and a year before Wendell Phillips. Much more is known concerning his
college life than that of other distinguished men of that time, and it is
highly interesting to recognize the mature man foreshadowed in the youth
of eighteen. He was a good scholar in everything but mathematics; yet, at
the same time, he cared little for rank. He was an enthusiastic reader,
and sometimes neglected his studies for a book in which he was more
deeply interested. He also liked to converse about the books he read, and
in this way acquired a reputation for loquacity which never left him as
long as he lived. It was sometimes troublesome to his friends, but it was
of great advantage to him as a public speaker. He lived a quiet, sober,
industrious life in college, attracting comparatively little attention
from either his instructors or his fellow students. Yet, he showed the
independence of his character by attending a cattle-show at Brighton, a
proceeding for which he would have been suspended if it had been
discovered by the college faculty. There were many foolish, monkish
restrictions at Harvard in those days, and among them it was not
considered decorous for a student to wear a colored vest. He might wear a
white vest, but not a buff or a figured one. Sumner preferred a buff
vest, and insisted on wearing it. When he was reprimanded for doing so he
defended his course vigorously, and exposed the absurdity of the
regulation in such plain terms that the faculty concluded to let him
alone for the future. [Footnote: In 1860 he still continued to wear a buff
vest in summer weather.] He was exceedingly fond of the Greek and Latin
authors, and quoted from them in his letters at this time, as he did
afterwards in his speeches. His college course was not a brilliant one
like Everett's and Phillips's, but seems to have been based on a more
solid ground-work.
It was in the Law-School that Sumner first distinguished himself. Judge
Story, who had left the United States Supreme Bench to become a Harvard
professor, was the chief luminary of the school and the finest instructor
in law of his time. He soon discovered in Sumner a pupil after his own
heart, and in spite of the disparity of their ages they became intimate
friends. This is the more significant because Phillips was also in the
same class, and the more brilliant scholar of the two; but Judge Story
soon discovered that Phillips was studying as a means to an end, while
Sumner's interest in the law was like that of a great artist who works
from the pure love of his subject.
William W. Story, who was a boy at this time, records the fact that
Sumner was always pleasant and kind to children.
At the age of twenty-four Charles Sumner was himself appointed an
instructor at the Law-School; and during the two following years he
edited the reports of Judge Story's decisions in the United States
Circuit Courts.
It is evident from James Russell Lowell's "Fable for Critics" that the
personalities of his contemporaries troubled him: he could not see over
their heads. In 1837 Sumner went to Europe and we find from his letters
to Judge Story, George S. Hillard, and others, that he had already
obtained a vantage ground from which the civilized world lay before him,
as all New England does from the top of Mount Washington. He goes into a
French law court, and analyzes the procedure of French justice in a
letter which has the value of an historical document. He noticed that
Napoleon was still spoken of as _l'Empereur_, although there was a
king in France,--a fact pregnant with future consequences. He remained in
Paris until he was a complete master of the French language, and attended
one hundred and fifty lectures at the university and elsewhere. He
enjoyed the grand opera and the acting in French theatres; nor did he
neglect to study Italian art. He was making a whole man of himself; and
it seemed as if an unconscious instinct was guiding him to his destiny.
Fortunate was the old Sheriff to have such a son; but Charles Sumner was
also fortunate to have had a father who was willing to save and economize
for his benefit. Otherwise he might have been a sheriff himself.
Judge Story's letters of introduction opened the doors wide to him in
England. In the course of ten months he became acquainted with almost
every distinguished person in the United Kingdom. He never asked for
introductions, and he never presented himself without one. He was handed
from one mansion to another all the way from London to the Scotch
Highlands. Only twenty-seven years of age, he was treated on an equality
by men ten to fifteen years his senior; and he proved himself equal to
their expectations. No American except Lowell has ever made such a
favorable impression in England as Sumner; but this happened in Sumner's
youth, while Lowell in his earlier visits attracted little attention.
