CHAPTER XIII
CHARLES SUMNER—A PRIVATE VIEW
The anti-slavery leaders who emerged about the same time from the groups of mediocrities enveloping them were Wendell Phillips and Charles Sumner. So essentially was Sumner an idealist that he might naturally have cast in his lot with those who preferred ideals to party politics, but other influences finally prevailed and he embarked on that career which, in due time, made him the leader of the anti-slavery forces to whom freedom seemed possible by political methods. On the whole, even among that group of men which included Andrew, I think Sumner must be put first. His province was larger; the range of his activities greater; and there were more moments than one when he was the most conspicuous figure in American public life. Of his scholarship, his legal attainments, his multifarious and accurate knowledge, his immense powers of work, everybody has heard. I do not enter upon that. The Sumner I shall speak of is the Sumner I knew.
In the account, first published in The New York Tribune, of my first meeting with Bismarck, in 1866, I said that I had heard much from Bismarck which I could not repeat. On my return, I saw Sumner. Almost instantly he asked what it was Bismarck had told me which I could not repeat in print. The question was embarrassing enough, and I answered rather slowly:
"Mr. Sumner, much of what Count Bismarck said that seemed to me confidential related to diplomatic and international matters, and you are Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. It would not have been said to you."
Sumner reflected a moment, then answered:
"I suppose you are right. I won't ask you about anything which you think you ought not to repeat. But you must consider that, notwithstanding all that Bismarck has accomplished, he is still an unknown force. My own belief is that the future of Germany lies in his hands. The man who could defy the public opinion of Europe in that business with Denmark, who could defy the public opinion and Parliament of Prussia, who could govern four years without a Budget or a majority, who could make war without supplies, and without his country behind him, and his King only a convert at the last moment to his policy—that man, though he has put Austria under his feet and Prussia in Austria's place at the head of Germany, is, in my judgment, only at the beginning of his career. He is the one supremely interesting figure in Europe at this moment. I have never met him; probably may never meet him. But it is important to me to know all I can about him. Violate no confidence, but tell me what you can. I will make no use of it except to inform my own mind. When I have to deal with Count Bismarck, I want to be able to picture to myself what manner of man he is. In diplomacy, a knowledge of men is half the battle."
This long speech was characteristic of Sumner. He was seldom brief or simple. His mind overflowed. In private, as in public, he was oratorical. The sentences, as they came from his lips, seemed to have passed through a mould. He spoke with a model before him. The most sincere of men he was never content to be himself and nobody else. In the murmur of the flowing periods he often uttered, you heard echoes of Cicero, of Bossuet, of Burke. Perhaps it was true of him—as Emerson said, not of him—that his library overloaded his wit. He moved as if in armour; a mixed but apt metaphor. The chair in which he sat was a platform, and his one listener was an audience. He neglected, in his private talk, none of the arts of the rhetorician. Whoever has heard Sumner in the Senate or in Faneuil Hall must remember the imposing presence of the man; his stature: and the leonine head with its waving black mane which every moment he tossed from his forehead, only to have it fall again half over his eyes. The strong features stood out sharply, the eyes were alight, the lips moulded into plastic form the most stubborn sentences, and the whole blended into one expression after another at the will of the speaker; each expression the visible image of his thought. He was so intent on bending his audience to his will that he used without stint every weapon at his command.
In private, all this was a little overwhelming. As it comes back to me in memory, my view of it is probably more critical than it was while I sat and looked and listened. But it still seems to me extremely fine. In England—the country of all others where simplicity counts for most—Sumner was thought emphatic; and the English do not like emphasis, but they liked Sumner. He was first here as a young man, in 1838 and 1840, when he was still in the late 'thirties; and these mannerisms were presumably less mannered, or less aggressive. But the men and women whom Sumner then came to know were men and women who dwelt on the heights. I suppose the average of serious culture at that time in that class was at least as high as it is now. They liked a man with a full mind. Sumner had that; and he poured it out in a flood.
Macaulay had taught his set, or the several sets to which he more or less belonged, to endure conversation which took the form of monologue and rivalled the laborious accuracy of a cyclopædia. People suffered under him. Lady Holland and Hayward and Lord Melbourne and others rebelled, but there were not many who rebelled. Sumner's path had therefore been made plain, nor was he dogmatic in Macaulay's way. He was human and his enthusiasms were human, and he was sympathetic.
But when Sumner, in 1869, made his indirect Claims speech in the Senate, seeking to induce the Government to demand from England indirect damages for the depredations of the Alabama, his popularity in this country came to a sudden end. His best friends were those who resented this speech most hotly; and Mr. Bright most of all. To Mr. Bright I once undertook to defend Sumner or to explain him, for I thought he had been misunderstood. But Mr. Bright would not have it. "The only defence is silence," he exclaimed, and he was the more angry when I said: "That will do for an epigram." And we never referred to it again.