To the Memory of My Grandfather

John Be [ford

Lieutenant

in that Brave Civil War Regiment

The First Vermont Cavalry

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2016

https://archive.org/details/isbn_9781402218392

PREFACE TO THE 1989 EDITION

T he republication of this book is evidence of the continuing fascination that our Civil War holds for Americans. A few years ago it seemed that interest in the Civil War and Reconstruction periods was waning. The excessive publicity and over-commercialization of the Civil War centennial celebrations dampened popular enthusiasm, while the publication of such massive, authoritative histories as Allan Nevins’s Ordeal of the Utiion, Bruce Catton’s Centewiial History of the Civil War, and Shelby Foote’s The Cwil War: A Narrative,^ discouraged younger historians from writing their own books on the period. During the late 1960s and 197()s, when the nation’s energies were absorbed in the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the Vietnam War, the flood of books on the Civil War diminished to a trickle, and, except in the South, interest in the nineteenth-century sectional conflict seemed little more than antiquarianism.

But the last few years have witnessed a remarkable revival of interest, both popular and scholarly, in the Civil War and Reconstruction era. The number of visitors to the national battlefield parks has reached a new high, and the sharp outcry over threatened commercial encroachments on the sites of Manassas and Antietam suggests the significance that American memory attaches to these hallowed military fields. Reenactments of Civil War battles, which dropped out of fashion after the centennial years, have resumed, and each year some forty thousand buffs, young and old, put on uniforms of blue or gray, pick up their muzzleloaders, and march off

vi Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War

to present “living history” impressions of Civil War combat. In 1988 the largest reenactment in history was staged at Gettysburg.

Readers have turned back to books on the Civil War, attracted by important new studies that not merely retell the facts but recapture, with great immediacy, the experience of the war years. C9ne thinks—to mention only a few, taken almost at random—of James Robertson’s revealing life of A.P. Hill, of Emory Thomas’s spirited recreation of “Jeb” Stuart, of Stephen W. Sears’s fine, critical life of George B. McClellan, of Jean Harv'ey Baker’s shrewdly sympathetic biography of Mary Todd Lincoln, of Gerald Linderman’s and Reid Mitchell’s disturbing analyses of soldiers’ experiences, of James M. McPherson’s absorbing narrative history of the war, of Leon Litwack’s graphic reconstruction of the lives of ex-slaves during their first years of freedom, and of Eric Foner’s eloquent account of Reconstruction.^

Fictional works on the war have made the conflict come alive for even more readers. William Satire’s Freedom and Gore Vidal’s Liticolti have reached hundreds of thousands. Even larger audiences have watched Peter Batty’s brilliant documentary, “The Divided Union” and the television adaptation of Vidal’s Liticolfj. It is hardly surprising that U.S. News and World Report recently featured a cover story, “Reliving The Civil War,” which asked “Why America’s Bloodiest Conflict Still Grips Us 125 Years Later.

Several years ago Robert Penn Warren offered the best answer to that question: “The Civil War is, for the American imagination, the great single event of our history. Without too much wrenching, it may, in fact, be said to he American history.”"^ Because the Civil War is so central in the American story, it is essential that it be remembered not alone for its battles and its military leaders but for the great social and intellectual movements that helped to bring the war about: the embattled proslavery defense in the South, which led the section to the disastrous step of secession, and the antislavery movement in the North, which insisted on curbing the South’s “peculiar institution” as a means of putting it on the road to ultimate extinction. Many leaders of that Northern movement deserve a place in history—William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Benjamin F. Wade, Owen Lovejoy, Wendell Phillips, to name just a few—but none more completely embodied his section’s values and more fully voiced its goals than Charles Sumner. As Senator from Massachusetts during the 1850s, Sumner became.

Preface to the 1989 Edition vii

as Carl Sandburg has said, “the most perfect impersonation of' what the South wanted to secede from.” Sumner’s biography helps us to understand how the Civil War came about and to appreciate the legacy it has left us. Republication of Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, is, then, a contribution to our ongoing search for national self-understanding, and I hope that it will cio something to explain how the United States drifted into the bloodiest and most divisive war in its histor)^

★★★

Not long ago a historian whose work I greatly respect remarked that at least once every two years he regularly rereads each of the many books he has published. While I admire his patience, 1 do not follow his practice. Indeed, once a book of mine has been published, I rarely look at it except perhaps to verify a quotation or a fact. Consequently it has been more than a quarter of a century since I systematically read Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, as I was obliged to do for the preparation of this new edition.

