2-1
[Lloyd Benson]
[The Caning of Senator Sumner]
[Part Two]
[H1]Part Two: The Crime and the Caning
[H2]Introduction: The Territorial Crisis
Southerners knew they must make haste. The North's larger population and proximity to Kansas gave it a decisive edge in settlement. Moreover, Northerners controlled most of the publishing houses and newspapers that told emigrants how to get to Kansas, as well as the steamboats and railroads that transported them west. From the start of the territorial crisis a manifest sense of disadvantage had guided Southern strategy. The chief reason for repealing the Missouri Compromise had been to help slaveholders settle in Kansas before its territorial government was organized. A quick influx from the neighboring slave state of Missouri would be able to pack the government with proslavery legislators. Their dominance would advertise Kansas to all future emigrants as a slavery-friendly territory. By scaring away freesoilers in the territory's first days proslavery men would thwart the North's other advantages and keep Kansas safe for the South. In their rush to execute this plan, however, Southern proslavery activists engaged in a series of acts that provoked a national crisis. Sumner's "Crime Against Kansas" address would give a full report of these events from his decidedly antislavery perspective.
Both sides initiated settlement plans before the Nebraska bill passed. In April 1854 a group in Massachusetts received a charter for an emigrant aid association to help free state settlers migrate to the territories. Meanwhile, proslavery settlers from Missouri crossed the state line to scout for prime homesteads. They did so in advance of the legally required federal surveys or even the completion of formal treaties with the Shawnee, Delaware, Osage, Fox, Sac, and other nations. Because these nations had already been relocated from homelands as far east as the Atlantic coast these encroachments represented a familiar betrayal, though neither Southerners nor Sumner worried excessively about this tragedy. By July 1854, self-described "Border Ruffians" in Kansas had formed the Platte County Self Defense Association. This association sought to defend slavery while intimidating free blacks and abolitionists from settling in the region. Other Borderers formed secret societies known as "blue lodges" with similar goals. When territorial governor Andrew Reeder arrived in October he found opposing camps of Free-Staters and proslavery Border Ruffians who were angry and armed.1
The first election for the territorial legislature took place in November 1854. Free-staters contested seats in six districts where they had lost despite being a clear majority in the population. The governor ordered new elections for May 1855, which Free-staters dominated and Borderers boycotted. The proslavery strategy was to ignore these elections and use their majority in the new legislature to nullify the credentials of any new Free-state delegates. When this proslavery legislature met in the summer of 1855 it created a law code for the territory that was deliberately hostile to the Free-staters. The new code applied the death penalty for anyone who engaged in the "treason" of helping runaway slaves, declared it a felony for anyone to criticize slavery, and required all territorial officers to swear an oath to enforce the fugitive slave law. They also relocated the seat of government to Shawnee Mission, Kansas. This led to a fight with Governor Reeder. Proslavery Democrats accused Reeder of inciting treason against the territory and persuaded President Pierce to appoint a new governor in his place. Free-staters responded by declaring the proslavery government a fraud and began organizing their own state government. In October 1855 the two rival camps held competing elections. By December a dubiously-elected official government faced off against a popular but unauthorized (or "spurious") Free-soil government.
During this period of disintegration in Kansas Sumner focused on Massachusetts state politics. The fall elections of 1855 had important implications for the state's nascent Republican party and for his Senate seat. It was not until Free-staters in Kansas petitioned Congress for statehood in early 1856 that he again took up the territorial issue. He did this, some historians have argued, to convince Massachusetts voters that the national slavery crisis represented a more serious problem for the state than local problems related to immigration.2 A steady stream of correspondence from Free-staters in the territories and from friends in the Emigrant Aid Association confirmed to Sumner the latest outrages of the "Slave Power." President Pierce compounded Sumner's anger by declaring in his annual address and in a message to Congress that territory's troubles were caused entirely by politically ambitious Northern extremists. Although he did not name names, Pierce's attack was aimed squarely at Sumner and his associates in the Republican coalition. "If the passionate rage of fanaticism and partisan spirit did not force the fact upon our attention," said the President, "it would be difficult to believe that any considerable portion of the people of this enlightened country could have so surrendered themselves to a fanatical devotion to the supposed interests of the relatively few Africans in the United States, as totally to abandon and disregard the interests of the twenty-five millions of Americans."3 Sumner wrote in a letter to Salmon Chase that "the course of the Administration towards Kansas seems diabolic."4 When Stephen Douglas presented a report in March accusing the Emigrant Aid Company of illegally invading Kansas, Sumner remarked that "Douglas has appeared at last on the scene & with him that vulgar swagger which ushered in the Nebraska debate. Truly -- truly -- this is a godless place."5
