Chapter 4 CHARLES SUMNER THE APPEAL TO EDUCATED MEN

In every country and time, the era of national peril has been the creative era for the intellect. The eloquence of Greece was at its best when Philip attacked Athens and Demosthenes defended its liberties. Dante's poems were born of the collision between the despots who sought to enslave Florence, and the patriots who dreamed of democracy. Milton's songs were written during the English Revolution, when the Puritan, seeking to diffuse the good things of life, and the Cavalier, who wished to monopolize the earth's treasure, came into a deadly collision.

In accordance with that principle it seems natural to expect that the scholars of the Republic should do their best work during the era of agitation, when the national intellect was white hot, and public excitement burned by day and night. The anti-slavery epoch, therefore, was the Augustan Era of American literature, when the historians, poets and philosophers lent distinction to American literature. At that time Motley was writing his "History of the Netherlands"; Prescott, his "History of Mexico and Spain"; Whittier, his songs of slavery and freedom; Lowell was the satirist of the debate, and was writing his "Biglow Papers," and Emerson, the philosopher, was undermining the foundations and shaking the principles of slavery, even as Samson pulled down the temple of the olden time.

Emerson, the philosopher, did the thinking, and furnished the intellectual implements to the abolitionists. Beginning his career as a preacher, he resigned his position, moved to Concord, and dwelt apart from men, but "as he mused, the fire burned." Easily our first man of American letters, he is among the first essayists of all ages and climes. Essentially, however, he was a man of intellect, an American Plato, "a Greek head screwed upon Yankee shoulders," to use Holmes' expression. His essay upon "The American Scholar," and his book on "Nature," brought him fame in England, and invitations to lecture before their colleges. Early in his career he won the friendship of Arnold of Rugby, of Matthew Arnold the son, of Arthur Hugh Clough, and of Thomas Carlyle. He returned from his honours in England to find himself the centre of the intellectual movement of New England. A number of younger men gathered around him, until Emerson's group at Concord became like unto Goethe's group at Weimar, and Coleridge's in London. During the late forties American educators, orators and statesmen began to quote the striking sentences from Emerson. Little by little it came about that the fighters went to Emerson as to an arsenal for their intellectual weapons. His first notable contribution to abolitionism was his "Story of the West India Emancipation." Then came his "Essay on the Fugitive Slave Law," his speech on the Assault on Mr. Sumner, his writings on Kansas, and on John Brown. Few men have had such power to condense a statement of philosophy into a single epigram. Grant once said of his soldiers that while each man took aim for himself, Winchester slew all the thousands. Not otherwise, hundreds of orators and reformers went up and down the land attacking slavery, but while the voices were many, the argument was one, and Emerson for a time did the speaking for the abolitionists.

What Emerson stated in pure white light, Whittier made popular through his poems of Slavery and Freedom. By way of pre?minence he was the poet of the abolition movement, and the Sir Galahad among our singers. Reared among the Friends, he had the simplicity of the Quaker, but the solidity and massiveness of the fighting Puritan. Strange as it may seem, he was at once the poet of peace, insisting upon the crime of war, and the poet of freedom, insisting upon the destruction of slavery. The fire and glow, the moral earnestness, the spiritual passion of Whittier, are best illustrated in his "Lost Occasion," and "Ichabod." At length the newspapers of the North took up his work. For some years before the war broke out, scarcely a month passed by without a new poem of liberty by Whittier. Soon these poems that were published in the newspapers were recited in the schools by the children, quoted in the pulpits by the preachers, and used by the orators as feathers for their arrows. Once Wendell Phillips concluded an impassioned oration by reciting one of Whittier's stanzas, when a man in the audience shouted, "That arrow went home!" to which Wendell Phillips answered, "Yes, and I have a quiver full of arrows, every one of which was made by a man of peace,-John Greenleaf Whittier." If Emerson's philosophy was like the diffused white daylight that makes clear the landscape for an army, Whittier's occasional poems like "Ichabod" were thunderbolts that blasted forever all compromise and expediency.