My first reaction was one of surprise that 1 once knew so much that I have forgotten. I fear that 1 could not now pass an examination that required me to trace the transformation of the Massachusetts Conscience Whigs into Republicans. Nor could I readily remember the details of Charles Sumner’s complex medical history during the years when he was recovering from Preston S. Brooks’s assault.

In a way this distance from the book gives me a chance to see it in perspective and to reassess it. Of course I am troubled by the few factual inaccuracies that have turned up, and I am happy that these, together with an occasional typographical slip, have been silently corrected in this edition.^ If it were possible to do so, I might introduce some other changes that, without essentially altering the character of the book, would reflect the findings of recent scholarship. For instance, if I were redoing all the notes, I no longer have to cite the 114 manuscript collections in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada which I searched for Sumner letters but could refer to the comprehensive microfilm edition of The Papers of Charles Sumner, edited by Beverly Wilson Palmer.^’ Drawing on Dale Baum’s The Civil War Party System: The Case of Massachusetts, 1848-1876, I could now provide a fuller account of the Bird Club and other political groups that

viii Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Ci\11 War

tomied the basis of Sumner’s political organization in Massachusetts.^ And, following recent studies by William E. Gienapp, I could present a much more complete analysis of the social and economic composition of the Republican pait\% which Sumner helped create.^

Some other changes would reflect a difference in emphasis rather than new research. It is probably true, as one critic has charged, that 1 have quoted more derogatory' comments about Sumner than 1 have admiring tidbutes from his contemporaries.^ In part this is because the most glowing praise was offered only after Sumner was safely dead, and its sincerity is suspect; it is also true that Sumner’s critics were generally more interesting than his admirers. If a biographer, with limited space, has to choose between Carl Schurz’s praise of Sumner’s “moral courage” and the “sincerirv' of his convictions,” and Henrv Adams’s remark that Sumner’s mind “had reached the calm of water which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contains nothing but itself,” can there be any doubt as to which he will include? Nevertheless, 1 wish 1 had been better able to portray Sumner as his best friends and admirers saw him: amiable, pure, earnest, and affectionate.

1 wish, too, that 1 had written more fully about Sumner’s relationships with some of the leading New England thinkers of his day. 1 have treated at some length the influence that William Ellery Channing exerted on Sumner, but 1 had much too little to say about his friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Brownson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, and others in the Transcendentalist group, and 1 did not adequately treat the role that Theodore Parker played as intermediary between Sumner and these reformers.*^'

But there are not many other changes that 1 would make if 1 were rewriting Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil IVard^ Most of the interpretations 1 advanced have stood the test of time. Since the publication of this book, and its companion volume, Charles Sumner and the R[^hts of Man (1970), no one else has felt impelled to write another biography of Sumner.

1 believe, however, that what 1 intended to be one of the major contributions of this book to general American histoiy^ has been somewhat overlooked. 1 conceived this biography as a case study of the American as reformer in politics, which would analyze the four essential elements needed for success in that role. The first, and most essential, of these is the existence of a real, palpable, and threatening evil that demands

Preface to the 1989 Edition

IX

correction; for Sumner, after some experimentation with otlier causes, that was slavery’. Another prerequisite is a body of public thought that can be mobilized against the evil. Sumner was able powerfully to appeal to widespread, it latent, beliefs ot New Englanders in the equality of men and in the idea of Progress. Third, for a reform to take hold, there have to be cracks or fissures in the established social structure, where seeds of change can take root. In nineteenth-century New England, industrialization and urbanization presented challenges that divided the established leadership ot the region and afforded younger people an opportunity to question the traditional politics of deference.

But, finally, for a reformer to be successful he must be deeply committed to his cause, not simply on intellectual or philosophical grounds but because of profound personal involvement. One of the main purposes of this book is to show that Sumner’s decision to become a reformer, and his willingness to stick to his cause despite social isolation, hostile criticism, and even physical assault, were deeply rooted in his early family experiences. Because of this emphasis, one colleague half-jokingly remarked that Charles Sumner and the Cominj^ of the Civil War was the most completely Freudian biography he ever read. In a sense he may have been right, for the book is informed by psychoanalytical insights—though not, 1 hope, marred by psychoanalytical jargon. But my pui-pose was anything but the kind of reductionism that is so often the mark of so-called “psychobiography.” Instead it was, and is, my hope that Charles Sumner and the Comini> of the Civil War can serve as a model to be tested by the life experiences of other American reformers.

