No vehemence of anti-slavery pressure, no shock of angry criticism coming from home was able to jostle him out of his fixed purpose to speak only when he was ready. Winter had gone, and spring, and still his silence remained. Summer too was almost gone before he determined to begin. Then like an August storm he burst on the Senate and the Country. “Freedom national: slavery sectional” was his theme. Like all of Mr. Sumner’s speeches, this speech was carefully written out and largely memorized. He was deficient in the qualities of the great debater, was not able usually and easily to think quickly and effectively on his feet, to give and take hard blows within the short range of extemporaneous and hand to hand encounters. Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams were pre-eminent in this species of parliamentary combat. Webster and Calhoun were powerful opponents whom it was dangerous to meet. Sumner perhaps never experienced that electric sympathy and marvellous interplay of emotion and intelligence between himself and an audience which made Wendell Phillips the unrivalled monarch of the anti-slavery platform. Sumner’s was the eloquence of industry rather than the eloquence of inspiration. What he did gave an impression of size, of length, breadth, thoroughness. He required space and he required time. These granted, he was tremendous, in many respects the most tremendous orator of the Senate and of his times.
He was tremendous on this occasion. His subject furnished the keynote and the keystone of his opposition to slavery. Garrison, Phillips, Frederick Douglass and Theodore D. Weld appealed against slavery to a common humanity, to the primary moral instincts of mankind in condemnation of its villanies. The appeal carried them above and beyond constitutions and codes to the unwritten and eternal right. Sumner appealed against it to the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence, to the spirit and letter of the Constitution, to the sentiments and hopes of the fathers, and to the early history and policy of the Country which they had founded. All were for freedom and against slavery. The reverse of all this, he contended, was error. Public opinion was error-bound, the North was error-bound, so was the South, parties and politicians were error-bound. Freedom is the heritage of the nation. Slavery had robbed it of its birthright. Slavery must be dispossessed, its extension must be resisted.
As it was in the beginning so it hath ever been, the world needs light. The great want of the times was light. So Sumner believed. This speech of his was but a repetition in a world of wrong of the fiat: “Let there be light.” With it light did indeed break on the national darkness, such light as a thunderbolt flashes, shrivelling and shivering the deep-rooted and ramified lie of the century. That speech struck a new note and a new hour on the slavery agitation in America. Never before in the Government had freedom touched so high a level. Heretofore the slave power had been arrogant and exacting. A keen observer might have then foreseen that freedom would also some day become exacting and aggressive. For its advancing billows had broken in the resounding periods and passion of its eloquent champion.
The manner of the orator on this occasion, a manner which marked all of his utterances, was that of a man who defers to no one, prefers no one to himself—the imperious manner of a man, conscious of the possession of great powers and of ability to use them. Such a man the crisis demanded. God made one American statesman without moral joints when he made Charles Sumner. He could not bend the supple hinges of the knee to the slave power, for he had none to bend. He must needs stand erect, inflexible, uncompromising, an image of Puritan intolerance and Puritan grandeur. Against his granite-like character and convictions the insolence of the South flung itself in vain.
Orator and oration revealed as in a magic mirror some things to the South, which before had seemed to it like “Birnam Wood” moving toward “high Dunsinane.” But lo, a miracle had been performed, the unexpected had suddenly happened. The insurgent moral sense of a mudsill and shopkeeping North had at last found voice and vent. With what awakening terror must the South have listened to this formidable prophecy of Sumner: “The movement against slavery is from the Everlasting Arm. Even now it is gathering its forces to be confessed everywhere. It may not yet be felt in the high places of office and power; but all who can put their ears humbly to the ground will hear and comprehend its incessant and advancing tread.”
This awakening terror of the South was not allayed by the admission of California and the mutinous execution of the Fugitive Slave Law. The temper of that section the while grew in consequence more unreasonable and arrogant. Worsted as the South clearly was in the contest with her rival for political supremacy, she refused nevertheless to modify her pretentions to political supremacy. And as she had no longer anything to lose by giving loose reins to her arrogance and pretentions, her words and actions took on thenceforth an ominously defiant and reckless character. If finally driven to the wall there lay within easy reach, she calculated, secession and a southern confederacy.
The national situation was still further complicated by the disintegration and chaos into which the two old parties were then tumbling, and by the fierce rivalries and jealousies within them of party leaders at the North. All the conditions seemed to favor southern aggression—the commission of some monstrous crime against liberty. Webster had gone to his long account, dishonored and broken-hearted. The last of the three supreme voices of the early senatorial splendor of the republic was now hushed in the grave. As those master lights, Calhoun, Webster and Clay, vanished one after another into the void, darkness and uproar increased apace.
About this time the most striking and sinister figure in American Party history loomed into greatness. Stephen A. Douglas was a curious and grim example of the survival of viking instincts in the modern office seeker. On the sea of politics he was a veritable water-dog, daring, unscrupulous, lawless, transcendently able, and transcendently heartless. The sight of the presidency moved him in much the same way as did the sight of the effete and wealthy lands of Latin Europe moved his roving, robber prototypes eleven centuries before. It stirred every drop of his sea-wolf’s blood to get possession of it.
His “Squatter Sovereignty Dogma” was in truth a pirate boat which carried consternation to many an anxious community in the free states.
It was with such an ally that the slave power undertook the task of repealing the Missouri Compromise. The organization of the northern section of the Louisiana Purchase into the territories of Kansas and Nebraska was made the occasion for abolishing the old slave line of 1820. That line had devoted all of that land to freedom. Calhoun, bold as he was, had never ventured to counsel the abrogation of that solemn covenant between the sections. The South, to his way of thinking, had got the worst of the bargain, had in fact been overreached, but a bargain was a bargain, and therefore he concluded that the slave states should stand by their plighted faith until released by the free. That which the great Nullifier hesitated to counsel, his disciples and successors dared to do. The execution of the plot was adroitly committed to the hands of Douglas, under whose leadership the movement for repeal would appear to have been started by the section which was to be injured by it. Thus the South would be rescued from the moral and political consequences of an act of bad faith in dealing with her sister section.