us stronger to commit ourselves before the world. We are compelled to
live up to the standard of our speech, or be adjudged hypocrites.
Before the Boston Mercantile Library Association, Sumner read a
brilliant paper on "White Slavery in the Barbary States," and gave an
address before Amherst College on "Fame and Glory." He spoke earnestly
in the Whig conventions, asking them to come out against slavery. He
urged Daniel Webster, the Defender of the Constitution, to become the
"Defender of Humanity," "by the side of which that earlier title shall
fade into insignificance, as the Constitution, which is the work of
mortal hands, dwindles by the side of man, who is created in the image
of God." But the words of entreaty came too late; the Whig party did not
dare take up the cause of human freedom.
In 1851, when Sumner was forty, the new era of his life came. The
Free-Soil party, organized August 9, 1848, the successor of the
"Liberty" party formed eight years earlier, wanted him as their leader.
Would he separate from the Whigs? Yes, for he had said, "Loyalty to
principle is higher than loyalty to party. The first is a heavenly
sentiment from God; the other is a device of this earth.... I wish it to
be understood that I belong to the party of freedom,--to that party
which plants itself on the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution of the United States.... It is said that we shall throw
away our votes, and that our opposition will fail. Fail, sir! No
honest, earnest effort in a good cause ever fails. It may not be crowned
with the applause of man; it may not seem to touch the goal of immediate
worldly success, which is the end and aim of so much of life; but still
it is not lost. It helps to strengthen the weak with new virtue, to arm
the irresolute with proper energy, to animate all with devotion to duty,
which in the end conquers all. Fail! Did the martyrs fail when with
their precious blood they sowed the seed of the Church?... Did the three
hundred Spartans fail when, in the narrow pass, they did not fear to
brave the innumerable Persian hosts, whose very arrows darkened the sun?
No! Overborne by numbers, crushed to earth, they have left an example
which is greater far than any victory. And this is the least we can do.
Our example shall be the source of triumph hereafter."
Millard Fillmore had signed the hated Fugitive Slave Bill, and Webster
had made his disastrous speech of March 7, 1850, urging conformity to
the demands of the bill. Sumner's hour had come. By a union of the
Free-Soil and Democratic parties, he was elected to the Senate of the
United States for six years, over the eloquent Robert C. Winthrop, the
Whig candidate. The contest was bitter. Sumner would give no pledges,
and said he would not walk across the room to secure the election. On
Monday, December 1, 1851, he took his seat. Devotion to principle had
gained him an exalted position.
Months went by before he could possibly obtain a hearing on the slavery
question, on which issue he had been elected. Finally, the long sought
opportunity came by introducing an amendment that the Fugitive Slave
Bill should be repealed. He spoke for four hours as only Charles Sumner
could speak. Despised by the slave-holders, they listened to his burning
words. In closing, he said: "Be admonished by those words of oriental
piety,--'Beware of the groans of wounded souls. Oppress not to the
utmost a single heart; for a solitary sigh has power to overset a whole
world.'"
Mr. Polk of Tennessee said to him: "If you should make that speech in
Tennessee, you would compel me to emancipate my niggers."
The vote on the repeal stood: Yeas, four; nays, forty-seven. Alas! how
many years he wrought before the repeal came.
Sumner had been heard not merely by Congress; he had been heard by two
continents. Henceforward, for twenty-three years, he was to be in
Congress the great leader in the cause of human freedom.
In 1854 the advocates of slavery brought forward the Kansas-Nebraska
Bill, by which a large territory, at the recommendation of Stephen A.
Douglas, was to be left open for slavery or no slavery, as the dwellers
therein should decide. On the night of the passage of this bill, Sumner
made an eloquent protest. "Sir, the bill which you are now about to pass
is at once the worst and the best bill on which Congress ever acted.
Yes, sir, WORST and BEST at the same time.