Sometimes what the essayist fails to achieve ridicule easily accomplishes. James Russell Lowell was the satirist of the abolition movement. With biting scorn and irony he laughed men out of narrowness, ignorance, and selfishness. During the last epoch in his career Lowell achieved world-wide fame as a diplomat, and was universally admired as the all round man of letters. But now that he has gone, in retrospect, the historian perceives that the first era of Lowell's career was the influential era. He was the Milton of the anti-slavery epoch, as Lincoln was its Cromwell. His influence in England, in developing an anti-slavery sentiment there, was, if possible, more influential than in the home country. The great English editor, William Stead, tells us that he owes to Lowell's message the influences that made him an editor and a reformer. In the critical moments of his life he found in Lowell the inspiration and support that he found in no other books, save in Carlyle's "Cromwell" and the Bible. "In Russia, in Ireland, in Rome, and in prison, Lowell's poems have been my constant companions." The poet used the story of Moses emancipating the Hebrew slaves as an illustration of the abolitionist as the unknown leader whom God would raise up to lead the three million black men out of Southern slavery. "What God did for the Egyptian bondsmen, he believed God would do; because what God was, God is. He goes on:-

"From what a Bible can a man choose his text to-day! A Bible which needs no translation; and which no priestcraft can close from the laity,-the open volume of the world, upon which, with a pen of sunshine and destroying fire, the inspired Present is even now writing the annals of God. Methinks the editor who should understand his calling, and be equal thereto, would truly deserve that title that Homer bestows upon princes. He would be the Moses of our nineteenth century; and whereas the old Sinai, silent now, is but a common mountain, stared at by the elegant tourist, and crawled over by the hammer of the geologist, he must find his tables of the new law here among factories and cities in this wilderness of sin, called the progress of civilization, and be the captain of our exodus into the Canaan of a truer social order."

Certain stanzas of Lowell, also, were quoted even more widely, and were ever upon the lips of college students. Many a soldier boy who went to battle from the forest and factory, the fields and the mines, scarcely knew that his inspiration-like Phillip's oratory-was embodied in Lowell's poem, "The Present Crisis":-

"Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,

In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;

Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,

Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,

And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

"Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record

One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word;

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,-

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own."

Then came Charles Sumner, the scholar in politics, to make practical the student's message. Daniel Webster's defense of Massachusetts in his reply to Hayne, and his wonderful eloquence in the years which followed that first great address, lifted the old Bay State into unique pre?minence in the Senate: when, therefore, Webster left the Senate and entered the cabinet of Millard Fillmore, the North and the South alike asked, with intense interest, who should succeed the defender of the Constitution. That no dramatic interest might be lacking when, in 1851, Charles Sumner entered the Senate chamber to take the oath of office, it came about that Henry Clay, the great Compromiser, left the Senate, going out at one door, on the very day that Conscience, in the person of this Puritan, entered it by the other door. John C. Calhoun, inflexible, iron to the end, adhering tenaciously to his doctrine of secession, had just died, quite unconscious of the fact that his speeches held the explosives that were to shatter the South and destroy half a million of his beloved people. Clay, too, was death-stricken, and with great pathos referred to himself as "a stag scarred by spears, worried by wounds, dragging his mutilated body to his lair to lie down and die." Webster was now gray and broken, with the shadow of the eclipse already drawing near. In such a moment Charles Sumner began his career by an appeal to the "everlasting yea" and the "everlasting nay."-"I desire to speak to-day of some laws greater than any passed in this capital or this country; older than America, older than India-I mean the laws of God."

Hitherto slavery had been the aggressor, crowding into Texas, edging into Missouri, with bullets forcing its way into Kansas. Freedom had always been on the defensive. Now all was changed, with the coming of a man whose watchword was "Slavery must be destroyed; liberty must be preserved." That cold body called the Senate became immediately conscious of the new influence that entered into the very being of the government, like iron into the rich blood of the physical system. Charles Sumner made it clear from the beginning that the movement against slavery was from the Everlasting Arm. With expediency he had nothing to do, but only with eternal right and eternal wrong. One day Daniel Webster reminded his young successor of the importance of looking on the other side, indicating that a shield that was gold on one side might at least be silver on the other, to which Sumner replied, "There is no other side." This Boston scholar became a voice for law, "whose seat is the bosom of God, and whose speech is the melody of the world." These eternal laws of God rose up to stay the progress of slavery like the beetling granite cliffs of Maine, that send forth their voice to the onrushing tides, saying, "Here stay your proud waves-thus far, and no farther."

