Charles Sumner Centenary: Historical Address / The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 14

by Archibald Henry Grimké

The Repeal fought its way through Congress during four stormy months of the winter and spring of 1854. Blows fell upon it and its authors fast and furious from Seward, Chase, Wade, Fessenden, Giddings and Gerrit Smith. But Sumner was the colossus of the hour, the flaming sword of his section. It was he who swung its ponderous broadsword and smote plot and plotters with the terrible strength of the northern giant. Such a speech, as was his “Landmarks of Freedom,” only great national crises breed. It was a volcanic upheaval of the moral throes of the times, a lavatide of argument, appeal, history and eloquence. The august rights and wrath of the northern people flashed and thundered along its rolling periods.

“Accomplish thou my manhood and thyself,” is the cry of humanity ringing forever in the soul of the reformer. He must needs bestir himself in obedience to the high behest. The performance of this task is the special mission of great men. It was without doubt Sumner’s, for he stood for the manhood of the North, of the slave, of the Republic. For this he toiled strenuously all his life long. It shines in every paragraph of that memorable speech, and of the shorter one in defence of the New England clergy made at midnight on that black Thursday of May, which closed the bitter struggle and consummated the demolition of the old slave wall.

From that time Sumner’s position became one of constantly increasing peril. Insulted, denounced, menaced by mob violence, his life was every day in jeopardy. But he did not flinch nor falter. Freedom was his master, humanity his guide. He climbed the hazardous steps to duty, heedless of the dangers in his way.

His collisions with the slave leaders and their northern allies grew thenceforth more frequent and ever fiercer. Every motion of his to gain the floor, he found anticipated and opposed by a tyrannous combination and majority, bent on depriving him of his rights as a senator. Wherever he turned he faced growing intolerance and malignity. It was only by exercising the utmost vigilance and firmness that he was able to snatch for himself and cause a hearing. Under these circumstances all the powers of the man became braced, eager, alert, determined. It was many against one, but that one was a host in himself, aroused as he then was, not only by the grandeur of his cause, but also by a keen sense of personal indignity and persecution. Whoever else did, he would not submit to senatorial insult and bondage. His rising temper began to thrust like a rapier. Scorn he matched with scorn, and pride he pitted against pride. As a regiment bristles with bayonets, so bristled his speech with facts, which thrust through and through with the merciless truth of history the arrogance and pretentions of the South. His sarcasm was terrific. His invective had the ferocity of a panther. He upon whom it sprang had his quivering flesh torn away. It was not in human nature to suffer such lacerations of the feelings and forgive and forget the author of them. The slave leaders did not forgive Sumner, nor forget their scars.

Meanwhile the plot of the national tragedy fast thickened, for as the Government at Washington had adopted the “Squatter Sovereignty” scheme of Douglas in settling the territorial question, the two sections precipitated their forces at once upon the debatable land. It was then for the first time that the two antagonistic social systems of the union came into physical collision. Showers of bullets and blood dashed from the darkening sky. Civil War had actually begun. The history of Kansas during this period is a history of fraud, violence and anarchy. Popular sovereignty, private rights and public order were all outraged by the Border Ruffians of Missouri and the slave power.

At this juncture Sumner delivered in the senate a philipic, the like of which had not before been heard in that chamber. His “Crime against Kansas” was another one of his speeches crisis born. It was an outbreak of the explosive forces of the long gathering tempest, its sharp and terrible lightning flash and stroke, the sulphurous vent of the hot surcharged heart of the North. More than one slave champion encountered during its delivery his attention, and must have recoiled from the panther-like glare and spring of his invective and rejoinder. Senator Arthur P. Butler of South Carolina was, on the whole, the most fiercely assaulted of the senatorial group. His punishment was indeed merciless. Impartial history must, however, under all the circumstances of the case, I think, adjudge it just. In that memorable struggle the Massachusetts chieftain used upon his foes not only his tomakawk, but also his scalping knife. No quarter he had received from the slave power, and none now he gave to it or its representatives.

Such a terrible arraignment of the slave power in general, and of Senator Butler in particular demanded an answer. To it, that power had but one reply, violence, the reply which wrong ever makes to right. And this Preston S. Brooks made two days after its delivery. Mr. Sumner pursuant to an early adjournment of the Senate on an announcement of the death of a member of the lower house, was busy at his desk preparing his afternoon mail, when Brooks, (who by the way was a nephew of Senator Butler) stepping in front of him and with hardly a word of warning, struck him on the head a succession of quick murderous blows with a stout walking-stick. Dazed and stunned, but impelled by the instinct of self-defense, Mr. Sumner tried to rise to grapple with his assailant, but the seat under which his long legs were thrust held him prisoner. Although fastened to the floor with iron clamps, it was finally wrenched up by the agonized struggles of Sumner. Thus released, his body bent forward and arms thrown up to protect his bleeding head, he staggered toward Brooks who continued the shower of blows until his victim fell fainting to the floor. Not then did the southern brute stay his hand, but struck again and again the prostrate and now insensible form of Mr. Sumner with a fragment of the stick.

In the midst of this frightful scene where were the overturned desk, pieces of the broken stick, scattered writing materials, and the blood-stained carpet, lay that noble figure unconscious alike of pain and of his enemies, and of the awful horror of it all. There he lay in the senate chamber of the Republic with blood on his head and face and clothing, with blood, now martyr’s blood, running from many wounds and sinking into the floor. Oh! the pity of it, but the sacrificial grandeur of it also! He was presently succored by Henry Wilson and other faithful friends, and borne to a sofa in the lobby of the Senate where doctors dressed his wounds, and thence he was carried to his lodgings. There suffering, bewildered, almost speechless, he spent the first night of the tragedy and of his long years of martyrdom.

On the wings of that tragedy Sumner rose to an enduring place in the pantheon of the nation. His life became thenceforth associated with the weal of States, his fate with the fortunes of a great people. The toast of the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table at the banquet of the Massachusetts Medical Society about this time gave eloquent expression to the general concern: “To the Surgeons of the City of Washington: God grant them wisdom! for they are dressing the wounds of a mighty empire, and of uncounted generations.” The mad act of Brooks had done for Sumner what similar madness had done for similar victims—magnified immensely his influence secured forever his position as an imposing, historic figure. Ah! it was indeed the old, wonderful story. The miracle of miracles was again performed, the good man’s blood had turned into the seed-corn of his cause.

No need to retell the tale of his long and harrowing fight for health. There were two sprains of the spine, besides the terrible blows on the head. From land to land, during four years, he passed, pursuing “the phantom of a cup that comes and goes.” As a last resort he submitted himself to the treatment by fire, to the torture of the Moxa, which Dr. Brown-Sequard pronounced “the greatest suffering that can be inflicted on mortal man.” His empty chair, Massachusetts, great mother and nurse of heroes (God give her ever in her need and the Country’s such another son) would not fill. Vacant it glared, voicing as no lips could utter her eloquent protest and her mighty purpose.