It is perfectly true that if he had been the son of an English sheriff
this would not have happened; but he encountered the same obstacles in
Boston society that he would have done under similar conditions in Great
Britain. The doors of Wentworth House and Strachan Park were open to him,
but those of Beacon Street were closed,--and perhaps it was better for
him on the whole that they were.
Sumner's letters from Europe are at least as interesting as those written
by any other American. Such breadth of vision is not often united with
clearness and accuracy of detail. All his letters ought to be published
in a volume by themselves. Sumner returned to America the following year
and settled himself quietly and soberly to his work as a lawyer. He was
not a success, however, as a practitioner in the courts, unless he could
plead before a bench of judges. In the Common Pleas an ordinary
pettifogger would often take a case away from him. He could not, if he
would, have practised those seductive arts by which Rufus Choate drew the
jury into his net, in spite of their deliberate intentions to the
contrary. Yet, Sumner's reputation steadily improved, so that when
Longfellow came to live in Cambridge he found Sumner delivering lectures
at the Harvard Law-School, where he might have remained the rest of his
life, if he had been satisfied with a merely routine employment, and the
fortunes of the republic had not decided differently.
The attraction between Sumner and Longfellow was immediate and permanent.
It was owing more perhaps to the essential purity of their natures, than
to mutual sympathy in regard to art and literature; although Longfellow
held Sumner's literary judgment in such respect that he rarely published
a new poem without first subjecting his work to Sumner's criticism.
Those who admired Sumner at this time, for his fine moral and
intellectual qualities, had no adequate conception of the far nobler
quality which lay concealed in the depths of his nature. Charles Sumner
was a hero,--one to whom life was nothing in comparison with his duty.
It was in the anti-Irish riot of June, 1837, that he first gave evidence
of this. Nothing was more hateful to him than race prejudice, and what
might be called international malignity, which he believed was the most
frequent cause of war.
As soon as Sumner was notified of the disturbance, he hastened to the
scene of action, seized on a prominent position, and attempted to address
the insurgents; but his pacific words only excited them to greater fury.
They charged on him and his little group of supporters, knocked him down
and trampled on him. Dr. S. G. Howe, who stood near by, a born fighter,
protected Sumner's prostrate body, and finally carried him to a place of
safety, although twice his own size. Sumner took his mishap very coolly,
and, as soon as he could talk freely, addressed his friends on the evils
resulting from race prejudice.
This incident may have led Sumner to the choice of a subject for his
Fourth of July oration in 1845. The title of this address was "The True
Grandeur of Nations," but its real object was one which Sumner always had
at heart, and never relinquished the hope of,--namely, the establishment
of an international tribunal, which should possess jurisdiction over the
differences and quarrels between nations, and so bring warfare forever to
an end. The plan is an impracticable one, because the decisions of a
court only have validity if it is able to enforce them, and how could the
decisions of an international tribunal have value in case the parties
concerned declined to accept them? It would only result in waging war in
order to prevent war. Yet, of all the Fourth of July orations that were
delivered in the nineteenth century, Sumner's and Webster's are the only
two that have survived; and the "True Grandeur of Nations" has recently
been published by the London Peace Society as an argument in favor of
their philanthropic movement.
Sumner was now in the prime of manhood, and a rarely handsome man. He had
an heroic figure, six feet two inches in height, and well proportioned in
all respects. His features, too large and heavy in his youth, had become
strong and regular, and although he had not acquired that leonine look of
reserved power with which he confronted the United States Senate, his
expression was frank and fearless. As L. Maria Child, who heard him
frequently, said, he seemed to be as much in his place on the platform as
a statue on its pedestal. His gestures had not the natural grace of
Phillips's or the more studied elegance of Everett, but he atoned for
these deficiencies by the manly earnestness of his delivery. He made
an impression on the highly cultivated men and women who composed his
audience which they always remembered.
