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All Of It with Alison Stewart
Full Bio: Charles Sumner Works to Preserve the Union
00:29:12
For this month's installment of Full Bio, we learn about the life of Senator Charles Sumner with Zaakir Tameez.
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Alison Stewart
This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart. Right now I'm sitting in the all of its studio. But this time a week ago I was in the WNYC Green space for a special live event. The cast and creative team from the Tony Award winning musical Buena Vista Social Club joined us. They performed songs from the show and talked about bringing the music from the beloved album to the Broadway stage. It was so much fun. Listen to this. Okay, if you missed it live, don't worry. WNYC is giving a special airing this coming Saturday, July 5th at 7pm Tune into WNYC on 93.9 FM or stream it at wnyc.org again. That's the Buena Vista Social Club performing live in the WYC Green space this Saturday at 7pm that's in the future. Let's get this hour started with Full Bio. Full Bio is our book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. Today we're going to discuss the book Charles Sumner Conscious of a Nation by Zakir Tammies. The author has taken a new look at Sumner's 600 personal and professional letters, 400 contemporaneous news articles, and the missives between his friends and enemies. Born in 1811, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner was a prominent abolitionist and a leader for integration. Tammy says Sumner denounced slavery by quote cloaking himself in the American founding. He charged enslavers of committing treason against the Declaration of Independence. Yesterday we learned about Charles Sumner's ancestry. He was the grandson of an American revolutionary fighter who abandoned his out of wedlock son. Charles Sumner's father. He was raised in a black neighborhood in Boston, trained at Harvard Law School and he became well positioned in Boston. He began to make his abolitionist views very public. Sumner gave a fiery speech in 1845 when he before he was a senator. The young well thought of Boston lawyer spoke at a fourth of July celebration. It was called the true Grandeur of Nations. The name of his speech and it was an anti war speech over the annexation of Texas from Mexico. He said it was a ruse for adding more slave states. It was a beacon of things to come. When Sumner became a senator, he gave what became his most famous abolitionist speech, the Crime against Kansas. In May of 1856, he was the leading Republican. He was leading the Republican party against Kansas being admitted as a slave state. The speech, well, it named names and so infuriated a pro slavery South Carolina congressman that he nearly beat Sumner to death on the Senate floor. It's probably the most well known story about him, but our guest has a few details that have often been left out of the retelling of it. Here's Akir Tammies, the author of Charles Sumner Conscience of a Nation. I'm going to take you to the 4th of July, 1845. This perhaps shows us Sumner's fire, but also his naivete. On the 4th of July, gave a speech that left the audience in shock in Boston because he spoke about how awful it would be to enter a war with Mexico. What was his argument?
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Zakir Tammies
Let me paint a picture. At this time, Boston organized an annual military parade on July 4th, and they recognized one young orator who seemed to be having a promising career. So, for example, John Quincy Adams and Horace Mann and other famous individuals had an opportunity in their youth to speak at this military parade. In 1845, it was Charles Sumner's turn, and this was considered a low risk pick. He is a Harvard educated corporate lawyer in Boston. Yet unbeknownst probably to the organizers, Charles Sumner was going through a transformation at the time. He was just mortified by the prospect of America going to war with Mexico. At this time, slaveholders were desperate to spread slavery into the West. Of course, most of the American west belonged to Mexico at that time. And so there's a push for the President to invade Mexico. And Sumner decides that he cannot stay silent, that he has to use his platform to denounce this war. Now, all that's well and good, but Sumner had no sense of moderation. If he was going to condemn this war, he was going to go all out. So he asked rhetorically at the beginning of his speech, who is the God of war? And he responds, it is not the Christian God of Abraham, it is Mars, man slaying blood, polluting pagan Mars. Then he goes on and he argues that in this age of Christian light, there can be no war that is not dishonorable. He denounces West Point Academy as a place of idleness and vice. He denounces the American Navy as a useless and expensive toy. He mocks the military officers who are sitting in the crowd, such that one officer tried to get up and tell his peers that they should just walk out. So this was the amazing scene, he articulated this extreme pacifist ideal. And in the wake of the speech, he is losing his own social reputation in Boston. The mayor of Boston, Samuel Elliott, says the young man has cut his own throat.
