Men of Our Times. Or, Leading Patriots of the Day

"I shall sound no trumpet and make no parade as to what I shall do for the future. After having gone through with such a struggle as has never been paralleled in duration in the life of any reformer, and for nearly forty years been the target at which all poisonous and deadly missiles have been hurled, and having seen our great national iniquity blotted out, and freedom 'proclaimed throughout all the land to all the inhabitants thereof,' and a thousand presses and pulpits supporting the claims of the colored population to fair treatment where not one could be found to do this in the early days of the anti-slavery conflict, I might, it seems to me – be permitted to take a little repose in my advanced years, if I desired to do so. But, as yet, I have neither asked nor wished to be relieved of any burdens or labors connected with the good old cause. I see a mighty work of enlightenment and regeneration yet to be accomplished at the South, and many cruel wrongs done to the freedmen which are yet to be redressed; and I neither counsel others to turn away from the field of conflict, under the delusion that no more remains to be done, nor contemplate such a course in my own case."

Mr. Garrison's health, which had suffered severely from his long labors, required the relief of foreign travel.

He once more revisited England, where his course was one unbroken triumph. A great breakfast was given in his honor at St. James' Hall, London, at which John Bright presided. The Duke of Argyle presented a complimentary address to Mr. Garrison, congratulating him on the successful termination of the Anti-Slavery struggle. Lord John Russell seconded this address, and at this time magnanimously retracted certain hasty sayings in regard to the recent conflict in America, at its commencement. In the city of Edinburgh he was received in a crowded public meeting with tumultuous cheering, and the freedom of the city was solemnly presented to him by the Lord Provost and magistracy. In a private letter he says:

"I need not tell you that I went to England with no purpose or thought of being lionized, but only quietly to see old friends, to seek recreation, hoping to renovate my failing health by the voyage. But I shall ever gratefully remember those friendly manifestations towards me and my native land."

In conclusion, it is but justice to human nature in general and to New England in particular, to say that the poets of New England, true to a divine inspiration always honored Garrison, even in his days of deepest darkness and rebuke. Longfellow, Russell, Lowell, Whittier and Emerson, came out boldly with Anti-Slavery poems. They were the wise men, star-led, who brought to the stable and the manger of the infant cause, the gold, frankincense and myrrh. It was a great opportunity, and they had grace given them to use it, and not all the fame they had won otherwise, honors them so much as those tributes to humanity and liberty which they bestowed in the hour of her utmost need.

We will conclude this sketch by a letter from Mr. Garrison, which best shows the spirit in which he regards the result of the great conflict.

"Dear Mrs. Stowe:

For your very appreciative and congratulatory letter on the "marvellous work of the Lord," which the Liberator marks as finished, I proffer you my heartfelt thanks, and join with you in a song of thanksgiving to Him, who, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm has set free the captive millions in our land.

"The instrumentalities which the God of the oppressed has used for the overthrow of the slave system, have been as multifarious and extraordinary as that system has been brutal and iniquitous. Every thing that has been done, whether to break the yoke or to rivet it more strongly, has been needed to bring about the great result. The very madness of the South has worked as effectively anti-slavery-wise as the most strenuous efforts of the abolitionists.

"The outlawry of all Northern men of known hostility to slavery – the numberless pro-slavery mobs and lynchings, her defiant and awful defence of the traffic in human flesh, her increasing rigor and cruelties towards the slaves, and finally her horrible treason and rebellion to secure her independence as a vast slaveholding empire, through all time, all mightily helped to defeat her impious purpose and to hasten the year of jubilee. Thus it is that

God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.

And who but God is to be glorified?

CHAPTER IV

CHARLES SUMNER

Mr. Sumner an Instance of Free State High Culture – The "Brahmin Caste" of New England – The Sumner Ancestry; a Kentish Family – Governor Increase Sumner; His Revolutionary Patriotism – His Stately Presence; "a Governor that can Walk" – Charles Sumner's Father – Mr. Sumner's Education, Legal and Literary Studies – Tendency to Ideal Perfection – Sumner and the Whigs – Abolitionism Social Death – Sumner's Opposition to the Mexican War – His Peace Principles – Sumner opposes Slavery Within the Constitution, as Garrison Outside of it – Anti-Slavery and the Whigs – The Political Abolitionist Platform – Webster asked in vain to Oppose Slavery – Sumner's Rebuke of Winthrop – Joins the Free Soil Party – Succeeds Webster in the Senate – Great Speech against the Fugitive Slave Law – The Constitution a Charter of Liberty – Slavery not in the Constitution – First Speech after the Brooks Assault – Consistency as to Reconstruction.