Debate on Kansas lasted through the Spring. Sumner began planning his own address in late March. The speech he produced was part history lesson, part prosecutorial indictment, and part rhetorical showmanship. Above all it was an attack on President Pierce's submissiveness to the slave power. Next in line for Sumner's wrath were Stephen A. Douglas and former Missouri Democratic Senator David Atchison, the two men who had sponsored the laws and the implementation of proslavery settlement. To illustrate the outrageousness of their conduct Sumner filled the speech with historical analogies. He relied most heavily on the works of Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.E.), who had been one of the most vocal defenders of political virtue and rule of law in the last days of the Roman Republic. Cicero's essay On Verres accused Rome's Sicilian territorial governor of bribery, intimidation through violence, desecration of religion, and sexual misconduct. Cicero's Orations Against Catiline were an attempt to awaken Rome's leadership to a conspiracy against the Republic and its freedoms which Cicero blamed on his arch-rival Catiline. Both of these orations were standard texts in antebellum American high schools and colleges. They were familiar to most members of Sumner's audience. Sumner also incorporated materials from Demosthenes' On the Crown as well as passages from the Bible, Shakespeare, Vergil, Milton, Dante, and antislavery poet James Russell Lowell.6
The speech also follows the arguments of earlier Kansas speeches made by Republican Senators Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, John P. Hale of New Hampshire, Jacob Collamer of Vermont, Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, and William Henry Seward of New York. Most of the examples of misconduct that he cites had been mentioned before by the previous speakers, though neither with the detail nor the richness of historical context presented by Sumner. In contrast to these other speeches and to his own behavior in the Nebraska debates, Sumner devoted little space in 'The Crime Against Kansas' to a rebuttal of specific points raised in debate by his Southern and Democratic opponents. Ironically, it was the few personal remarks that he did make that caused the most controversy afterwards. These, however, were merely supporting arguments in his attack on what he saw as a more serious debasement of political virtue and core American liberties. It was less Senator Butler he meant to attack than a Pierce-dominated Slave Power conspiracy of which Butler was only a small part. "My heart is wrung by this outrage, & I shall pour it forth," he wrote to Salmon Chase a few days before the speech, "How small was all that our fathers endured compared with the wrongs of Kansas?"7
[H2]"The Crime Against Kansas:" Sumner's Introductory Remarks
When Sumner took the floor on May 19 it was a stiflingly hot day and the galleries were crowded beyond capacity. The audience had been attracted by his reputation for grand eloquence and by his prominence in the Free-Soil wing of the Republican party. As he began speaking, Senators from Southern states made a show of shuffling papers, whispering with each other, and moving about the chamber. This was an effort to illustrate through actions their rejection of a man who had "refused to uphold the Constitution." It is likely that this response was pre-arranged. Such an action would explain their failure to call Sumner to order when he began personal attacks on Butler and Douglas, and was entirely consistent with Southern demands in 1854 that Sumner be shunned.8
Sumner's strategy was to claim that the Slave Power's deeds in Kansas could be counted as among the worst in recorded history. Throughout his career Sumner had condemned physical force as a relic of earlier and more primitive ages.9 The doings in Kansas, he argued, were inconceivable in an age of Progress. Implicit in the speech is the accusation that the Free-soilers (who to him represented modern rule of law) were being victimized by uncivilized barbarians who were incapable of self-control. To make this point more vivid he filled the introduction with explicit sexual references. Not just any crime, the doings in Kansas were like those worst and most primitive of violations, prostitution and rape. His frequent invocation of Protestant heroes who resisted religious and political oppression played on widespread anti-Catholic sentiments. The episodes he mentioned would have been familiar and disturbing to his predominantly Protestant audience.
[H3]The Crime Against Kansas: The Apologies for the Crime: The True Remedy
Speech of Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, In the Senate of the United States, May 18-19, 1856.10
You are now called to redress a great transgression. Seldom in the history of nations has such a question been presented. Tariffs, army bills, navy bills, land bills, are important, and justly occupy your care; but these all belong to the course of ordinary legislation. As means and instruments only, they are necessarily subordinate to the conservation of Government itself. Grant them or deny them, in greater or less degree, and you will inflict no shock. The machinery of Government will continue to move. The State will not cease to exist. Far otherwise is it with the eminent question now before you, involving, as it does, Liberty in a broad Territory, and also involving the peace of the whole country with our good name in our history for evermore....