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Alison Stewart
Yeah, Boston elites, he loses place in society. He gets turned down for jobs. After this. There's this great quote, a letter that a professor wrote to the Harvard Board of Governors. It rejected Sumner twice in a row because of his political views. I'm reading from your book. This says Sumner has become an outrageous philanthropist, neglecting his law to patch up the world, reform prisoners, convict, put down soldiers in war and keep the solar system in harmonious action. The conservative corporation of Harvard College considers Sumner in the law school and unsuitable as a bull in a china shop.
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Zakir Tammies
Yeah, it was pretty extreme. He gets disinvited from all the aristocratic parties of Boston that he was once an honored guest. He tells a friend while walking down Beacon street, one of these wealthy streets on the city, that there was a time when every door was open to him and now they are all shut. His legal career, which is already floundering, gets even worse. He said, quote, they are trying to starve me into silence. And as this is happening, his speech simultaneously becomes famous. It goes viral. Peace societies across North America are printing the speech and reading it at different organizations. The speech even goes to Europe, where in the United Kingdom, pacifist societies are circulating the speech, publishing it. One peace society even mails a copy of the speech to Queen Victoria, who probably never read it. And so, as Sumner is losing favor among Boston aristocrats, he is also gaining favor among abolitionists, pacifists, young people, many women's circles. And he experiences his own career transformation.
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Alison Stewart
My guest is author Zakir Tammies. We're discussing his book, Charles Conscience of a Nation. It's our choice for full bio. Charles Sumner got involved with a case involving a black girl who wanted to attend a school in Boston. How did he get involved? Who did he get involved with?
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Zakir Tammies
By 1849, Charles Sumner is 38 years old. He has a broken law practice. He is active in a number of radical progressive causes. And then one day, a young black attorney walks into his door. His name was Robert Morris, the first African American lawyer in our history to win a jury trial. Robert Morris is 26 years old. Morris had been representing a young black girl who wanted to go to a white only public school. He had sued the Boston school board. He had lost a district court. And now he thought that he could use the benefit of an older, more experienced and more educated co. Counsel. So he asked Charles Sumner to join the case. And Sumner responds, not only agreeing to the case, but saying that he will do it for free. And together, Sumner and Morris become the first interracial legal team in American history. And they argue their case at the Massachusetts Supreme Court for Equality in Education.
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Alison Stewart
How did Sumner's view on integration? Where was it at this point? Because it shifts over his lifetime.
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Zakir Tammies
Yeah, it is really striking because, in fact, in Massachusetts, black school children were attending white schools across the state. It was only in Boston where they were prohibited from doing so because Boston had already built a black only public school. So the logic was, there's a public school for African Americans, so that's the only school they should go to. But Sumner and Morris point out that the school is very far from this young girl's home, that she walks past several other elementary schools on the way, and that she will have a stigma against her for attending this school, even if the resources are the same. And then Sumner analogizes what she is going through to what Jewish people were experiencing in Italy. He says that just as the ghettos of Rome might have equal public services, they are still not equal because of the stigma of being from the ghetto. Similarly, there's a stigma of going to a black school. Sumner argues that the Massachusetts State Constitution, which had an equality provision, required the integration of public schools. He essentially argues that separate cannot be equal. And he coins the expression equality before the law. He says that just as a Declaration of Independence pointed out that we are equal before God, we should therefore also be equal before the law.
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Alison Stewart
Why did Charles Sumner want to become a senator?
