The tide of history and the tide of mortality were running meanwhile their inexorable courses. Two powerful parties, the Whig and the American, had foundered on the tumultuous sea of public opinion. A new political organization, the Republican, had arisen instead to resist the extension of slavery to national territory. Death too was busy. Preston S. Brooks and his uncle had vanished in the grave. Harper’s Ferry had become freedom’s Balaklava, and John Brown had mounted from a Virginia gallows to the throne and the glory of martyrdom. Sumner was not able to take up the task which his hands had dropped until the troublous winter of 1859-60. Those four fateful years of suffering had not abated his hatred of slavery. That hatred and the Puritanical sternness and intolerance of his nature had on the contrary intensified his temper and purpose as an anti-slavery leader. He was then in personal appearance the incarnation of iron will and iron convictions. His body nobly planned and proportioned was a fit servant of his lofty and indomitable mind. All the strength and resources of both he needed in the national emergency which then confronted the Republic. For the supreme crisis of a seventy years’ conflict of ideas and institutions was at hand. At every door and on every brow sat gloom and apprehension.
There was light on but one difficult way, the way of national righteousness. In this storm-path of the Nation Sumner planted his feet. Thick fogs were before and above him, a wild chaotic sea of doubt and dread raged around him, but he hesitated not, neither swerved to the right hand nor to the left. Straight on and up he moved, calling through the rising tumult and the fast falling darkness to his groping and terrified countrymen to follow him.
Nothing is settled which is not settled right, I hear him saying, high above the breaking storm of civil strife. Peace, ever enduring peace, comes only to that nation which puts down sin, and lifts up righteousness. Kansas he found still denied admission to the Union, he presented her case and arraigned her oppressors, in one of the great speeches of his life. Where-ever liberty needed him, there he was, the knight without fear or reproach. From platform and press and Senate he flung himself, during those final decisive months of 1860, into the thickest of the battle. No uncertainty vexed his mind and conscience. Whatever other questions admitted of conciliatory treatment he was sure that the slavery question admitted of none. With him there was to be no further compromise with the evil, not an inch more of concessions would he grant it. Here he took his stand, and from it nothing and no one were able to budge him. If disunion and civil war were crouching in the rough way of the Nation’s duty, the Republic was not to turn aside into easier ways to avoid them. It should on the contrary, regardless of consequences, seek to re-establish itself in justice and liberty.
He recognized, however, amid the excitement of the times with all his old-time clarity of vision the constitutional limitations of the Reform. He did not propose at this stage of the struggle to touch slavery within the states, because Congress had not the power. To the utmost verge of the Constitution be pushed his uncompromising opposition to it. Here he drew up his forces, ready to cross the Rubicon of the slave-power whenever justificatory cause arose. Such he considered to be the uprising of the South in rebellion. Rebellion with him cancelled the slave covenants of the Constitution and discharged the North from their further observance.
He was at last untrammelled by constitutional conditions and limitations, was free to carry the War into Africa. “Carthago est delenda” was thenceforth ever on his lips. Mr. Lincoln and the Republican party started out to save the Union with slavery. It is the rage now, I know, to extol his marvellous sagacity and statesmanship. And I too will join in the panegyric of his great qualities. But here he was not infallible. For when he issued his Emancipation Proclamation, the South too was weighing the military necessity of a similar measure. Justice was Sumner’s solitary expedient, right his unfailing sagacity. Of no other American statesman can they be so unqualifiedly affirmed. They are indeed his peculiar distinction and glory. Here he is the transcendent figure in our political history. And yet, he was no fanatical visionary, Utopian dreamer, but a practical moralist in the domain of politics. When president and party turned a deaf ear to him and his simple straightforward remedy to try their own, he did not break with them. On the contrary foot to foot and shoulder to shoulder he kept step with both as far as they went. Where they halted he would not stop. Stuck as the wheels of State were, during those dreadful years in the mire and clay of political expediency and pro-slavery Hunkerism, he appealed confidently to that large, unknown quantity of courage and righteousness, dormant in the North, to set the balked wheels again moving.
An ardent Peace advocate, he nevertheless threw himself enthusiastically into the uprising against the Disunionist. Not to fight then he saw was but to provoke more horrible woes, to prevent which the man of Peace preached war, unrelenting war. He was Anglo-Saxon enough, Puritan and student of history enough to be sensible of the efficacy of blood and iron, at times, in the cure of intolerable ills. But his was no vulgar war for the mere ascendancy of his section in the Union. It was rather a holy crusade against wrong and for the supremacy and perpetuity of liberty in America.
As elephants shy and shuffle before a bridge which they are about to cross, so performed our saviors before emancipation and colored troops. Emancipation and colored troops were the powder and ball which Providence had laid by the side of our guns. Sumner urged incessantly upon the administration the necessity of pouring this providential broadside into the ranks of the foe. This was done at last and treason staggered and fell mortally hurt.
The gravest problem remained, however, to be solved. The riddle of the southern sphinx awaited its Oedipus. How ought local self-government to be reconstituted in the old slave states was the momentous question to be answered at close of the war. Sumner had his answer, others had their answer. His answer he framed on the simple basis of right. No party considerations entered into his straightforward purpose. He was not careful to enfold within it any scheme or suggestion looking to the ascendancy of his section. It was freedom alone that he was solicitious of establishing, the supremacy of democratic ideas and institutions in the new-born nation. He desired the ascendancy of his section and party so far only as they were the real custodians of national justice and progress. God knows whether his plan was better than the plans of others except in simpleness and purity of aim. Lincoln had his plan, Johnson his, Congress its own. Sumner’s had what appears to me might have evinced it, on trial, of superior virtue and wisdom, namely, the element of time, indefinite time as a factor in the work of reconstruction. But it is impossible to speak positively on this point. His scheme was rejected and all discussion of it becomes therefore nugatory.
Negro citizenship and suffrage he championed not to save the political power of his party and section, but as a duty which the republic owes to the weakest of her children because of their weakness. Equality before the law is, in fact, the only adequate defense which poverty has against property in modern civilized society. Well did Mr. Sumner understand this truth, that wrong has a fatal gift of metamorphosis, its ability to change its form without losing its identity. It had shed in America, Negro slavery. It would reappear as Negro serfdom unless placed in the way of utter extinction. He had the sagacity to perceive that equality before the law could alone avert a revival under a new name of the old slave power and system. He toiled therefore in the Senate and on the platform to make equality before the law the master principle in the social and political life of America.
As his years increased so increased his passion for justice and equality. He was never weary of sowing and resowing in the laws of the Nation and in the mind of the people the grand ideas of the Declaration of Independence. This entire absorption in one loftly purpose lent to him a singular aloofness and isolation in the politics of the times. He was not like other political leaders. He laid stress on the ethical side of statesmanship, they emphasized the economical. He was chiefly concerned about the rights of persons, they about the rights of property. Such a great soul could not be a partisan. Party with him was an instrument to advance his ideas, and nothing more. As long as it proved efficient, subservient to right, he gave to it his hearty support.