CHAPTER 1 “WE ARE BECOMING ABOLITIONISTS … FAST”
Charles Sumner was saddened, though not overly sympathetic, when he saw his first slaves in 1834 at the age of twenty-three.
Fresh out of Harvard Law School, Sumner left Boston by stagecoach at 3:30 A.M. on February 17 for his first trip to Washington, D.C. His mentors, Harvard dean and associate Supreme Court justice Joseph Story and Professor Simon Greenleaf, had suggested the trip to the nation’s capital, believing that for Sumner to excel at the law, he had to understand the way the country’s politics worked and gain a broad acquaintance with judges and government leaders. Sumner also welcomed the trip as an opportunity to spread his wings after years of painstaking classroom study and cloying and overbearing supervision from his demanding father.
The long journey, portions of which were made by steamboat and railway (Sumner’s first train ride), was tiring but exhilarating.
Departure night was so dark that Sumner, riding up front with the driver while eleven other passengers sat in the coach, did not realize until the break of dawn, ten miles from the city, that the wagon was pulled by six sturdy horses, a number Sumner marveled at in a letter to his family. Later, Sumner was the sole passenger on a “gig”—a small carriage pulled by a single horse—again riding alongside the driver “over roads nearly impassable to the best animals,” while enduring “benumbing” cold. As the driver wrestled to keep the carriage on course, Sumner—at the driver’s request—rained blows from his whip upon the horse to move the reluctant animal along, “literally working my passage … my shoulder was lame for its excessive exercise in whipping the poor brute.” Changing horses every sixteen miles, the gig arrived in Hartford near 2:00 A.M. the next day, twenty-three hours after Sumner left Boston. Another stagecoach brought Sumner to New Haven, from which he boarded a steamer to New York City.
New York’s “perpetual whirl and bustle” thrilled him. “I am now in the great Babel,” he wrote to his parents, a young man on his own in the big city. “The streets flow with throngs, as thick and pressing as those of Boston on a gala day. Carriages of all sorts are hurrying by … omnibuses and Broadway coaches … are perpetually in sight.… One must be wide awake, or be run over by some of the crowd.” Sumner then traveled by boat to Amboy, New Jersey, where he took his first train ride for nearly forty miles, “part of the way going at the rate of more than twenty miles an hour!” From there, he was on to Philadelphia and Baltimore by a combination of stage, railroad, and steamboat.
By the final leg of his exhausting six-day journey south, on a stagecoach ride from Baltimore to Washington—a stretch of only thirty-eight miles through “barren and cheerless country” that took all day over the “worst roads” Sumner had ridden upon—Sumner spotted a group of slaves toiling in a field. He appeared to view them with a combination of contempt and curiosity.
“My worst preconception of their appearance and ignorance did not fall as low as their actual stupidity,” he wrote to his parents. “They appear to be nothing more than moving masses of flesh, unendowed with any thing of intelligence above the brutes.” He concluded his reference with an ambiguous aside that may have been an indictment upon the South itself, the slave system, or the jarring sight of seeing enslaved people: “I have now an idea of the blight upon that part of the country in which they live.”
He made no other direct reference to slavery, either in that letter or any others he wrote from Washington, D.C., in 1834.
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Upon reaching Washington, Sumner immersed himself in the city’s political scene.
He settled into a routine wherein he rose at seven o’clock each morning, and after breakfast, visited a congressman or two. By late morning, he was in the Capitol building—a structure “that would look proud amidst any European palaces”—where he attended congressional debates or sat in on sessions of the Supreme Court, which met in a dark room on the lower floor, until late in the afternoon. In the evening, he often spent time with Justice Story and his legal associates and friends, dining at “well-furnished tables of the richest hotels,” excited that at these lively and invigorating sessions “no conversation is forbidden … the world and all its things are talked of.”