"It is the worst bill, inasmuch as it is a present victory of
slavery.... It is the best, for it prepares the way for that 'All hail
hereafter,' when slavery must disappear.... Thus, sir, now standing at
the very grave of freedom in Kansas and Nebraska, I lift myself to the
vision of that happy resurrection by which freedom will be secured
hereafter, not only in these Territories but everywhere under the
national government. More clearly than ever before, I now see 'the
beginning of the end' of slavery. Proudly I discern the flag of my
country as it ripples in every breeze, at last become in reality, as in
name, the flag of freedom,--undoubted, pure, and irresistible. Am I not
right, then, in calling this bill the best on which Congress ever acted?
"Sorrowfully I bend before the wrong you are about to enact. Joyfully I
welcome all the promises of the future."
After the passage of the bill the excitement at the North was intense.
Public meetings were held, denouncing the new scheme of the slave-power
to acquire more territory. So bitter grew the feeling that Sumner was
urged by his friends to leave Washington, lest harm come to him; but he
walked the streets unarmed. "He was assailed," said the noble Joshua R.
Giddings of Ohio, "by the whole slave-power in the Senate, and, for a
time, he was the constant theme of their vituperation. The maddened
waves rolled and dashed against him for two or three days, until
eventually he obtained the floor himself; then he arose and threw back
the dashing surges with a power of inimitable eloquence utterly
indescribable."
The Kansas-Nebraska Bill produced its legitimate result,--civil war in
the Territory. Slave-holders rushed in from Missouri, bringing their
slaves with them; free men came from the East to build homes,
school-houses, and churches on these fertile lands. The struggles at the
ballot-box over illegal elections were followed by struggles on the
battle-field. At the village of Ossawatomie twenty-eight Free State men
led by John Brown defeated on the open prairie fifty-six Slave State
men. Houses were burned, and men murdered. Two State constitutions were
adopted: one at Lecompton, representing the pro-slavery element; the
other at Lawrence, representing the anti-slavery party. Finally, the
President, in 1855, appointed a military governor to restore Kansas to
order. But, while order might be restored there, the whole country
seemed on the verge of civil war.
Meantime the Republican party had been formed in 1854, the outgrowth of
the "Liberty" and "Free Soil" parties. A "Bill for the Admission of
Kansas into the Union" having been presented, Sumner made his celebrated
speech "The Crime against Kansas," on the 19th and 20th of May, 1856. He
spoke eloquently and fearlessly, arousing more than ever the hot blood
of the South. Two days later, as Mr. Sumner was sitting at his desk in
the Senate chamber, his head bent forward in writing, the Senate having
adjourned, Preston S. Brooks, a nephew of Mr. Butler, a senator of South
Carolina, stood before him. "I have read your speech twice over,
carefully," he said. "It is a libel on South Carolina and Mr. Butler,
who is a relative of mine." Instantly he struck Mr. Sumner on the back
of the head, with his hollow gutta-percha cane, making a long and
fearful gash, repeating the blows in rapid succession. Sumner wrenched
the desk from the floor, to which it was screwed, but, unable to defend
himself, fell forward bleeding and insensible. He was carried by his
friends to a sofa in the lobby, and during the night lay pale and
bewildered, scarcely speaking to any one about him.
The indignation and horror of the North beggar description. That a man,
in this age of free speech, should be publicly beaten, and that by a
member of the House of Representatives, was, of course, a disgrace to
the nation. Said Joseph Quincy: "Charles Sumner needs not our sympathy.
If he dies his name will be immortal--his name will be enrolled with the
names of Warren, Sidney, and Russell; if he lives he is destined to be
the light of the nation." Wendell Phillips said: "The world will yet
cover every one of those scars with laurels. He must not die! We need
him yet, as the van-guard leader of the hosts of Liberty. Nay, he shall
yet come forth from that sick-chamber, and every gallant heart in the
commonwealth be ready to kiss his very footsteps."
