CHARLES SUMNER--A PRIVATE VIEW
The anti-slavery leaders who emerged about the same time from the
groups of mediocrities enveloping them were Wendell Phillips and
Charles Sumner. So essentially was Sumner an idealist that he might
naturally have cast in his lot with those who preferred ideals to
party politics, but other influences finally prevailed and he
embarked on that career which, in due time, made him the leader of
the anti-slavery forces to whom freedom seemed possible by political
methods. On the whole, even among that group of men which included
Andrew, I think Sumner must be put first. His province was larger;
the range of his activities greater; and there were more moments than
one when he was the most conspicuous figure in American public life.
Of his scholarship, his legal attainments, his multifarious and
accurate knowledge, his immense powers of work, everybody has heard.
I do not enter upon that. The Sumner I shall speak of is the Sumner
I knew.
In the account, first published in _The New York Tribune_, of my
first meeting with Bismarck, in 1866, I said that I had heard much
from Bismarck which {122} I could not repeat. On my return, I saw
Sumner. Almost instantly he asked what it was Bismarck had told me
which I could not repeat in print. The question was embarrassing
enough, and I answered rather slowly:
"Mr. Sumner, much of what Count Bismarck said that seemed to me
confidential related to diplomatic and international matters, and you
are Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. It would
not have been said to you."
Sumner reflected a moment, then answered:
"I suppose you are right. I won't ask you about anything which you
think you ought not to repeat. But you must consider that,
notwithstanding all that Bismarck has accomplished, he is still an
unknown force. My own belief is that the future of Germany lies in
his hands. The man who could defy the public opinion of Europe in
that business with Denmark, who could defy the public opinion and
Parliament of Prussia, who could govern four years without a Budget
or a majority, who could make war without supplies, and without his
country behind him, and his King only a convert at the last moment to
his policy--that man, though he has put Austria under his feet and
Prussia in Austria's place at the head of Germany, is, in my
judgment, only at the beginning of his career. He is the one
supremely interesting figure in Europe at this moment. I have never
met him; probably may never meet him. But it is important to me to
know all I can about him. Violate no confidence, but tell me what
you can. {123} I will make no use of it except to inform my own
mind. When I have to deal with Count Bismarck, I want to be able to
picture to myself what manner of man he is. In diplomacy, a
knowledge of men is half the battle."
This long speech was characteristic of Sumner. He was seldom brief
or simple. His mind overflowed. In private, as in public, he was
oratorical. The sentences, as they came from his lips, seemed to
have passed through a mould. He spoke with a model before him. The
most sincere of men he was never content to be himself and nobody
else. In the murmur of the flowing periods he often uttered, you
heard echoes of Cicero, of Bossuet, of Burke. Perhaps it was true of
him--as Emerson said, not of him--that his library overloaded his
wit. He moved as if in armour; a mixed but apt metaphor. The chair
in which he sat was a platform, and his one listener was an audience.
He neglected, in his private talk, none of the arts of the
rhetorician. Whoever has heard Sumner in the Senate or in Faneuil
Hall must remember the imposing presence of the man; his stature: and
the leonine head with its waving black mane which every moment he
tossed from his forehead, only to have it fall again half over his
eyes. The strong features stood out sharply, the eyes were alight,
the lips moulded into plastic form the most stubborn sentences, and
the whole blended into one expression after another at the will of
the speaker; each expression the visible image of his thought. He
was so intent on bending his audience {124} to his will that he used
without stint every weapon at his command.
In private, all this was a little overwhelming. As it comes back to
me in memory, my view of it is probably more critical than it was
while I sat and looked and listened. But it still seems to me
extremely fine. In England--the country of all others where
simplicity counts for most--Sumner was thought emphatic; and the
English do not like emphasis, but they liked Sumner. He was first
here as a young man, in 1838 and 1840, when he was still in the late
'thirties; and these mannerisms were presumably less mannered, or
less aggressive. But the men and women whom Sumner then came to know
were men and women who dwelt on the heights. I suppose the average
of serious culture at that time in that class was at least as high as
it is now. They liked a man with a full mind. Sumner had that; and
he poured it out in a flood.
Macaulay had taught his set, or the several sets to which he more or
less belonged, to endure conversation which took the form of
monologue and rivalled the laborious accuracy of a cyclopædia.
People suffered under him. Lady Holland and Hayward and Lord
Melbourne and others rebelled, but there were not many who rebelled.
Sumner's path had therefore been made plain, nor was he dogmatic in
Macaulay's way. He was human and his enthusiasms were human, and he
was sympathetic.
But when Sumner, in 1869, made his indirect {125} Claims speech in
the Senate, seeking to induce the Government to demand from England
indirect damages for the depredations of the Alabama, his popularity
in this country came to a sudden end. His best friends were those
who resented this speech most hotly; and Mr. Bright most of all. To
Mr. Bright I once undertook to defend Sumner or to explain him, for I
thought he had been misunderstood. But Mr. Bright would not have it.