In the example of Abraham Lincoln we have shown the working man, self-educated, rising to greatness and station, under influences purely American. It is our pride to say that in no other country of the world could a man of the working classes have had a career like that of Lincoln.

We choose now another name made famous by the great struggle for principle and right which has ended in our recent war. As Lincoln is a specimen of the facilities, means of self-education and advance in life which America gives to the working man, so Charles Sumner is a specimen of that finish, breadth, and extent of culture which could be produced by the best blood and the best educational institutions of the oldest among the free States of America.

We may speak properly of the blood of the Sumner family, for they belong to what Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes so happily characterizes as the "Brahmin caste of New England," that "harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy," in whom elevated notions of life, and aptitudes for learning, seem, in his own words, to be "hereditary and congenital." "Families whose names are always on college catalogues; and who break out every generation or two in some learned labor which calls them up after they seem to have died out." A glance at the Cambridge catalogue will show a long line of Sumners, from 1723 down to the graduation of our present Senator.

Like many other American families distinguished for energy and intellectual vigor, the Sumner family can trace back their lineage to the hardy physical stock of the English yeomanry. The race, afterwards emigrating to Oxfordshire, had its first origin in Kent, and it is curious to see how to this day it preserves physical traits of its origin. The Kentish men were tall, strong, long-limbed, and hardy, much relied on for archery and holding generally the front of the battle. The Sumners in America have been marked men in these same physical points; men of commanding stature and fine vital temperament, strong, athletic, and with the steady cheerfulness of good health and good digestion.

One of the early ancestors of this family, who lived in Roxbury, is thus characterized in the Antiquarian Register: "Never was there a man better calculated for the sturdy labors of a yeoman. He was of colossal size and equal strength of muscle, which was kept in tone by regularity and good habits. He shrunk from no labor, however arduous and fatiguing it might seem to others. Instances of the wonderful feats of strength performed by him were related after his death by his contemporaries in his native place and the vicinity."

The son of this man was the venerated Increase Sumner, the cousin of Charles Sumner's father, one of the most distinguished Judges and Governors of Massachusetts. He was indeed one of the nursing fathers of the State of Massachusetts during the critical period when, just emerging from the tutelage of England, she was trying the experiment of a State constitutional government.

Some of the sayings of Increase Sumner are important, as showing of what stock it was that our present Massachusetts Senator came, and what were the family traditions in which he was educated. In a letter just in the beginning of the revolutionary war, he says:

"The man who, regardless of public happiness, is ready to fall in with base measures, and sacrifice conscience, honor and his country, merely for his own advancement, must (if not wretchedly hardened,) feel a torture, the intenseness of which nothing in this world can equal."

Again, in one of his judicial charges, he says:

"America furnishes one of the few instances of countries where the blessings of civil liberty and the rights of mankind have been the primary objects of their political institutions; in which the rich and poor are equally protected; where the rights of conscience are fully enjoyed, and where merit and ability can be the only claim to the favor of the public. May we not then pronounce that man destitute of the true principles of liberty and unworthy the blessing of society, who does not at all times lend his aid to support and maintain a government on the preservation of which depends his own political as well as private happiness?"

Never was a Governor of Massachusetts carried to the chair with more popular enthusiasm than Increase Sumner, to which, doubtless, his stately person and appearance of high physical vigor added greatly. Hancock had been crippled with gout, and Adams had been bent with infirmity, and the populace, ever prone to walk by sight, were cheered by the stately steppings of their new leader. "Thank God, we have got a Governor that can walk, at last," said an old apple woman, as he passed in state at the head of the legislative body, from hearing the election sermon in the Old South.