The question has often been raised by the older abolitionists, "Why did
not Sumner take an earlier interest in the anti-slavery struggle?" The
answer is twofold. That he did not join the Free-soilers in 1844 was most
probably owing to the influence of Judge Story, who had already marked
Sumner out for the Supreme Bench, and wished him to concentrate his
energies in that direction. His friends, too, at this time--Hillard,
Felton, Liebe, and even Longfellow--were either opposed to introducing
the slavery question into politics or practically indifferent to it.
On the other hand, Sumner never could agree with Garrison's position on
this question. He held the Constitution in too great respect to admit
that it was an agreement with death and a government with the devil. He
believed that the founders of the Constitution were opposed to slavery,
and that the expression, "persons held to labor," was good evidence of
this. One of his finest orations in the Senate was intended to prove this
point. Furthermore he perceived the futility of Garrison's idea--and this
was afterwards disproved by the war--that if it were not for the National
Government the slaves would rise in rebellion and so obtain their
freedom. He always asserted that slavery would be abolished under the
Constitution or not at all. Like Abraham Lincoln he waited for his time
to come.
Charles Sumner was the reply that Massachusetts made to the Fugitive
Slave Law, and a telling reply it was. Unlike his legal contemporaries he
recognized the law as a revolutionary act which, unless it was
successfully opposed, would strike a death-blow at American freedom. He
saw that it could only be met by counter-revolution, and he prepared his
mind for the consequences. It was only at such a time that so
uncompromising a statesman as Sumner could have entered into political
life; for the possibility of compromise had passed away with the
suspension of the writ of _habeas corpus_, and Sumner's policy of
"no compromise" was the one which brought the slavery question to a
successful issue. For fifteen years in Congress he held to that policy as
faithfully as a planet to its course, and those who differed with him
were left in the rear.
Sumner's first difference was with his conservative friends, and
especially with his law-partner, George S. Hillard, a brilliant man in
his way, and for an introductory address without a rival in Boston.
Hillard was at heart as anti-slavery as Sumner, and his wife had even
assisted fugitive slaves, but he was swathed in the bands of fashionable
society, and he lacked the courage to break loose from them. He adhered
to the Whigs and was relegated to private life. They parted without
acrimony, and Sumner never failed to do his former friend a service when
he found an opportunity.
His difference with Felton was of a more serious kind. Emerson, perhaps,
judged Felton too severely,--a man of ardent temperament who was always
in danger of saying more than he intended.
Sumner's election to the Senate was a chance in ten thousand. It is well
known that at first he declined to be a candidate. He did not think he
was fitted for the position, and when Caleb Gushing urged him to court
the favor of fortune he said: "I will not leave my chair to become United
States Senator." Whatever vanity there might be in the man, he was
entirely free from the ambition for power and place.
There were several prominent public men at the time who would have given
all they owned for the position, but they were set aside for the man who
did not want it,--the bold jurist who dared to set himself against the
veteran statesmen of his country. It reads like a Bible-tale, or the
story of Cincinnatus taken from his plow to become dictator.
The gates of his _alma mater_ were now closed to Sumner, not only
during his life but even long after that. Such is the fate of
revolutionary characters, that they tear asunder old and familiar bonds
in order to contract new ties. In Washington he found a broader and more
vigorous life, if less cultivated, and the Free-soil leaders with whom he
now came in contact in his own State were much more akin to his own
nature than Story, and Felton, and Hillard. Sumner was never popular in
Washington, as he had been among the English liberals and Cambridge men
of letters; but he was respected on all sides for his fearlessness, his
ability, and the veracity of his statements. His previous life now proved
a great advantage to him in most respects, but he had become accustomed
to dealing and conversing with a certain class of men, and this made it
difficult for him to assimilate himself to a wholly different class.
Sumner's ardent temperament required constant self-control in this new
and trying position; and a man who continually reflects beforehand on his
own actions acquires an appearance of greater reserve than a person of
really cold nature.
