Now the one man who was not on the defensive, who was not content to merely stay the forward progress of slavery, but insisted on driving it back into the Gulf and ultimately into the sea, to be drowned forever, was Charles Sumner, with his "Carthago est delenda." His favourite phrase was "freedom is national, slavery is sectional." Burke himself, depicting the sufferings of India, scarcely surpassed Sumner's speech on the devastation of Kansas by outlaws and guerrillas. Commenting upon the fact that a company of armed slave owners had crossed the borders at night, and destroyed the homes of a group of Northern settlers, Sumner said: "Border incursions, which in barbarous lands fretted and harried an exposed people, are here renewed, with this peculiarity, that our border robbers do not simply levy blackmail and drive off a few cattle, they do not seize a few persons and sweep them away into captivity, like the African slave-traders whom we brand as tyrants, but they commit a succession of deeds in which border sorrows and African wrongs are revived together on American soil, while the whole territory is enslaved. I do not dwell on the anxieties of families exposed to sudden assault, and lying down to rest with the alarms of war ringing in the ears, not knowing that another day may be spared them. Throughout this bitter winter, with the thermometer thirty degrees below zero, the citizens of Lawrence have slept under arms, with sentinels pacing. In vain do we condemn the cruelties of another age—the refinement of torture, the rack and thumbscrew of the Inquisition; for kindred outrages disgrace these borders. Murder stalks, assassination skulks in the tall grass; where a candidate for the Legislature was gashed with knives and hatchets, and after weltering in blood on the snow-clad earth, trundled along with gaping wounds to fall dead before the face of his wife."
With speeches like these, Sumner attacked slavery. The edge of his argument was keen, but his blows had also the power of sledgehammers. The Southern leaders were in a frenzy of anger. Harriet Martineau said of the situation that from 1830 to 1850, by general agreement, men in Congress referred to slavery under their breath, believing that only by silence could the Union be preserved. Now came a man who believed that silence was criminal, who would not be bullied, and would be heard, who believed in the Golden Rule, insisted on the Declaration of Independence, and who, in the name of freedom that was national, wished to destroy the Fugitive Slave Law and bring about the immediate and unconditional emancipation of all slaves on the ground.
When two opposing gases come together, an explosion is inevitable. One day in 1856, after the adjournment of the Senate, a Southern member of Congress entered the Chamber, and finding Sumner seated, with his legs under an iron desk screwed to the floor, and, therefore, helpless for defense, with a heavy walking-stick the assailant beat the powerless man into insensibility, two of his friends protecting him from those who would interfere in his murderous assault. Having lost enough blood to soak through the carpet and stain the very floor, unconscious, and hovering between life and death, Sumner was carried to a sofa, thence to his hotel. From that time on the scholar endured a living death. He was carried to Paris, where Dr. Brown-Sequard tried "the fire cure" upon the spine. But for years his desk was vacant. Massachusetts insisted that the empty seat should proclaim to the world her abhorrence of the barbarism that, unequal to intellectual debate, betakes itself to clubs and murder. Later on Sumner did return to his seat, but he was broken in health, and to the end was tortured with pain. Nevertheless, despite all the physical distresses, he remained the Puritan in politics, adhering inflexibly to his old ideals of liberty. The great lesson of Sumner's life is the importance of fidelity to conviction and singleness of purpose. All Sumner's speeches in Congress, all his lectures on the platform, his appeals to the people of the North during the years when he travelled incessantly, addressing great crowds all over the land, had a single theme, "Liberty is national, Slavery is sectional; Liberty must be established, Slavery must be destroyed." He had his faults and limitations, but men without faults are generally men without force. Limitations are like banks to a river; they increase the strength of the current for a mill wheel. Sumner's concentration made his enemies call him a narrow man and a fanatic. But Paul was narrow when he said, "This one thing I do." Luther was narrow when he nailed his theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. Garrison was narrow and a fanatic when he said, "I will not equivocate, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard." Rushing between the cliffs of its banks, the Rhine has power through confinement; spreading out over the plains of North Germany, the Rhine becomes a mere marsh, laden with miasm, blown to and fro with the winds.
The tallow candle is small, while the summer lightning flashes across the midnight sky. But for the purpose of studying a guide book in the dark, one lucifer match is worth a sky full of lightning.
Sumner had the courage of his convictions; he was brave as a lion. Having no physical fear, he was devoid also of moral fear. He had the foresight of far-off things, and could look beyond to-day's defeat to the coming victory for his cause. He had many bitter enemies. His intolerance and intellectual arrogance offended men. When a friend said to President Grant, "Sumner is a skeptic; I fear he does not believe in the Bible," Grant's instant retort was, "Certainly he does not; he did not write it."
But we can forgive much to a man who sacrificed much, and endured the murderous cross of cruelty, obloquy and shame. A lonely and companionless man, at the end, he trod the wine-press of sorrow in solitude and isolation. He had no woman's love to heal his wounded spirit. His one support was the cause he loved. To this cause he clung with a tenacity that was as sublime as it was pathetic. The last time he opened his eyes it was to repeat unconsciously the dearest thoughts of his life, "All humanity is my country." "Take care of my civil rights bill."
When long time has passed, many other great names will pass out of view like tapers that have burned down to the socket. But the name and memory of this Puritan will probably survive, as the highest type of the scholar toiling in the heroic age of the Republic.