The father of Charles Sumner was no less distinguished for the personal and mental gifts of the family. He was an able lawyer, and for many years filled the office of high sheriff of Suffolk county, and is still spoken of with enthusiasm by those who remember him, as a magnificent specimen of a man of the noblest type; noble in person, in manners and in mind, and of most immaculate integrity. He was the last high sheriff who retained the antique dress derived from English usage, and the custom well became his lordly person and graceful dignity of manner.

Charles Sumner, therefore, succeeded to physical vigor, to patriotic sentiment and noble ideas as his birthright. His education was pursued in the Boston Latin school and in Phillips Academy, which is still proud of the tradition of his sojourn, and lastly in Harvard College, where he graduated in 1830.

In the same place he pursued his law studies, under Judge Story, and was admitted to the bar in 1834. No young man could rise more rapidly. He soon gained a large practice, and was appointed reporter of the Circuit Court of the United States, in which capacity he published three volumes, known as Sumner's Reports, containing the decisions of Judge Story. He also edited the American Jurist, a quarterly law journal. The first three winters after his admission to the bar he lectured in the Cambridge Law School with such approval that in 1836, he was offered a professorship in the Law School, which he declined.

In 1837 he visited Europe for purposes of travel and general improvement, and remained there for three years, returning in 1840. As the result of this sojourn, he added to his previous classical and legal knowledge an extensive and accurate acquaintance with the leading languages and literature of modern Europe. Possessed of a memory remarkable for its extent and accuracy, all these varied treasures were arranged in his mind where they could be found at a moment's notice. We have heard of his being present once at a dinner, among the Cambridge élite, when Longfellow repeated some French verses, which he said had struck him by their euphony and elegance, but to which he could not at the moment assign the name of the author. Sumner immediately rose from the table, took down a volume of Voltaire, and without a moment's hesitation turned to the passage. He has sometimes been accused of a sort of pedantry in the frequent use of classical and historical illustration in his speeches, but the occurrence of these has been the result of a familiarity which made their use to him the most natural and involuntary thing in the world.

In the outset of Sumner's career it was sometimes said of him that he was a brilliant theorizer, but that he would never be a practical politician. His mind, indeed, belongs to that class whose enthusiasms are more for ideas and principles than for men. He had the capacity of loving the absolute right, abstracted from its practical uses. There was a tendency in his mind to seek ideal perfection and completeness. In study, his standard was that of the most finished scholarship; in politics and the general conduct of life it was that of the severest models of the antique, elevated and refined by Christianity.

He returned to his native city at a time when the intention in good faith to be an ideal patriot and Christian, was in the general estimation of good society, a mark of a want of the practical faculties. The Whig party, in whose ranks, by birth and tradition, he belonged, looked upon him as the son of their right hand; though they shook their heads gently at what seemed to them the very young and innocent zeal with which he began applying the weights and measures of celestial regions to affairs where, it was generally conceded, it would be fatal to use them.

Just at this season, the great Babylon, which now is cast down with execration, sat as a queen at Washington, and gave laws, and bewitched northern politicians with her sorceries. Church and State were entangled in her nets, and followed, half willingly, half unwilling, at her chariot wheels. The first, loudest, most importunate demand of this sorceress was, that the rule "Do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you" should be repealed. There was no objection to its forming a part of the church service, and being admired in general terms, as an ideal fragment of the apostolic age, but the attempt to apply it to the regulation of national affairs was ridiculed as an absurdity, and denounced as a dangerous heresy.

What then was the dismay of Beacon Street, the consternation of State Street, when this young laurelled son of Cambridge, fresh from his foreign tour, with all his career of honor before him, showed symptoms of declining towards the abolitionists. The abolitionists, of all men! Had not Garrison been dragged by a halter round his neck through the streets of Boston? And did not the most respectable citizens cry, Well done? Was it not absolute social and political death to any young man to fall into those ranks?

Had not the Legislature of the sovereign state of Georgia in an official proclamation signed by their governor, set a price on Garrison's head as an incendiary, and had not a Governor of Massachusetts in his message to a Massachusetts Legislature, so far sympathized with his southern brethren as to introduce into his inaugural a severe censure of the abolitionists, and to intimate his belief that in their proceedings they were guilty of an offence punishable by common law? Had not Massachusetts legislatures taken into respectful consideration resolutions from slaveholding legislatures, dictating to them in that high style for which such documents are famous, that they should pass laws making it penal to utter abolitionist sentiments?