Sumner received a hands-on education about the legislative process and speechmaking. He sat rapt as Senator Henry Clay delivered a “splendid and thrilling” oration criticizing President Andrew Jackson, “without notes or papers of any kind … he showed feeling, to which, of course, his audience responded.” South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun employed his trademark “rugged language” to make an impression on his audience. Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster introduced Sumner to other senators and presented Sumner with his card, “which gives me access at all times to the floor.” He watched attorney Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” argue a case before the Supreme Court. He saw the original Declaration of Independence, which hung in the Patent Office, and “paid a pilgrimage to Mount Vernon on horseback.”
Sumner described Washington as a “city of magnificent distances,” and he walked for miles to take it all in, along the National Mall, up and down bustling and dust-choked Pennsylvania Avenue and the city’s other main thoroughfares—and amid the numerous slave pens and auction sites that dotted the heart of the nation’s capital.
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In fact, Washington at the time of Sumner’s first visit was the nexus for a great slave migration—a slave “trail of tears,” as it were—in which hundreds of thousands, perhaps up to one million, “Upper South” slaves, who worked in tobacco fields and as household servants in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky, were sold to labor-hungry plantation owners in the rapidly growing Deep South cotton and sugarcane states of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana.
Between 1833 and 1836 alone, more than 150,000 Upper South slaves either walked overland for hundreds of miles—usually chained together—to Lower South owners or were transported by ship down the Eastern Seaboard, around Florida, and into the gulf ports of Mobile, Alabama, or New Orleans, where they awaited purchase and another trek to expanding plantations and farms across the Deep South. In Washington, D.C., slave pens were conspicuous in the heart of the city. Large D.C. slave brokers even purchased their own ships to support the coastal slave trade. “The District of Columbia is the great mart for the sale of men,” said one antislavery activist in 1834, home to a “vast and diabolical slave trade.”
For slave owners, Washington, D.C., was the perfect location through which to transport slaves to the Deep South. Its proximity to the slave states of Virginia and Maryland gave the city ready access to thousands of slaves—and free blacks who were often illegally rounded up and sold into slavery—as well as to the Potomac River and the Atlantic coast. Moreover, slavery proponents knew that if they kept the institution of slavery visible in the nation’s capital, it would serve as a vivid symbol of their hold on the nation and the national government.
For antislavery advocates, abolitionists, and foreign guests, the city’s slave auctions and pens had the opposite effect. Most expressed disgust at the site of chained slaves trudging past the White House and Capitol. Most turned away with shame as slaves awaited sale and relocation in crowded pens near and on the National Mall, as children were torn from their parents and families were broken apart.
All of the trading activity in Washington, D.C.—chained slaves forced under guard to pens near the National Mall; auctioneers offering men and women for sale as crowd members shouted their bids; newspaper advertisements that connected buyers and sellers of slaves—would have been impossible for Charles Sumner to miss.
Yet, strangely enough, Sumner—a prolific and descriptive writer who penned numerous letters home about virtually every aspect of his Washington trip—never explicitly articulated his feelings about the presence of such slave activity in the nation’s capital.
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But he alluded to the issue, especially later in his trip.
“Signs of the deep distress of the country are received every day and proclaimed in both Houses,” he wrote to his friend Professor Greenleaf on March 3. And again to Greenleaf on March 18: “The country is in a sad condition, without a discernible sign of relief. I cannot but have a sense or feeling that things cannot continue in this pass … the very extremity of our distress shows the day of redemption to be near.” A few days later, Sumner confided to his father that, while one part of him felt “a little melancholy at leaving,” he was ready to come home. “I feel in an unnatural state [in Washington],” he said.
Sumner attributed some of his sadness at the situation in D.C. to a growing dislike for politics as the days went along. His initial ebullience waned, and his letters became more cynical as he watched the political process at work, admitting to Greenleaf that he had felt “no envy” for the fame politicians acquired and “no disposition to enter into the unweeded garden in which they are laboring, even if its gates were wide open to me.” To his father, Sumner acknowledged that the more he saw of Washington, the more he was convinced that “I shall probably never come here again. I have little desire ever to … in any capacity. Nothing I have seen of politics has made me look upon it with any feeling other than loathing.”