Against this Territory [Kansas], thus fortunate in position and population, a crime has been committed, which is without example in the records of the Past.... The wickedness which I now begin to expose is immeasurably aggravated by the motive which prompted it. Not in any common lust for power did this uncommon tragedy have its origin. It is the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of Slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved longing for a new slave State, the hideous offspring of such a crime, in the hope of adding to the power of slavery in the National Government. Yes, sir, when the whole world, alike Christian and Turk, is rising up to condemn this wrong, and to make it a hissing to the nations, here in our Republic, force -- aye, Sir, force, -- has been openly employed in compelling Kansas to this pollution, and all for the sake of political power. There is the simple fact, which you will vainly attempt to deny, but which in itself presents an essential wickedness that makes other public crimes seem like public virtues....
But this enormity, vast beyond comparison, swells to dimensions of wickedness which the imagination toils in vain to grasp, when it is understood, that for this purpose are hazarded the horrors of intestine feud, not only in this distant Territory, but everywhere throughout the country. Already the muster has begun. The strife is no longer local, but national. Even now, while I speak, portents hang on all the arches of the horizon, threatening to darken the broad land, which already yawns with the musterings of civil war. The fury of the propagandists of slavery, and the calm determination of their opponents, are now diffused from the distant Territory over wide-spread communities, and the whole country, in all its extent -- marshalling hostile divisions, and foreshadowing a strife, which, unless happily averted by the triumph of Freedom, will become war -- fratricidal, parricidal war -- with an accumulated wickedness beyond the wickedness of any war in human annals; justly provoking the avenging judgment of Providence and the avenging pen of history, and constituting a strife, in the language of the ancient writer, more than foreign, more than social, more than civil; but something compounded of all these strifes, and in itself more than war; sed potius commune quoddam ex omnibus, et plus quam bellum.11
Such is the crime which you are to judge. But the criminal also must be dragged into day, that you may see and measure the power by which all this wrong is sustained. From no common source could it proceed. In its perpetration was needed a spirit of vaulting ambition which would hesitate at nothing; a hardihood of purpose which was insensible to the judgment of mankind; a madness for slavery which should disregard the Constitution, the laws, and all the great examples of our history; also a consciousness of power such as comes from the habit of power; a combination of energies found only in a hundred arms directed by a hundred eyes; a control of public opinion, through venal pens and a prostituted press; an ability to subsidize crowds in every vocation of life -- the politician with his local importance, the lawyer with his subtile tongue, and even the authority of the judge on the bench, and a familiar use of men in places high and low, so that none, from the President to the lowest border postmaster, should decline to be its tool; all these things and more were needed; and they were found in the slave power of our Republic. There, sir, stands the criminal -- all unmasked before you -- heartless, grasping, and tyrannical -- with an audacity beyond that of Verres, a subtlity beyond that of Machiavel, a meanness beyond that of Bacon, and an ability beyond that of Hastings. Justice to Kansas can be secured only by the prostration of this influence; for this is the power behind, -- greater than any President -- which succors and sustains the Crime. Nay, the proceedings I now arraign derive their fearful consequence only from this connection....
Such is the Crime, and such the criminal which it is my duty in this debate to expose; and, by the blessing of God, this duty shall be done completely to the end....
My task will be divided under three different heads: first, the crime against kansas, in its origin and extent; secondly, the apologies for the crime; and thirdly, the true remedy.
But, before entering upon the argument, I must say something of a general character, particularly in response to what has fallen from senators who have raised themselves to eminence on this floor in championship of human wrongs. I mean the senator from South Carolina, (Mr. Butler,) and the senator from Illinois, (Mr. Douglas,) who, though unlike as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, yet, like this couple, sally forth together in the same adventure. I regret much to miss the elder senator from his seat; but the cause, against which he has run a tilt with such activity of animosity, demands that the opportunity of exposing him should not be lost; and it is for the cause that I speak. The senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight -- I mean the harlot, slavery. For her his tongue is always profuse in words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this senator. The phrenzy of Don Quixote in behalf of his wench Dulcinea del Toboso is all surpassed. The asserted rights of slavery, which shock equality of all kinds, are cloaked by a fantastic claim of equality. If the slave States cannot enjoy what in mockery of the great fathers of the Republic, he misnames equality under the Constitution -- in other words, the full power in the national Territories to compel fellow men to unpaid toil, to separate husband and wife, and to sell little children at the auction block -- then, sir, the chivalric senator will conduct the State of South Carolina out of the Union! Heroic knight! Exalted senator! A Second Moses come for a second exodus!