Charles Sumner

American politician

• Born: January 6, 1811
• Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: March 11, 1874
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

Through the quarter of a century that he served in the U.S. Senate, Sumner was the most significant proponent in high public office of equal rights and equal opportunities for black Americans.

Early Life

The son of a puritanical father, a Boston lawyer and politician, and his severe, distant mother, who was preoccupied with rearing his eight younger brothers and sisters, Charles Sumner received little affection from his parents. Shy and inhibited, young Sumner avoided outdoor games in favor of solitude and books. After studying at the Boston Latin School during the early 1820’s, he attended Harvard College, from which he was graduated in 1830 at the age of nineteen. At six feet, two inches in height, weighing only 120 pounds, Sumner was ungainly, amiable, studious, humorless, and nervous near women.

Sumner was graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1834, but, temperamentally unsuited to his father’s profession, he was unable to establish a successful practice. In December, 1837, he abruptly left Boston for Europe, where he spent three years in travel, living mostly on borrowed money. Letters of introduction from friends of his father procured for him invitations to visit eminent jurists, writers, and political leaders in Great Britain and France, many of whom were favorably impressed by the young New Englander’s good manners and eager idealism.

Arriving home in May, 1840, Sumner gloried in his sudden prominence as one of the few Americans during that era who had enjoyed social success in Europe. He volubly recapitulated his triumphs in Boston drawing rooms while his law practice languished. As his celebrity diminished during the early 1840’s, however, Sumner became increasingly moody, suspicious, and sensitive. In 1844, he suffered a breakdown.

Life’s Work

The crisis eventually passed. Ardent involvement in social reform movements was Sumner’s therapy for recovering from his depression. Embracing the cause of prison reform, he soon divided the local penal improvement society into warring factions when he tried to replace its longtime secretary with his friend Francis Lieber. As a member of the Peace Society, he used an Independence Day address in 1845 not only to denounce all wars but also to attack personally the uniformed militia members in his audience. Such exhibitions of tactless self-righteousness soon made Sumner a social outcast in Boston. Nevertheless, the pugnacious eloquence with which he assailed established institutions brought him many admirers outside his immediate circle.

In time, Sumner confined his attempts at social regeneration almost exclusively to the antislavery movement. By the mid-1840’s, he had begun to give speeches and publish articles condemning the South’s peculiar institution as a national evil, which Congress ought eventually to abolish. Following the admission of Texas to the Union in 1845, Sumner joined a group of “Young Whigs” in Massachusetts, including Charles F. Adams, Richard H. Dana, Jr., John G. Palfrey, and Henry Wilson, who challenged the Boston Whig oligarchy, led by Congressman Robert Winthrop and Senator Daniel Webster, for collaborating in the aggrandizements of southern slaveholders. Joining for the first time in party politics, Sumner helped edit the antislavery newspaper published by this group. His bitter denunciations of the Mexican War further alienated the Boston Brahmins but drew praise from northern abolitionists and peace advocates, who characterized their new spokesperson’s relentless vituperation as high moral courage.

After the Mexican War, Sumner became a candidate for Congress on the ticket of the Free-Soil Party, but he lost the 1848 election to Winthrop by a large margin. Two years later, running for the same office, he received less than five hundred votes. Once again, he seemed a failure.

Early in 1851, however, a coalition of Democrats and Free-Soil Party members in the Massachusetts legislature elected Sumner to the U.S. Senate. Cautious at first, he did not make the first of many Senate speeches against slavery until August 26, 1852. Soon, however, he was trading denunciations and insults with spokespeople for the slaveholding aristocracy, while other northern senators spoke circumspectly or remained silent. His combativeness produced a surge of sentiment in his favor throughout the North, while he became a hated symbol of radical abolitionism in the South. In 1855, seeking political allies, he joined the Massachusetts Republican Party, recently established.

Sumner’s most famous Senate speech, which was delivered on May 19, 1856, was entitled “The Crime Against Kansas.” For three hours, he denounced what he called Stephen Douglas’s swindle, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and berated both its author and his former Senate seatmate, Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina. Continuing his indictment on the following day, he labeled Douglas a loathsome animal, and he called Butler a liar and a madman. On May 22, South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks, avenging the wrong to his kinsman Butler, used his cane to beat Sumner senseless on the Senate floor.

Rendered an invalid by his wounds, Sumner became a martyr in the North, his empty seat in the Senate a convenient symbol for Massachusetts Republicans in the 1856 presidential election campaign. John C. Frémont led their ticket to a statewide sweep, and Sumner was overwhelmingly reelected to the U.S. Senate in January, 1857.