It is hard to imagine that Charles Sumner’s disgust for D.C. politics was separate from his feelings on slavery or the signs of slavery that surrounded him in the nation’s capital, especially since, upon his return to Boston, the twenty-four-year-old Sumner began taking a deeper interest in the subject.
Sumner’s father, Charles Pinckney Sumner, had strong antislavery sentiments, and though Charles and his father were not close, the elder Sumner’s convictions carried great sway over his son’s thinking. Young Charles denounced proslavery violence in the South, and he began reading William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. He also read abolitionist Lydia Maria Child’s An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, first published in 1833, which further convinced him of the injustice of slavery and racial discrimination in the wake of his Washington trip.
Sumner was far from an antislavery champion in his mid-twenties, but there is little doubt that his first exposure to slavery stayed with him and had an important effect on his early thinking and throughout his life; his thoughts on the injustice of slavery pepper his early letters and other writings.
In January 1836, Sumner wrote a letter to his friend Dr. Francis Lieber, whom he met on his Washington trip and who was now a professor of political economy in South Carolina—in essence, an antislavery sympathizer in the heart of slave country. Lieber had as much influence over Sumner’s early thinking on slavery as anyone. Sumner shared his sentiments on the evils of slavery and also felt compelled to tell his friend:
“We are becoming abolitionists in the North fast.”
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Not fast enough, apparently, for Europeans, who watched America’s ongoing slavery debate with contempt.
And they let Charles Sumner know about it on his first trip to Europe in the late 1830s, a pilgrimage that accelerated his antislavery education and hardened his beliefs.
After his return from Washington, Sumner practiced law and taught at Harvard Law School, but he decided to interrupt both endeavors in 1837 to embark on a long European trip and “visit those scenes memorable in literature and history, and to see … the great men that are already on stage.” The desire to cross the Atlantic had burned in Sumner “since the earlier days of memory”; such a trip would allow him to obtain knowledge of “languages … manners, customs, and institutions of other people than my own.” Against the advice of his father, Justice Story, and other friends who believed Sumner would damage his career path by embarking on a whimsical journey, Sumner departed on December 8, 1837, aboard the Albany. “I tremble with hope, anticipation, and anxiety,” he wrote as he was about to begin his European tour.
After overcoming seasickness that confined him to his cabin for a week on the early part of the voyage, Sumner recovered, relaxed, walked the decks, and engaged with other passengers. By the time the captain spied land on Christmas night, Sumner’s spirits were high, and he could not wait to go ashore. “The life of life seems to have burst upon me,” he wrote joyfully to a friend.
And indeed, Sumner did enjoy his visits to museums, palaces, libraries, drawing rooms, and cathedrals. But more memorable for him was that, for more than two years, from Paris to London to Rome to Munich to Vienna, Europeans told him repeatedly that American slavery was a disgrace unbefitting a civilized nation. People whom Sumner admired had strong abolitionist opinions and were not shy about expressing them. In London, the Duchess of Sutherland was unsurpassed among English nobility in using her position to argue against American slavery. And in Paris, Sumner met lecturer and author Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi, whom he described as a “thorough abolitionist” who was “astonished that our country will not take a lesson from the ample page of the past and eradicate slavery, as has been done in the civilized parts of Europe.”
But what gave him pause—even more than the opinions of the political, social, and academic elites in his host countries—were the things Sumner saw with his own eyes.
On a freezing January day in Paris (“My hair is so cold that I hesitate to touch it with my hand,” Sumner wrote), he attended a lecture at the Sorbonne and spotted “two or three blacks” in the audience. Sumner was surprised that they had the “easy, jaunty air of men of fashion, who were well received by their fellow students,” and even more surprised that while they were standing amid their classmates, “their color seemed to be no objection” to the group. Sumner was “glad to see this” but acknowledged that such a scenario would be unlikely in America.