David Herbert Donald

Lincoln, Massachusetts

19 August 1988

PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION

HIS IS THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF CHARLES SUMNER TO BE WRITTEN

in fifty years. The neglect of Sumner has not been due to any un-awareness of his importance in American history. The more familiar and dramatic episodes ot his career spring readily to mind. For example, as Mr. Bruce Catton has recently reminded us in This Hallowed Gromid,^ Preston Brooks’s assault upon Sumner in the Senate chamber in 1856 may be regarded as the first blow of the Civil War. Students recognize that Sumner’s life touched upon virtually every significant movement in midnineteenth-century American history. He was an advocate of international peace; leader of educational and prison reform movements; organizer of the antislavery Whigs; a founder of the Republican party; the outstanding antislavery spokesman in the Senate during the 185()s; chief of the Radical Republicans during the Civil War; chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations during both the war and the Reconstruction years; a principal architect of the congressional program for reconstructing the conquered South; and pioneer in the Liberal Republican movement of 1872. In a period when senators often exercised more influence than presidents of the United States, Charles Sumner was one of the most potent and enduring forces in the American government.

Sumner’s role in American history is unique. 1 can think of few, if any, other instances in which a “statesman doctrinaire,” as Charles Francis Adams, Jr., called Sumner—a man inllexibly committed to a set of basic ideas as moral principles—has exercised political power in the United

xii Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War

States. Sumner’s career illustrates the problems the man of theories must confront when he becomes the man of action. He was further distinctive in that he alone of his contemporaries moved with equal assurance in the antithetical worlds of New England letters and of Washington politics. He was friend to both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Eierre Soule. In addition, Sumner was almost the only nineteenth-century American politician who was nearly as widely known in Europe as in his own country. At a time when President Abraham Lincoln had to confess that he had no personal acquaintances abroad, Sumner knew practically every important political leader and literary figure in England, France, Germany, and Italy.

These were some of the reasons why I began research toward a biography nearly ten years ago. At the time I was, fortunately, not aware of the opinion Mr. Edward H. O’Neill, the historian of American biography, had rendered upon Sumner: “He had one of the most complex characters of any man in American public life, a character that requires not only industry but knowledge and genius for its proper interpretation.”^ Of the “genius” allegedly requisite I do not speak, but I can certainly agree that a Sumner biographer must exhibit industry. The published and manuscript records of his career are almost overwhelmingly voluminous. Sumner himself began the editing and publishing of his Works, which run to fifteen volumes,'^ but these include, I estimate, less than one half of his public utterances. His papers, which he bequeathed to Harvard University, total somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 items. Most of these, of course, are letters to Sumner, for the senator’s own letters are scattered through dozens of manuscript repositories in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.

Finding Sumner materials has, indeed, been less a problem than assimilating them. I found, once I had begun this project, that I should have to know not merely something of Massachusetts and national politics, but a good deal of fields where I have no technical training—constitutional law; rhetoric; medicine; and psychology. The following pages, I fear, reveal that I am still all too inexpert in these matters, but I have tried to learn and, as my acknowledgments will show, I have been fortunate enough to have some of the best teachers in the world to help me.

I wish I could say that I have unraveled the riddle of Sumner and that I am now presenting the “definitive” biography. Of course I make no such claims. Virtually every sentence in the following chapters should have an interjected phrase like “it seems to me,” or “to the best of my knowledge,”

Preface to the Original Edition xiii

or “in my opinion.” Out of charity to the reader 1 have omitted such qualifiers; out of charity for the author he will supply them for himself

While I was preparing this book, interested friends—perhaps recalling that a leading American jurist once called Sumner the most objectionable figure in American history—kept asking: “Is your biography going to be a sympathetic one?” I have never, I think, been able to answer the question satisfactorily. Certainly I started my research without conscious preconceptions or partialities. The longer I worked, the less relevant the question of sympathy became. After living with Sumner for a decade, after learning more about him than I know about any other human being, alive or dead—a great deal more, in some respects, than he ever knew about himself—I think of him almost as I would a member of my family. Rarely does it occur to one to ask whether he really “likes” his father or his mother or any other member of his family; these are the people with whom one lives, who are important in his life, and whom he tries to understand.