Brooks was censured by the House of Representatives, resigned his seat,
and died the following year. Sumner returned to Boston as soon as he was
able. Houses were decorated for his coming, and banners flung to the
breeze with the words, "Welcome, Freedom's Defender," "Massachusetts
loves, honors, will sustain and defend her noble SUMNER." The home on
Hancock Street was surrounded by a dense crowd. He appeared at the
window with his widowed mother, and bowed to their cheers. For several
months he enjoyed the tender care of this mother, now almost alone. Her
son Horace had been lost in the ship Elizabeth, July 16, 1850, when
Margaret Fuller, her husband, and child were drowned. Albert, a
sea-captain, had been lost with his wife and only daughter on their way
to France. And now, perhaps, her distinguished son Charles was to give
his life to help bring freedom to four millions in slavery.
In 1857 Sumner was almost unanimously reelected to the Senate for six
years, but Brooks had done his dreadful work too well. Broken in health,
he sailed for Europe. Nearly twenty years before he had gone to meet the
honored and famous, his future all unknown; now he went as the stricken
leader of a great cause, one of the most able and eloquent men of the
new world. Twenty years before he was restless and unhappy because he
did not see his life-work before him; now he was happy in spite of
physical agony, because he knew he was helping humanity.
After travelling in Switzerland, Germany, and Great Britain, he returned
and took his seat in Congress, but, finding his health still impaired,
he sailed again to Europe. He regretted to leave the country, but was,
as he says, "often assured and encouraged to feel that to every sincere
lover of civilization my vacant chair was a perpetual speech." On this
second visit he came under the treatment of Dr. Brown-Sequard, who, when
asked by Mr. Sumner what would cure him, replied, "Fire." At once the
dreadful remedy was applied. The physician says, when he first met the
senator, "He could not make use of his brain at all. He could not read a
newspaper, could not write a letter. He was in a frightful state as
regards the activity of the mind, as every effort there was most painful
to him.... I told him the truth,--that there would be more effect, as I
thought, if he did not take chloroform; and so I had to submit him to
the martyrdom of the greatest suffering that can be inflicted on mortal
man. I burned him with the first moxa. I had the hope that after the
first application he would submit to the use of chloroform; but for five
times after that he was burned in the same way, and refused to take
chloroform. I have never seen a patient who submitted to such treatment
in that way."
Sumner wrote home: "It is with a pang unspeakable that I find myself
thus arrested in the labors of life and in the duties of my position.
This is harder to bear than the fire."
Four years elapsed before he regained his health; indeed his death
finally resulted from the attack of Brooks. No sooner had he returned to
the Senate than he made another great speech against slavery. The
country was agitated by the coming presidential election. John Brown had
captured, with a force of twenty-two men, the United States arsenal at
Harper's Ferry, with the fallacious hope of setting the slaves at
liberty. He was of course overpowered, his sons killed at his side, as
others of his sons had been on the Kansas battlefields, and he led out
to execution, December 2, 1859, with a radiant face and an overflowing
heart, because he knew that his death would arouse the nation to action.
Mr. Sumner spoke to an immense audience at Cooper Institute, urging the
election of Abraham Lincoln. By this election, he said, "we shall save
the Territories from the five-headed barbarism of slavery; we shall save
the country and the age from that crying infamy, the slave-trade; we
shall help save the Declaration of Independence, now dishonored and
disowned in its essential, life-giving truth,--_the equality of men_....
A new order of things will begin; and our history will proceed on a
grander scale, in harmony with those sublime principles in which it
commenced. Let the knell sound!--
"'Ring out the old, ring in the new!
Ring out the false, ring in the true!
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife!
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.'"
A "new order of things" was indeed begun. South Carolina very soon
seceded from the Union, and other southern States followed her example.
Sumner now spoke and wrote constantly. He urged Massachusetts to be
"_firm_, FIRM, FIRM! against every word or step of concession.... More
than the loss of forts, arsenals, or the national capital, I fear the
loss of our principles."
In 1861, Mr. Sumner was made chairman of the Committee on Foreign
Relations. How different his position from that day, ten years before,
when he stood almost alone in the Senate, a hated abolitionist!
When the war began, he saw with prophetic eye the necessity of
emancipating the slaves. He urged it in his public speeches. When
Lincoln hesitated and the country feared the result, he said to a vast
assembly at Cooper Institute, "There has been the cry, 'On to Richmond!'
and still another worse cry, 'On to England!' Better than either is the
cry, 'On to freedom!'"