"The only defence is silence," he exclaimed, and he was the more
angry when I said: "That will do for an epigram." And we never
referred to it again.
So far as I could, I satisfied Sumner's interest about Bismarck, whom
I had seen at short range, and with whom, on the evening in question,
I had spent some three hours alone. Sumner asked question after
question, with one definite object; he wanted to understand the man
himself. Once or twice he put a searching interrogatory on matters
of diplomacy, or on the relations between the King and his great
Minister, which had to be answered with reserve. He showed an
astonishing knowledge of purely Prussian politics and even of
Prussian politicians. He asked if it was true that Loewe and the
other Liberals had owned they were wrong in opposing Bismarck, and
when I said yes, exclaimed: "Then they showed more good sense than I
expected."
I spent some days with Mr. Sumner in his house in Lafayette Square,
in Washington, now part of a Washington hotel. A plainly furnished
house, {126} hardly a home; chiefly remarkable for its books and for
Sumner. He was a kindly host, anxious that his guest should make the
most of his visit, and see the men he wanted to see. I wanted to ask
him why he had, on a former visit, advised me not to see Lincoln; but
I did not. But Lincoln was now dead and among the giants who
survived him Sumner was the most attractive personality.
He became more attractive still some years later, in 1872, when he
came to Europe for the rest which his long warfare, first with
President Johnson and then with President Grant, had made imperative.
He came first to London, staying--or, as the English perversely say,
stopping--at Penton's Hotel, St. James's Street; then a hostelry of
repute, now extinct. He had a large suite of rooms on the ground
floor at the back; gloomy, and intensely respectable. I dined with
him the night of his arrival. "I don't know what kind of a dinner
they will give us," said Sumner, "but you shall have a bottle of
Chateau Lafitte of 1847, and the rest will matter less." He loved
good Bordeaux, as all good men do; and his talk flowed like old
wine--a full, pure stream, with both flavour and bouquet; and not
much of the best claret has both.
It is not possible to repeat much of Sumner's talk, for it was mostly
personal and intimate. But I asked him whether he still felt the
effects of those coward blows which Preston Brooks had dealt him from
behind as he sat imprisoned in his chair in the Senate. He was not
sure. He {127} doubted whether he had ever completely recovered,
though it was now some sixteen years since that particular piece of
South Carolina chivalry had been perpetrated. He thought everything
had been done for him which could be done. What he told me may or
may not have been printed. I do not know. When the moxa was to be
applied to his spine, Dr. Charcot proposed to give him an anæsthetic.
"But," said Sumner, "does not the effect you seek to produce--the
counter-irritation--depend more or less on the pain the patient would
endure without the anæsthetic?" "Yes," Charcot admitted,
reluctantly, "it probably does." "Then let us go ahead without
ether," said Sumner; and they did. I understood the treatment
consisted in laying along the spine cotton-wool soaked in oil and
setting fire to it. When, after two or three days, the burn is
partly healed, the operation is renewed, and the pain, of course,
more severe. But no ether was administered. After his first attack
of angina pectoris, "the pain," said Sumner, "which I endured in a
single second from one of those spasms was more than all I ever
suffered from all the applications of the moxa."
We went together from London by way of Boulogne to Paris, staying two
nights at Boulogne at one of the beach hotels. Sumner was like a
boy; his sixty-one years sat lightly on him and his interests were as
fresh as I had ever known them. He loved the sea and the sea air; an
air so much more exhilarating on the southern coast of the {128}
Channel than the northern. He was amused to hear that the customs
authorities had passed all our luggage--his and mine--because I had
told them he was a Senator; and still more amused later when the
Dover customs on our return had shown him the same indulgence as "The
Honourable Charles Sumner"--honourable denoting in England not
political distinction, but membership of a family the head of which
is a peer. In Paris, as in London, we had rambled about the
book-shops. "I dare say," remarked Sumner, "you thought from my
books at home that I cared nothing for books as books; or for
bindings. But you will see." And he proceeded to buy a certain
number of so-called fine bindings: which, alas, were not so fine as
they ought to have been.
Less than two years after his last months in Europe, he died. I have
still much to say about him, and there are many letters of his to me
which I hope to print; but they are not here and I must end. When I
remember what has been said so often of Sumner by men who did not
know him or did not like him, I may be allowed to end with a tribute
of affection. I thought him, and I shall ever think him, one of the
most lovable of men; more than loyal to his friends, delighting in
kindnesses to them; of an implacable honesty, sincerity, devotion to
duty and to high ideals; an American to whom America has paid high
honour, but never yet enough.
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