Ancestry, opportunity and events all conspired to equip Charles Sumner with those implements that make man great. Like Phillips, he was a descendant of the early settlers of Boston. His father led the men who delivered Garrison out of the hands of the mob, and who told the excited populace that unless Boston was careful "our children's heads will be broken by cannon-balls." The plastic, critical hours of his youth were spent in Harvard College and in the law office of Judge Story. Never interested in philosophy and metaphysics, he was surpassed by few as a master of the humanities, general literature, and the story of the rise and progress of democracy and free institutions. Not a man of genius, Charles Sumner was gifted with talent of a very high order. He had, what is perhaps better than genius, a capacity for sustained labour and prodigious industry. He did nothing by halves. In his chosen realm he became a master of the details of every movement related to free institutions, since the days of the republics of Greece and Switzerland, Holland and England. Long after other students had blown out their lights, Charles Sumner's window was still flaming. At a very early epoch he exhibited his tenacity of will and his constitutional inability to change his mind. Once he planned with a companion to walk to Boston on Saturday morning, starting at half-past seven. When the hour struck, a snow-storm was raging. But having decided to go to Boston, to Boston the student went alone, floundering through the blizzard. Snow-drifts were little things, but changing his plan was an impossible thing. The centre of his character, about which all else revolved, was a certain axis of pride and self-esteem, which may be pardoned, perhaps, in view of the fact that the world takes a man largely upon his own estimate of personal worth.

In those days the atmosphere of Boston was charged with enthusiasm for education and the humanities. Among young Sumner's friends were Prescott, who was writing the history of Spain and Mexico; Bancroft, who was outlining his history of the United States; Story, the jurist; Horace Mann, the educator; Dr. Howe, the father of the movement for the education of the deaf and dumb; Emerson, Longfellow, Channing and Whittier-all were not simply friends but correspondents of Charles Sumner.

Nor must we forget the Boston of earlier days, the Boston of Adams, and Otis, of Warren and Quincy. In such a city, surrounded by the noblest traditions of patriotism, stimulated by the greatest group of scholars that the Republic has produced, Charles Sumner passed his early manhood. Then, remembering that Edward Everett had fitted himself for his work in Harvard University by four years abroad, Sumner, in his twenty-seventh year, went to Europe. He spent five months in Germany, where the spirits of Goethe, Richter and Luther lingered upon the scene. In Paris he studied French, French art, French literature, French philosophy, and finally attended the debates in the French Parliament, examining the problems with all the care of a member. He lingered long in England, where he was welcomed and lionized by the foremost men of letters, science, philosophy, as well as by the leading clergymen and statesmen of London. He was an honoured guest not at some, but "at most of the country seats of England and Scotland." He travelled the circuits as the companion of the greatest English judges, Vaughan, Parke and Alderson. He met on a familiar footing Macaulay and Grote, Carlyle and Jeffrey, Sidney Smith and Wordsworth. But his great year was in Italy, in the Eternal City, the city of C?sar and Cicero, the city of Horace and Virgil. In all, Sumner spent thirty years in preparation for his labour. Few men in American politics have had a wider horizon, a better equipment in history and literature, or have known so intimately all the great men in the world of his own generation who were worth knowing. He went away to Europe an American; he returned a universal man, a citizen of the world.