My purpose has been to understand Sumner and his motives, to recreate a very complex personality, not to hale him for trial before the bar of history. Where he was misinformed, or partially informed, or actually in error, I have not hesitated to set the record straight, but I have not felt it my proper function to sit in moral judgment upon his career, handing down verdicts of either praise or condemnation for his actions.

In ti-ying to explain the motives underlying Sumner’s actions, I am not making even an implicit judgment on the causes for which he fought. It—to make an assumption I carefully do not make in the following pages— Sumner took up the cause of prison reform solely in order to advance his own political career, his motive in no sense derogates from the desirability of reforming prisons; nor would the unworthiness of his motive keep him from doing valiant service in that worthy cause. In particular, I hope that no one will accuse me of sympathizing with Negro slavery because I have not interjected a little moral discourse after each of Sumner’s orations to the elEect that he was on the side of the angels. Surely in the middle of the twentieth century there are some things that do not need to be said.

While some readers may feel that I have gone much too far in exploring the depths of Sumner’s mind, others may object that I have not explicitly discussed such ultimate questions as the causes of the Civil War. These matters, in my opinion, are beyond a biographer’s proper competence.

xiv Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War

Certainly the debate about whether the Civil War was an “irrepressible conflict” or a “needless war” is not likely to be settled through a study of one participant in the sectional crisis, even of a key figure like Sumner. The more I have learned about the complexities of Sumner’s personality and career, the less willing I have grown to generalize about other nineteenth-century American politicians.

If biography is to have a useful function in the historical craft, perhaps it is to steer us away from cosmic and unanswerable questions toward the intricacies of actuality. As Andre Gide once remarked, it is the part of wisdom to ask not why, but how events happen. I hope that it may be helpful in this biography to examine the way in which a single actor in a historical crisis arrived at his position of power. In 1845 any observer would have predicted that Sumner’s chances for political success were much less than those of Robert C. Winthrop or Edward Everett, considerably inferior to those of John Gorham Palfrey or Charles Francis Adams. Yet, as the following chapters show, a series of developments—the Conscience Whig movement; the Free Soil party; the coalition of Democrats and antislavery men; the rise of nativism; the Preston Brooks assault; the factional disputes within the Republican party—sifted out Sumner’s rivals and left him the unchallenged spokesman of his own state. The historical philosopher who could explain Sumner’s triumph in terms of the interaction of forces, whether of economics, society, or personality, would have to be both daring and wise—and even then, perhaps, he might overlook the part that accident plays in selecting leaders.

I have concluded my book with 1861, when Sumner and his party finally attained power. These chapters form a self-contained unit. The uses to which Sumner and his associates put their power during the stormy Civil War and Reconstruction periods I expect to make the subject of a companion volume at a not too distant date.

★★★

A few words need to be added about the documentation of this book. Since, as Edward H. O’Neill correctly observed, Sumner’s previous biographers'* generally omitted “all facts and inferences that might adversely affect the character of their hero,” I have placed little reliance upon earlier works, but have tried, wherever possible, to work with the original

Preface to the Original Edition

XV

manuscript sources. I have, however, tbund a great deal of useful material in the standard four-volume Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, by Edward Lillie l^ierce, his authorized biographer.^

Because Sumner’s Works represent what the senator in the 1870s wished he had said, rather than what he actually said in earlier years, I have usually referred to the manuscripts or to the earliest pamphlet editions of his speeches.

A few liberties have been taken with some of the quotations in this book. Where Sumner, in haste, used “Commttee,” “Govt, ” etc., I have spelled the words out. For easier reading I have also transposed the persons ot a few c]uotations. Where Sumner may have written “my condition,” I have said “his condition.” I have also dispensed with most initial and terminal ellipses for quoted materials. Instead of writing: “...he was right...” 1 have simply said: “He was right.” In no case, of course, have 1 tampered with the meaning of any quoted passage.

My notes are designed to give sources for specific statements and quotations, not to offer a general bibliography of pre-Civil War history, a task that would require a volume at least as long as the present one. Consequently these notes—though surely more than ample for most readers—do not adequately reflect my indebtedness to scholars who have written on nineteenth-century American history. For nearly every topic discussed in this book 1 could have referred to the works of Avery O. Craven, Oscar Handlin, Allan Nevins, Roy F. Nichols, James G. Randall, and others as excellent secondary sources. Fortunately the recent publication of the admirable Harvard Guide to American History^' makes such citations here supererogatory.