As the war went forward he was ever at his post, working for Henry
Wilson's bill for the abolishing of slavery in the District of Columbia,
for the recognition of the independence of Hayti and Liberia, for the
final suppression of the coastwise trade in slaves, for the employment
of colored troops in the army, and for a law that "no person shall be
excluded from the cars on account of color," on various specified lines
of railroad. He spoke words of encouragement constantly to the North,
"This is no time to stop. FORWARD! FORWARD! Thus do I, who formerly
pleaded so often for peace, now sound to arms; but it is because, in
this terrible moment, there is no other way to that sincere and solid
peace without which there will be endless war.... Now, at last, by the
death of slavery, will the republic begin to live; for what is life
without liberty?
"Stretching from ocean to ocean, teeming with population, bountiful in
resources of all kinds, and thrice happy in universal enfranchisement,
it will be more than conqueror, nothing too vast for its power, nothing
too minute for its care."
He wrote for the magazines on the one great subject. He helped organize
the Freedman's Bureau, which he called the "Bridge from Slavery to
Freedom." He urged equal pay to colored soldiers. He was invaluable to
President Lincoln. Though they did not always think alike, Lincoln said
to Sumner, "There is no person with whom I have more advised throughout
my administration than with yourself."
When Lincoln was assassinated, Sumner wept by his bedside. "The only
time," said an intimate friend, "I ever saw him weep." When he
delivered his eloquent eulogy on Lincoln in Boston, he said, "That
speech, uttered on the field of Gettysburg, and now sanctified by the
martyrdom of its author, is a monumental act. In the modesty of his
nature, he said, 'The world will little note, nor long remember, what we
say here; but it can never forget what they did here.'
"He was mistaken. The world noted at once what he said, and will never
cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the
speech. Ideas are more than battles."
And so the great slavery pioneer and the great emancipator will go down
in history together. How the world worships heroic manhood! Those who,
with sweet and unselfish natures, seek not their own happiness, but are
ready to die if need be for the right and the truth!
Sumner aided in those three grand amendments to the Constitution, the
thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth. "Neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall
have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any
place subject to their jurisdiction.... All persons born or naturalized
in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are
citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No
State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges
or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State
deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process
of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal
protection of the laws.... The right of citizens of the United States to
vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any
State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
In June, 1866, Mr. Sumner came home to say good-bye to his dying mother.
True to her noble womanhood, she urged that he should not be sent for,
lest the country could not spare him from his work. Beautiful
self-sacrifice of woman! Heaven can possess nothing more angelic. O
mother, wife, and loved one, know thine unlimited powers, and hold them
forever for the ennobling of men!
When Mrs. Sumner was buried, her son turned away sorrowfully, and
exclaimed, "I have now no home." He had a house in Washington, where he
had lived for many years, but it was only home to him where a
sweet-faced and sweet-voiced woman loved him.
In 1869, Mr. Sumner made his remarkable speech on the "Alabama" claims,
which for a time caused some bitter feeling in England. This vessel,
built at Liverpool, and manned by a British crew, was sent out by the
Confederate government, and destroyed sixty-six of our vessels, with a
loss of ten million dollars. In 1864, she was overtaken in the harbor of
Cherbourg, France, by Captain Winslow, commander of the steamer
Kearsarge, and sunk, after an hour's desperate fighting. Her commander,
Captain Raphael Semmes, was picked up by the English Deerhound, and
taken to Southampton. In the summer of 1872, a board of arbitration met
at Geneva, Switzerland, and awarded the United States over fifteen
million dollars as damages, which Great Britain paid.
On May 12, 1870, Mr. Sumner introduced his supplementary Civil-Rights
Bill, declaring that all persons, without regard to race or color, are
entitled to equal privileges afforded by railroads, steamboats, hotels,
places of amusement, institutions of learning, religion, and courts of
law. His maxim was, "Equality of rights is the first of rights."