All this had been going on during the three years while Sumner was in Europe, and now, when he was coming home to take his place as by right in the political ranks, did it not become him to be very careful how he suffered indiscreet moral enthusiasm to betray him into expressions which might identify him with these despised abolitionists? Was not that socially to forfeit his birthright, to close upon him every parlor and boudoir of Beacon Street, to make State Street his enemy, to shut up from him every office of advancement or profit, and make him for every purpose of the Whig party a useless impracticable instrument?

And so the rising young man was warned to let such things alone; not to strive for the impossible ambrosia of the higher morals, and to content himself like his neighbors, with the tangible cabbage of compromise, as fitted to our mortal state.

He was warned with fatherly unction, by comfortable old Whigs, who to-day are shouting, even louder than he, "Down with Babylon, raze it, raze it to the foundations!"

But in spite of such warnings and cautions, Sumner became an ardent and thoroughgoing anti-slavery man, and did not hesitate to avow himself an abolitionist and to give public utterance to his moral feelings, contrary to the stringent discipline of the Whig party.

On the 4th of July, 1844, Sumner pronounced in Boston, in view of the threatening Mexican war, an oration on "The True Grandeur of Nations."

This discussed the general questions of war from the Christian stand point, and deprecated the threatened one on Christian principles. It might have passed as a harmless peace tract in ordinary times, but just at this period, it was too evidently the raising a standard against Babylon to be considered acceptable doctrine, for had not Babylon issued a decree that Gospel or no Gospel, a war with Mexico must take place, so that she might gain more slave territory? Let the young man look to himself, applying such impossible, impracticable tests to such delicate political questions! The speech, however, was widely circulated, both here and in England, and was said by Cobden to be one of the noblest contributions ever made to the cause of peace.

November 4, 1845, Sumner spoke more decidedly against the Mexican war, in a public meeting at Faneuil Hall, and the next year came out boldly in the Whig convention with an address, on "The Anti-Slavery Duties of the Whig Party."

In this speech, Sumner, as openly as Garrison, declared himself the eternal opponent of slavery, and defined his position and marked out his work within the constitution of the United States, and by the constitution, just as Garrison had marked out his work outside of the constitution, and against it.

Sumner took the ground that the constitution of the United States was not a covenant with death, or an agreement with hell, but an instrument designed to secure liberty and equal rights, and that the present sanction and encouragement it was giving to slavery was owing to a perversion of its original design. He maintained that the constitution nowhere recognises slavery as an institution, that the slave is nowhere spoken of in it as a chattel but as a person, and that those provisions in the constitution which confer certain privileges on slaveholders were supposed to be temporary compromises with what the founders of the constitution imagined would prove only a temporary institution – soon to pass entirely away from the country. He asserts in this speech:

"There is in the constitution no compromise on the subject of slavery of a character not to be reached legally and constitutionally, which is the only way in which I propose to reach it. Wherever power and jurisdiction are secured to Congress, they may unquestionably be exercised in conformity with the constitution. And even in matters beyond existing powers and jurisdiction there is a constitutional mode of action. The constitution contains an article pointing out how at any time amendments may be made thereto. This is an important article, giving to the constitution a progressive character, and allowing it to be moulded to suit new exigences and new conditions of feeling. The wise framers of this instrument did not treat the country as a Chinese foot, never to grow after its infancy, but anticipated the changes incident to its growth."

Accordingly, Sumner proposed to the Whig party, as a rallying watch-word, the

Repeal of slavery under the constitution and laws of the Federal Government.

Of this course he said: "The time has passed when this can be opposed on constitutional grounds. It will not be questioned by any competent authority, that Congress may by express legislation abolish slavery, 1st, in the District of Columbia; 2d, in the Territories, if there should be any; 3d, that it may abolish the slave-trade on the high seas between the states; 4th, that it may refuse to admit any new state with a constitution sanctioning slavery. Nor can it be doubted that the people of the free States may in the manner pointed out by the constitution, proceed to its amendment."

Here we have, in a few words, the platform of the Political Abolitionists, every step of which has actually been accomplished.