Not until 1845, when he was thirty-four years of age, did a really great opportunity come to Sumner. Boston at that far-off day made much of the Fourth of July, and looked forward to the holiday as the great event of the year. During the previous autumn the mayor and aldermen of the city invited Sumner to deliver the oration. Webster made John Adams say, "When we are in our graves, our children will celebrate the day with song and story, with oration and pageant, and the explosion of cannon, and greet it with tears of joy and exultation." But unfortunately the speeches of that time had degenerated into false rhetoric, full of insincerity. In his oration, Sumner left the beaten track and plunged into an unknown way. His theme was the crime of war. He attacked his city and his country for spending millions upon fortifications in the harbour. He affirmed that the best protection of a nation was not dead stones but living patriots and heroes. He called the roll of the great wars of history, and found only one or two, like our Revolution, that were really justifiable. He defined war as the temporary repeal of all the ten commandments, and an enthronement of all the crimes.

In retrospect we know that Sumner overstated his case. His argument against physical force would forbid the police in great cities, the militia on the frontier, and would leave communities exposed to the ravages of brigands on land and pirates by sea. But for the most part, Sumner's argument in favour of peace was sound. To-day all civilized countries are coming to recognize war as a blunder, since questions of justice cannot be settled by brute force.

When we consider that France is an armed camp, Germany and Austria countries of bristling bayonets, that three years at the most critical epoch of the boy's life are consumed in a camp exposed to all manner of temptations and dangers, at the very time when the youth should be mastering his trade or his profession, war seems the capitalization of all the possible follies and wastes. The peasants of Europe plough, each carrying a soldier upon his back. The brick-mason builds, but staggers up the ladder with a heavier load than bricks,-the soldier upon his back. The symbols of nations are still the lion, the eagle and the wolf. Some political leaders even yet talk about the necessity of an occasional war to put boys upon their mettle, as if invention, the building of railways, the founding of cities, the fighting of economic and social wrongs would not put a man upon his mettle! To put a German on one side of a fence and a Frenchman on the other, and have one peasant empty his shotgun into the bowels of the other is about as noble as going out into a yard and shooting a Jersey cow. The best way to protect a nation is to build boys into men, through the processes of productive industry. Machine gun and dreadnought will soon be as obsolete in the presence of arbitration and the court at the Hague as an ox-cart is obsolete in the presence of a Pullman palace car.

Wendell Phillips once said that Lord Bacon had a right to lay his hand on the steam engine and say to Watt: "This engine is mine; I gave you the method." So Charles Sumner, after sixty-five years, has a right to stand yonder at the entrance of the Parliament House of Peace, now being completed in the capital of Holland, and say: "I laid the foundation stones of this structure and started a war against war." This oration of Sumner's on "The True Grandeur of Nations" made him a most unpopular figure at home, but Europe soon called for his speech. It was translated into many languages, two hundred and fifty-thousand copies were published and sold, and for the time Sumner was the most talked of man of the year.

Now the one man who was not on the defensive, who was not content to merely stay the forward progress of slavery, but insisted on driving it back into the Gulf and ultimately into the sea, to be drowned forever, was Charles Sumner, with his "Carthago est delenda." His favourite phrase was "freedom is national, slavery is sectional." Burke himself, depicting the sufferings of India, scarcely surpassed Sumner's speech on the devastation of Kansas by outlaws and guerrillas. Commenting upon the fact that a company of armed slave owners had crossed the borders at night, and destroyed the homes of a group of Northern settlers, Sumner said: "Border incursions, which in barbarous lands fretted and harried an exposed people, are here renewed, with this peculiarity, that our border robbers do not simply levy blackmail and drive off a few cattle, they do not seize a few persons and sweep them away into captivity, like the African slave-traders whom we brand as tyrants, but they commit a succession of deeds in which border sorrows and African wrongs are revived together on American soil, while the whole territory is enslaved. I do not dwell on the anxieties of families exposed to sudden assault, and lying down to rest with the alarms of war ringing in the ears, not knowing that another day may be spared them. Throughout this bitter winter, with the thermometer thirty degrees below zero, the citizens of Lawrence have slept under arms, with sentinels pacing. In vain do we condemn the cruelties of another age-the refinement of torture, the rack and thumbscrew of the Inquisition; for kindred outrages disgrace these borders. Murder stalks, assassination skulks in the tall grass; where a candidate for the Legislature was gashed with knives and hatchets, and after weltering in blood on the snow-clad earth, trundled along with gaping wounds to fall dead before the face of his wife."