It was at that moment, in France in 1838 at the age of twenty-seven—reinforced by similar scenes in Italy—that Sumner recognized the full import of what he was witnessing and reached the conclusion that would anchor his antislavery and equal rights philosophy.
In his opinion, the camaraderie displayed between students of different races at the Sorbonne could only mean one thing—“that the distance between free blacks and whites among us is derived from education, and does not exist in the nature of things.”
For the remainder of his life, in personal letters and speeches and congressional debates, Sumner would reiterate, in some form, this profound observation and link it to his assertion that the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution applied to all people equally.
By the time he returned from Europe on Sunday, May 3, 1840, Charles Sumner was convinced that American society also would be far better if slavery were abolished.
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How to accomplish that was another matter.
Sumner sympathized with the moral purpose of abolitionists, and even initially gave merit to William Lloyd Garrison’s calls to “dissolve the Union” if it could not abolish slavery. But as Sumner thought and read more about the issue, he found distasteful and counterproductive the position of Garrison and his acolytes that the Constitution was a proslavery instrument, “a covenant with death, and an agreement with Hell.”
Sumner not only disagreed with Garrison’s conclusions about the Constitution, but he also believed such language only served to array conservatives, moderates, and the country in general against the antislavery movement, even as these groups were all potential allies essential to its success. Sumner grew increasingly uncomfortable with the tone of the language used in the Liberator. “It has seemed to me often vindictive, bitter, and unchristian,” he said. “I have been openly opposed to [its] doctrines on the Union and the Constitution.”
To Sumner’s way of thinking, the Constitution was a charter of human rights, a protector of freedom, the very guarantee of equality, for all races within the borders of the United States. It codified the linchpin “self-evident” and “all men are created equal” clauses in the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution’s guarantee of a “republican form of government” applied to all men, black or white, and such a government could not exist if it embraced, or even tolerated, slavery.
In Sumner’s view, the fact that the Constitution did not even contain the word “slavery” proved that the Founders refused to let it “pollute its text,” sought to discredit the institution, and concurred with “prevailing opinion, which regarded Slavery as temporary, destined to pass away” of its own accord within a decade or two—unable to survive against the Constitution’s guarantees of freedom; the fact that the Constitution included language that banned the slave trade as of 1808 was further evidence of this. Other elements of the Constitution that clearly contradicted the principles of equality—the Three-Fifths Compromise, the insertion of a fugitive slave law—were, in Sumner’s view, essentially the same positions espoused by Madison and others—necessary compromises to placate Southern states and ensure the foundational document’s passage in the first place.
This would be the essence of the argument Sumner would make throughout his life. Indeed, no other approach made sense to him, nor could any other argument serve as a catalyst for people from many different political persuasions to join, or at least support, the antislavery movement.
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In the early 1840s, Sumner began to more fully express his thoughts on the moral wrong of extending slavery beyond the current states that allowed and depended on the institution, and on refuting the notion that blacks were inherently inferior and thus could not become citizens. He had witnessed for himself in Europe that this belief, widely held both in the North and South, was an evil canard.
Sumner questioned how those who argued in favor of black inferiority reconciled their support for the U.S. Constitution. “If it be urged that the African cannot be a citizen of the U.S., it may be asked if the Constitution was intended to apply only to the Caucasian race,” he concluded. If so, where did such limitations to one of America’s founding documents end? “Is the Indian race also excluded?” Sumner asked. “Is the Mongolian excluded?”
Sumner’s reasoning and the strength of his beliefs about the power within the Constitution to check—and perhaps end—slavery and ensure equal rights placed him in an odd position, sandwiched between conservatives and moderates, who were reluctant to tamper with the current uneasy alliance between North and South, and radicals like Garrison, who wanted to tear down the entire system and start over.
He was stung by criticism from both sides and often felt he was standing alone.
Copyright © 2024 by Stephen Puleo