Seward had thus far been the leader of the Free-soil and Republican
parties, not only before the country at large but in the Senate. It was
soon found, however, that Sumner was not only a more effective speaker,
but possessed greater resources for debate. Judge Story had noticed long
before that facts were so carefully and systematically arranged in
Sumner's mind that whatever spring was touched he could always respond to
the subject with a full and exact statement. He was like a librarian who
could lay his hand on the book he wanted without having to look for it in
the catalogue,--and this upon a scale which seems almost incredible.
Webster possessed the same faculty, but united it with a sense of
artistic beauty which Sumner could not equal.
Sumner, however, was the best orator in Congress at this time, as well as
the best legal authority. On all constitutional questions it was felt
that he had Judge Story's support behind him. His oration on "Freedom
National, Slavery Sectional," was a revelation, not only to the
opposition, but to his own party. From that time forth, he became the
spokesman of his party on all the more important questions.
It frequently happens that the essential character of a government
changes while its form remains the same. In 1801 France was nominally a
Republic, but its administration was Imperial. In 1853 the United States
ceased to be a democracy and became an oligarchy, governed by thirty
thousand slave-holders,--until the people reconquered their rights on the
field of battle. Accustomed to despotic power in their own States for
more than two generations, and justifying themselves always by divine
right, the slave-holders possessed all the self-confidence, pretension,
and arrogance of the old French nobility. They were a self-deluded class
of men, of all classes the most difficult to deal with, and Sumner was
the Mirabeau who faced them at Washington and who pricked the bubble of
their Olympian pretensions by a most pitiless exposure of their true
character.
Those men had come to believe that the ownership of slaves was equivalent
to a patent of nobility, and they were encouraged in this monarchical
illusion by the nobility of Europe. In Disraeli's "Lothair" an English
duke is made to say: "I consider an American with large estates in the
South a genuine aristocrat." The pretension was ridiculous, and the only
way to combat it was to make it appear so. Sumner characterized Butler,
of South Carolina, and Douglas, of Illinois, who was their northern man
of business, as the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of an antiquated cause.
The satire hit its mark only too exactly; and two days later Sumner was
assaulted for it in an assassin-like manner,--struck on the head from
behind while writing at his desk, and left senseless on the floor. Sumner
was considered too low in the social scale for the customary challenge to
a duel, and there was no court in Washington that would take cognizance
of the outrage.
The following day, when Wilson made the most eloquent speech of his life
in an indignant rebuke to Butler and Brooks, Butler started from his seat
to attack him, but was held back by his friends. They might as well have
allowed him to go, for Wilson was a man of enormous strength and could
easily have handled any Southerner upon the floor.
In "The Crime against Kansas" there are two or three sentences which
Sumner afterwards expunged, and this shows that he regretted having said
them; but it is the greatest of his orations, and Webster's reply to
Hayne is the only Congressional address with which it can be compared.
One is in fact the sequence of the other; Webster's is the flower, and
Sumner's the fruit; the former directed against the active principle of
sedition, and the latter against its consequences; and both were directed
against South Carolina, where the war originated. Sumner's speech has not
the finely sculptured character of Webster's, but its architectural
structure is grand and impressive. His Baconian division of the various
excuses that were made for the Kansas outrages into "the apology
_tyrannical_, the apology _imbecile_, the apology _absurd_, and the apology
_infamous_," was original and pertinent.
Preston S. Brooks only lived about six months after his assault on
Sumner, and some of the abolitionists thought he died of a guilty
conscience. Both in feature and expression he bore a decided likeness to
J. Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Lincoln. It might have proved
the death of Sumner, but for the devotion of his Boston physician, Dr.
Marshall S. Perry, who went to him without waiting to be telegraphed for.
It was also fortunate for him that his brother George, a very intelligent
man, happened to be in America instead of Europe, where he lived the
greater part of his life. The assault on Sumner strengthened the
Republican party, and secured his re-election to the Senate; but it
produced nervous irritation of the brain and spinal cord, a disorder
which can only be cured under favorable conditions, and even then is
likely to return if the patient is exposed to a severe mental strain.