With speeches like these, Sumner attacked slavery. The edge of his argument was keen, but his blows had also the power of sledgehammers. The Southern leaders were in a frenzy of anger. Harriet Martineau said of the situation that from 1830 to 1850, by general agreement, men in Congress referred to slavery under their breath, believing that only by silence could the Union be preserved. Now came a man who believed that silence was criminal, who would not be bullied, and would be heard, who believed in the Golden Rule, insisted on the Declaration of Independence, and who, in the name of freedom that was national, wished to destroy the Fugitive Slave Law and bring about the immediate and unconditional emancipation of all slaves on the ground.

When two opposing gases come together, an explosion is inevitable. One day in 1856, after the adjournment of the Senate, a Southern member of Congress entered the Chamber, and finding Sumner seated, with his legs under an iron desk screwed to the floor, and, therefore, helpless for defense, with a heavy walking-stick the assailant beat the powerless man into insensibility, two of his friends protecting him from those who would interfere in his murderous assault. Having lost enough blood to soak through the carpet and stain the very floor, unconscious, and hovering between life and death, Sumner was carried to a sofa, thence to his hotel. From that time on the scholar endured a living death. He was carried to Paris, where Dr. Brown-Sequard tried "the fire cure" upon the spine. But for years his desk was vacant. Massachusetts insisted that the empty seat should proclaim to the world her abhorrence of the barbarism that, unequal to intellectual debate, betakes itself to clubs and murder. Later on Sumner did return to his seat, but he was broken in health, and to the end was tortured with pain. Nevertheless, despite all the physical distresses, he remained the Puritan in politics, adhering inflexibly to his old ideals of liberty. The great lesson of Sumner's life is the importance of fidelity to conviction and singleness of purpose. All Sumner's speeches in Congress, all his lectures on the platform, his appeals to the people of the North during the years when he travelled incessantly, addressing great crowds all over the land, had a single theme, "Liberty is national, Slavery is sectional; Liberty must be established, Slavery must be destroyed." He had his faults and limitations, but men without faults are generally men without force. Limitations are like banks to a river; they increase the strength of the current for a mill wheel. Sumner's concentration made his enemies call him a narrow man and a fanatic. But Paul was narrow when he said, "This one thing I do." Luther was narrow when he nailed his theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. Garrison was narrow and a fanatic when he said, "I will not equivocate, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard." Rushing between the cliffs of its banks, the Rhine has power through confinement; spreading out over the plains of North Germany, the Rhine becomes a mere marsh, laden with miasm, blown to and fro with the winds.

The tallow candle is small, while the summer lightning flashes across the midnight sky. But for the purpose of studying a guide book in the dark, one lucifer match is worth a sky full of lightning.

Sumner had the courage of his convictions; he was brave as a lion. Having no physical fear, he was devoid also of moral fear. He had the foresight of far-off things, and could look beyond to-day's defeat to the coming victory for his cause. He had many bitter enemies. His intolerance and intellectual arrogance offended men. When a friend said to President Grant, "Sumner is a skeptic; I fear he does not believe in the Bible," Grant's instant retort was, "Certainly he does not; he did not write it."

But we can forgive much to a man who sacrificed much, and endured the murderous cross of cruelty, obloquy and shame. A lonely and companionless man, at the end, he trod the wine-press of sorrow in solitude and isolation. He had no woman's love to heal his wounded spirit. His one support was the cause he loved. To this cause he clung with a tenacity that was as sublime as it was pathetic. The last time he opened his eyes it was to repeat unconsciously the dearest thoughts of his life, "All humanity is my country." "Take care of my civil rights bill."

When long time has passed, many other great names will pass out of view like tapers that have burned down to the socket. But the name and memory of this Puritan will probably survive, as the highest type of the scholar toiling in the heroic age of the Republic.

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