He supported Horace Greeley for President, thus separating himself from
the Republican party, and carrying out his life-long opinion that
principle is above party. After another visit to Europe, in 1872, when
he was sixty-one years old, feeling that, the war being over and slavery
abolished, the two portions of the country should forget all animosity
and live together in harmony, he introduced a resolution in the Senate,
"That the names of battles with fellow-citizens shall not be continued
in the army register or placed on the regimental colors of the United
States."
Massachusetts hastily passed a vote of censure upon her idolized
statesman, which she was wise enough to rescind soon after. This latter
action gave Mr. Sumner great comfort. He said, "The dear old
commonwealth has spoken for me, and that is enough."
In his freestone house, full of pictures and books, overlooking
Lafayette Square in Washington, on March 11, 1874, Charles Sumner lay
dying. The day previous, in the Senate, he had complained to a friend of
pain in the left side. On the morning of the eleventh he was cold and
well nigh insensible. At ten o'clock he said to Judge Hoar, "Don't
forget my Civil-Rights Bill." Later, he said, "My book! my book is not
finished.... I am so tired! I am so tired!"
He had worked long and hard. He passed into the rest of the hereafter at
three o'clock in the afternoon. Grand, heroic soul! whose life will be
an inspiration for all coming time.
The body, enclosed in a massive casket, upon which rested a wreath of
white azaleas and lilies, was borne to the Capitol, followed by a
company of three hundred colored men and a long line of carriages. The
most noticeable among the floral gifts, says Elias Nason, in his Life of
Sumner, "was a broken column of violets and white azaleas, placed there
by the hands of a colored girl. She had been rendered lame by being
thrust from the cars of a railroad, whose charter Mr. Sumner, after
hearing the girl's story, by a resolution, caused to be revoked." From
there it was carried to the State House in Boston, and visited by at
least fifty thousand people. In the midst of the beautiful floral
decorations was a large heart of flowers, from the colored citizens of
Boston, with the words, "Charles Sumner, you gave us your life; we give
you our hearts."
Through a dense crowd the coffin was borne to Mount Auburn cemetery, and
placed in the open grave just as the sun was setting, Longfellow,
Holmes, Emerson, and other dear friends standing by. The grand old song
of Luther was sung, "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott." Strange contrast!
the quiet, unknown Harvard law student;--the great senator, doctor of
laws, author, and orator. Sumner had his share of sorrow. He lived to
see seven of his eight brothers and sisters taken away by death. He who
had longed for domestic bliss did not find it. He married, when he was
fifty-five, Mrs. Alice Mason Hooper, but the companionship did not prove
congenial, and a divorce resulted, by mutual consent.
He forgot the heart-hunger of his early years in living for the slaves
and the down-trodden, whether white or black. Through all his struggles
he kept a sublime hope. He used to say, "All defeats in a good cause are
but resting-places on the road to victory at last." He had defeats, as
do all, but he won the victory.
Well says Hon. James G. Blaine, in his "Twenty Years of Congress," "Mr.
Sumner must ever be regarded as a scholar, an orator, a philanthropist,
a philosopher, a statesman, whose splendid and unsullied fame will
always form part of the true glory of the nation."
"He belongs to all of us, in the North and in the South," said Hon. Carl
Schurz, in his eulogy delivered in Music Hall, Boston, "to the blacks
he helped to make free, and to the whites he strove to make brothers
again. On the grave of him whom so many thought to be their enemy, and
found to be their friend, let the hands be clasped which so bitterly
warred against each other. Upon that grave let the youth of America be
taught, by the story of his life, that not only genius, power, and
success, but, more than these, patriotic devotion and virtue, make the
greatness of the citizen."
[Illustration: Signature U. S. Grant]
U. S. GRANT.
What Longfellow wrote of Charles Sumner may well be applied to Grant:--
"Were a star quenched on high,
For ages would its light,
Still travelling downward from the sky,
Shine on our mortal sight.
"So when a great man dies,
For years beyond our ken
The light he leaves behind him lies
Upon the paths of men."