Sumner's cure by Dr. Brown-Sequard was considered a remarkable one, and
has a place in the history of medicine. The effect of bromide and ergot
was then unknown, and the doctor made such good use of his cauterizing-
iron that on one occasion, at least, Sumner declared that he could not
endure it any longer. Neither could he tell positively whether it was
this treatment or the baths which he afterwards took at Aix-les-Bains
that finally cured him. His own calm temperament and firmness of mind may
have contributed to this as much as Dr. Brown-Sequard.
When Sumner returned to Boston, early in 1860, all his friends went to
Dr. S. G. Howe to know if he was really cured, and Howe said: "He is a
well man, but he will never be able to make another two hours' speech."
Yet Sumner trained himself and tested his strength so carefully that in
the following spring he delivered his oration on the barbarism of
slavery, more than an hour in length, before the Senate; and in 1863 he
made a speech three hours in length, a herculean effort that has never
been equalled, except by Hamilton's address before the Constitutional
Convention of 1787.
I remember Sumner in the summer of 1860 walking under my father's grape
trellis, when the vines were in blossom, with his arms above his head,
and saying: "This is like the south of France." To think of Europe, its
art, history, and scenery, was his relaxation from the cares and
excitement of politics; but there were many who did not understand this,
and looked upon it as an affectation. Sumner in his least serious moments
was often self-conscious, but never affected. He talked of himself as an
innocent child talks. On all occasions he was thoroughly real and
sincere, and he would sometimes be as much abashed by a genuine
compliment as a maiden of seventeen.
At the same time Sumner was so great a man that it was simply impossible
to disguise it, and he made no attempt to do this. The principle that all
men are created equal did not apply in his case. To realize this it was
only necessary to see him and Senator Wilson together. Wilson was also a
man of exceptional ability, and yet a stranger, who did not know him by
sight, might have conversed with him on a railway train without
suspecting that he was a member of the United States Senate; but this
could not have happened in Sumner's case. Every one stared at him as he
walked the streets; and he could not help becoming conscious of this.
That there were moments when he seemed to reflect with satisfaction on
his past life his best friends could not deny; but the vanity that is
born of a frivolous spirit was not in him. He was more like a Homeric
hero than a Sir Philip Sidney, and considering the work he had to do it
was better on the whole that he should be so.
He carried the impracticable theory of social equality to an extent
beyond that of most Americans, and yet he was frequently complained of
for his reserve and aristocratic manners. The range of his acquaintance
was the widest of any man of his time. It extended from Lord Brougham to
J. B. Smith, the mulatto caterer of Boston, who, like many of his race,
was a person of gentlemanly deportment, and was always treated by Sumner
as a valued friend. As the champion of the colored race in the Senate
this was diplomatically necessary; but to the rank and file of his own
party he was less gracious. He had not grown up among them, but had
entered politics at the top, so that even their faces were unfamiliar to
him. The representatives of Massachusetts, who voted for him at the State
House, were sometimes chagrined at the coldness of his recognition,--a
coldness that did not arise from lack of sympathy, but from ignorance of
the individual. Before Sumner could treat a stranger in a friendly
manner, he wished to know what sort of a person he had to deal with.
There is a kind of insincerity in universal cordiality,--like that of the
candidate who is seeking to obtain votes.
A recent writer, who complains of Sumner's lack of graciousness, would do
well to ask his conscience what the reason for it was. If he will drop
the three last letters of his own name the solution will be apparent to
him.
The more Sumner became absorbed in public affairs the less he seemed to
be suited to general society,--or general society to him. He was always
ready to talk on those subjects that interested him, but in general
conversation, in the pleasant give-and-take of wit and anecdote, he did
not feel so much at home as he had in his Cambridge days. His thoughts
were too serious, and the tendency of his mind was argumentative.