For the next three years, Sumner made only rare appearances in the halls of Congress. Most of that time he spent in Europe, alternating between ineffectual treatments by physicians and extensive touring and social engagements. Not until June 4, 1860, did he feel well enough to deliver a substantial speech in the Senate. Entitled “Barbarism of Slavery,” it was his main contribution to Abraham Lincoln’s successful presidential campaign, an effusion of vituperation against the slaveholders whom Sumner held responsible for his difficulties, both physical and emotional.

To the southern threat of secession, Sumner retorted that there could be no compromise with slavery. For a time he hoped that the withdrawal of southerners from Congress would make possible the acquisition by the United States of Canada. As for the cotton states, he was quite willing to let them depart. As his former friends and benefactors Senator William H. Seward of New York and Congressman Charles F. Adams of Massachusetts struggled along with others to construct a principled compromise designed to avert civil war, Sumner accused them of obliquity and labeled them Ishmaelites. He was willing to relinquish territory, he said, but he would never barter principle. He tried to prevent the appointment of Adams as Lincoln’s minister to Great Britain and to undermine Seward’s direction of U.S. foreign policy as secretary of state. Indeed, he worked covertly for the next two years to cause Seward’s ouster from the cabinet in order to obtain the State Department for himself, but Lincoln greatly valued the services of the New Yorker and refused to give him up.

For the next eleven years, Sumner served as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He believed that his should be the decisive voice on U.S. foreign policy. Using spies in the State Department such as the eccentric Adam Gurowski, denouncing Seward to foreign diplomats and journalists in Washington, and criticizing him to highly placed correspondents abroad, Sumner worked surreptitiously to appease the antidemocratic governments of European nations. His object was to avoid foreign complications, but his methods actually exacerbated them.

An example of this was the Trent affair. When the British government, in December, 1861, sent an ultimatum requiring the release of four Confederate envoys seized by a federal naval captain from a British mail steamer, the Trent, Sumner pleaded with President Lincoln to hold out for international arbitration of the question, an approach that would probably have brought Great Britain and France into the Civil War on the side of the slave states. Lincoln, following Seward’s counsel, instead authorized the release of the captives.

Trying to rouse support in Massachusetts during 1862 for his reelection to a third term in the Senate, Sumner continually pressed the president to proclaim the entire abolition of slavery. Lincoln, trying to hold the border slave states in the Union, insisted that the object of the war was to restore the Union, not to free the slaves. Nevertheless, in February, 1862, Sumner publicly propounded the doctrine of state suicide, asserting that the seceding states had forfeited their sovereignty within the Union and must become conquered provinces. It was past time, he declared, for the confiscation of southern property, especially of slaves, by the federal military authorities. When Lincoln issued his preliminary emancipation proclamation in September, Sumner claimed that the president was finally following his lead.

In the Senate during the last two years of the Civil War, Sumner was increasingly isolated even from the other radicals of his own party. In relentless pursuit of freedom and equal rights for black Americans, he regularly castigated rather than attempted to cajole his colleagues, and despite being cultivated assiduously by both the president and Mrs. Lincoln, he regularly criticized the chief executive in his conversations and correspondence for being lethargic, disorganized, and ineffectual. He refused to support Lincoln for renomination in 1864 and only reluctantly campaigned for him against General George B. McClellan, the Democratic nominee, as the lesser of two evils.

Because of his alienation from most of the other senators, Sumner played a minor role in constructing the apparatus of postwar reconstruction, including the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. He was kept off the Joint Committee on Reconstruction and was barred from the committee set up to supervise the Freedmen’s Bureau and the enforcement of civil rights legislation in the South. He continually exasperated his fellow radicals by carping at their efforts but rarely suggesting practical alternatives. As always, he stressed principles, not means.

In October, 1866, four months after the death of his mother, Sumner married Alice Mason Hooper, the widowed daughter-in-law of a Massachusetts congressman. The senator was fifty-five; his new wife was still in her twenties. The marriage soon foundered. Mrs. Sumner sought younger male companionship and humiliated her husband by flaunting her liaison. Eight months after the wedding, the couple separated, and the senator never spoke to his wife again. In 1873, he divorced her.

Almost from the start of Andrew Johnson’s presidency, Sumner excoriated him as a disgrace to the office. By early 1868, the Massachusetts senator was a determined exponent of impeachment, accusing Johnson of treason against the United States. When the effort to remove the chief executive from office fell short by a single vote in the Senate, Sumner bitterly denounced those who cast ballots against Johnson’s deposition. Soon thereafter, he began campaigning for Ulysses S. Grant for president, in the process successfully seeking his own reelection to a fourth term.

