A time traveler to the quarter-century of Charles Sumner’s service in the U.S. Senate—from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s—would return to the 21st century with good news and bad news. The good news is that America experienced politics more bitter than anything we witness today, and survived. The bad news is that the surviving entailed a civil war.
Sumner is one of those historical figures who looks better from the safe distance of knowing how things turned out. He was the Senate’s counterpart to John Brown, the messianic abolitionist who channeled the God of the Old Testament to reach a conclusion later associated with Lenin and other secular revolutionaries: that the worse things got, the better they got. The status quo must be broken and discredited before its crimes could be corrected and a new order established. Brown took up weapons to wage war against slavery, and in doing so he caused white Southerners to conclude that the institution on which their way of life depended could not be safe within the American republic. Sumner produced the same effect with the speeches he gave on the Senate floor. One in particular made Sumner’s national reputation, albeit inadvertently.
Zaakir Tameez’s thorough, well-crafted biography walks us through Sumner’s years of preparation in Massachusetts. The pace quickens when the Massachusetts legislature elects Sumner to the Senate as a rebuke of Daniel Webster, who had voted for the Compromise of 1850, which included a stiffened Fugitive Slave Act. Sumner’s constituents expected him to pick up where John Quincy Adams, recently deceased after years of assailing slaveholders from his seat in the House of Representatives, had left off. Sumner was slow to find his voice, but in 1856 he delivered a speech that shocked his Senate colleagues for the insults and invective it contained.
Sumner knew he was asking for trouble. He knew he was crossing the bounds of Senate protocol. He was warned by allies to watch his tongue. He ignored them. “There is a time for everything,” he said. “When crime and criminals are thrust before us, they are to be met with all the energies that God has given us—by argument, sarcasm, scorn, and denunciation. The whole arsenal of God is ours, and I will not renounce one of the weapons, not one.”
The weapon that drew the most attention was sexual imagery and innuendo. The recent successful effort of the South to open frontier Kansas to slavery was “the rape of a virgin territory,” Sumner said. He likened one of the sponsors of the Kansas bill, Andrew Butler of South Carolina, to the deluded, decrepit Don Quixote of literature. Quixote had mistaken a prostitute for a damsel to defend. Butler was doing likewise, having chosen for his fair lady “the harlot, Slavery.” Butler himself was absent during Sumner’s speech, having suffered a stroke. Sumner used Butler’s disability against him. “Even his white head ought not to protect him from rebuke,” Sumner said. An aftermath of the stroke was a speech impediment, which Sumner mocked as “loose expectoration.”
Sumner wasn’t the first to play the sex card in the politics of the day. Sumner had never married, and his bachelorhood was suspected against him. He was, in Tameez’s words, “probably gay.” Sumner’s lack of a wife and what it was presumed to signify hadn’t prevented his election. The lack of a wife wouldn’t prevent the election of James Buchanan to the presidency that very year. But it afforded an opening to critics. Butler had taunted Sumner on the subject. Now Sumner was getting back.
Butler was in no condition to defend himself. But his kinsman Preston Brooks, a congressman from South Carolina, was. A young brawler, Brooks boasted of meting out summary justice to those who impugned the good name of the South, even within the walls of the Capitol. “Pride, honor, patriotism all command us, if a battle is to be fought, to fight it here upon this floor,” he said.
Brooks had learned that Sumner was going to speak and so walked from the House to the Senate to listen. As a Southerner and a slaveholder, he took Sumner’s criticism personally. As a kinsman of Butler, he felt an obligation to retaliate. After pondering the matter, he returned to the Senate and approached Sumner, who was seated at his desk. He denounced the speech Sumner had given. “It is a libel on South Carolina and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine,” he said. Employing a cane he had used for the purpose before, Brooks rained blows upon the head of the senator. Sumner tried to stand but got caught by the desk. Brooks continued to beat him. Before anyone could pull Brooks off, Sumner was covered in blood and barely conscious.
The assault was interpreted quite differently on opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Northerners, even non-abolitionists, thought this time the slaveholders had gone too far. If a senator could be bludgeoned within the temple of democracy, what hope was there for American self-government? If the South wanted a fight, the North should be prepared to give it one. Southerners applauded Brooks. Learning that Brooks’s cane had shattered in the assault, dozens of Southerners sent him replacements. When no Northerner responded at once in kind, many Southerners concluded that Northerners were cowards.
Sumner’s career was more than the beating he took at the hands of Brooks. Tameez’s biography does justice to it all. During the Civil War he was a leader of the Radical Republicans, a faction of the governing party that pressed Abraham Lincoln to move faster toward emancipation of slaves and equality for African Americans. After the war, Sumner and the Radical Republicans made life miserable for Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor by assassination. Johnson survived impeachment, but the Radicals wrested control of Reconstruction from the president and imposed their egalitarian ideas upon the South.
The effect didn’t last. Northerners gradually wearied of trying to impose good behavior on Southern whites. Ulysses Grant, the general-turned-president, fell out with Sumner, who made no secret of his disdain for Grant’s intellect and character. When Grant was told that Sumner didn’t believe in the Bible, the president said, “I suppose not. He didn’t write it.”
By the time Sumner died in 1874, he was a man without a party. But his reputation improved posthumously, not unlike Brown’s. In the 1960s, when it became apparent that they had been on the right side of history, the violent extremism of Brown and the self-righteousness of Sumner were largely forgiven.
Tameez’s Sumner has all the prickliness of the man in life and yet emerges as a historic figure worthy of admiration and even emulation. “Sumner’s life demonstrates that individuals like him, with enough courage and drive, can alter the trajectory of American racial history, even if they are not able to succeed fully,” Tameez says. This book makes a persuasive case for that conclusion.
Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation
by Zaakir Tameez
Henry Holt and Co., 640 pp., $38.99
H. W. Brands teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include Heirs of the Founders and The Zealot and The Emancipator.
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