty-five times in addition to his formal speeches. He did let loose some expectoration when he spoke as a result of a slight paralysis of his face from a stroke. Yet Sumner’s phrase—“the loose expectoration of his speech”—was one he had used in private to refer to the depravity of proslavery justifications. He had written his brother George Sumner in 1852 about the Southern domination of Washington, “In truth, slavery is the source of all our baseness, from gigantic national issues down to the vile manners and profuse expectorations of this place.”
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