While Johnson was still president, Sumner supported ratification of the Alaska purchase treaty negotiated by Secretary of State Seward. His opposition would have been fatal to that project, as it was to Seward’s treaties to annex the Danish West Indies (later known as the Virgin Islands) and to purchase territory in the Dominican Republic for an American naval base. Sumner’s committee also rejected the Johnson-Clarendon convention with Great Britain, negotiated on Seward’s instructions in an attempt to ease dangerous tensions growing out of the Fenian crisis and out of the refusal of the British government thus far to arbitrate American claims for damages incurred at the hands of British subjects during the Civil War. Sumner declared in a Senate speech on April 13, 1869, that because British aid to the Confederates had caused the war to be doubled in duration, the English owed the American people damages of two billion dollars.

For a while, Sumner was able to dictate U.S. foreign policy to Seward’s successor, the inexperienced Hamilton Fish. As the senator with the longest continuous service, he even exercised influence, for the first time, over domestic legislation. This stopped, however, after he repeatedly blocked bills and appointments favored by Grant, culminating his obstructiveness by getting the Senate to kill a treaty to annex the Dominican Republic (the president’s principal foreign policy objective). The angry chief executive retaliated by dismissing Sumner’s friend John L. Motley as minister to England. When Sumner threatened a peaceful settlement of the Civil War Alabama claims by calling for the transfer of Canada to the United States as his price for support of an arbitration award, Fish and Grant were able to get him ousted as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

On May 31, 1872, a vitriolic Sumner delivered a four-hour speech, “Republicanism Versus Grantism,” charging the president with nepotism and corruption, hoping thereby to help block Grant’s renomination for a second term. The Republican National Convention at Philadelphia nevertheless endorsed the president by acclamation. Sumner then backed Horace Greeley, the Democratic and liberal Republican candidate for the presidency. Grant’s easy victory, accompanied by the rise of the venal Benjamin F. Butler to political supremacy in Massachusetts, signaled the nadir of Sumner’s influence in his home state. His health declined rapidly. Facing an uphill battle for reelection in 1874, virtually isolated and widely ridiculed in the Senate, having through many years driven away most of his friends and political allies by egotistical outbursts against them, and worried about heavy debts incurred during buying binges, Sumner lived his final months as a solitary invalid, his attacks of angina pectoris increasing in frequency and intensity, until on March 11, 1874, his heart finally stopped.

Significance

Sumner served in the U.S. Senate for more than twenty-three years. However, he was never a universally respected leader in that body, nor is his name attached to any portion of the landmark legislation of his epoch. Whether his party was in or out of power, his role was invariably that of obstructionist. For this he was well suited: His diligence in preparing elaborate, didactic assaults on the purposes and programs of others, his power of invective, and his uncompromising adherence to his own ideas brought him a strong following among reformers of the North, who admired his fidelity to principles of human rights and who were not subjected personally to his vehemence.

The widely repeated story, the main author of which was Sumner himself, that he played a decisive role in keeping the United States from armed conflict with Great Britain and France during the Civil War is untrue. His greatest service to the nation was that of keeping relentless pressure on other politicians for almost a quarter of a century to include black Americans under the protection of the Bill of Rights.

Bibliography

Blue, Frederick J. Charles Sumner and the Conscience of the North. Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1994. Analyzes the achievements and shortcomings of Sumner’s battle to abolish slavery, portraying Sumner as a voice of conscience who persistently reminded nineteenth century Americans about the realities of racism.

Donald, David. Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960. Based on extensive research, this is the most thorough treatment of Sumner’s life prior to the inception of the Civil War. Although Donald is appreciative of his subject, he is more objective than most earlier writers.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. The fullest account available of Sumner’s career during the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction, this is the concluding volume of Donald’s highly praised modern biography.

Pierce, Edward L. Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner. 4 vols. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1877-1893. Typically Victorian, this study comprises extracts from documents, held together with uncritical commentary and reminiscences of the subject by people disposed to speak only well of him.

Schurz, Carl. Charles Sumner: An Essay. Edited by Arthur Reed Hogue. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1951. This long eulogy of Sumner by a younger contemporary should be read skeptically but with appreciation of some shrewd insights.

Storey, Moorfield. Charles Sumner. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900. A brief laudatory account in the famous “American Statesman” series. Though biased and not always factually reliable, it is probably the best available introduction to Sumner.

Sumner, Charles. Charles Sumner: His Complete Works. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1900. Collection of speeches carefully edited in later years by their author. To obtain a closer approximation of what Sumner actually said, a careful researcher will consult contemporary newspapers, the Congressional Globe, and, if possible, Sumner’s manuscripts.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner. Edited by Beverly Wilson Palmer. 2 vols. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990. The first volume contains letters from 1830 through 1859, while the second volume includes correspondence from 1859 to 1874.

Taylor, Anne-Marie. Young Charles Sumner and the Legacy of the American Enlightenment, 1811-1851. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Focuses on Sumner’s first forty years, before he took public office, to demonstrate the evolution of his character and thought. Taylor maintains Sumner was not a self-righteous fanatic, but was motivated by the Enlightenment principles upon which his young nation was founded.