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Zakir Tammies
Well, he loses this case, and I think that drove him to do even more because even as he lost, the Massachusetts Supreme Court did rule that everyone should be equal before the law. And then it just said that separate schools can be equal. So there was an amazing success in the dicta of the court establishing this principle of equality before the law. Come 1850, the situation in America becomes extremely dire for black Americans. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. This act is so outrageous that Charles Sumner calls it the, quote, most cruel, unchristian, devilish law. The act essentially authorized bounty hunters to kidnap black Americans in the north, take them to a magistrate. The magistrate would get paid $5 for letting that person go free and $10 for sending that person into slavery. Black identity is essentially criminalized in the North. And Sumner sees what is happening in his own community of his black neighbors who are now fleeing in the hundreds to Canada because they are afraid of being abducted and sent or returned to slavery. And Sumner decides that he cannot stay silent. He joins forces with a number of other white and black lawyers, including Robert Morris and some activists, to create something they called the Vigilance Committee, which was essentially a group of vigilantes who are protecting fugitives from being re abducted and sent into slavery. Sumner does this for several years and while he's doing so, he is also getting involved in politics. He runs for Congress unsuccessfully. He joins a new political party called the Free Soilers, which stood for the non expansion of slavery into the West. And he is now furious, most of all at Daniel Webster, the famous Senator of Massachusetts, this incredible orator, this man who championed the idea of an indestructible American union. He is furious with Webster, one of his childhood heroes, because Webster signed on to the Fugitive Slave Act. Webster had calculated that he needed to appease the south if he ever wanted to be president of the U.S. webster was planning to run for President very soon. And Sumner basically says that Webster had made a deal with the devil. And now Sumner wants a new person, an anti slavery person, to take that seat when Webster becomes Secretary of the Senate, leaving that seat open and vulnerable.
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Alison Stewart
My guest is author Zakir Tammies. We're discussing his book Charles Conscience of a Nation. It's our choice for full bio. When Charles Sumner went to Washington D.C. he had an exposure to slavery that he really hadn't had before. What did the Black population of D.C. look like?
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Zakir Tammies
In the early 1850s, Washington D.C. was a Southern city, a slave city. There were some free blacks in Washington, but their freedom was extremely precarious. Due to the Fugitive Slave Act, Washington straddles between Maryland and Virginia, which are both slave states. Sumner is now living among slavery for the first time and he is deeply uncomfortable. Even worse, perhaps for him, he is often harassed and accost on the streets of Washington on his way to and from Capitol Hill because he's an abolitionist senator, one of the only abolitionists in the city. And pro slavery voices in the city were just furious with him. So he is getting death threats, he is getting accosted, he is extremely uncomfortable. And yet this is the job he signed up for by becoming a US Senator.
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Alison Stewart
One of the things that was so interesting in the way you describe it is Sumner describes slaveholders as having a slave oligarchy, sort of claiming that slaveholders were dominating the free will of Americans. Can you explain that? A little longer, a little more.
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Zakir Tammies
So Sumner pointed out in a speech that there were only 92,000 slaveholders in the country that had more than two slaves. This is roughly 1.5% of the American population. And he says this small 1% of the population, 1.5% of the population, dominates over the Republic, determines its national policy, disposes of its offices and sways all to its absolute rule. He said there was nothing the national government that was not controlled by the slave oligarchy. He said they owned the keys to the presidential Cabinet. He said that you couldn't be appointed to any office in the executive branch without the Senate approving you and without the Senate clearing your views on slavery. In fact, from George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, there was not a single US President or Cabinet member who had an anti slavery political position while they were in office. So that was how strong slavery dominated American politics at the time. One of Sumner's colleagues warned him when he first started that at Washington, slavery rules everything. And Sumner tells the public that until you unseat the slave oligarchy, there is nothing you can really do in the country. He was saying, prostrate the slave oligarchy and then the country will be open to all kinds of generous reforms. He said in vain. You seek economy in the government, improvements of rivers and harbors, or dignity and peace in our foreign relations, while the slave oligarchy holds the national purse and the national sword. So to him, the primary issue in America was to unseat this oligarchy before anything else meaningful could be achieved by the country.
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Alison Stewart
Charles Sumner was known for giving elaborate speeches. Some people marveled at his ability to be so eloquent. Other people were like, who is this guy? I can't believe what he's saying. He should resign immediately. You know, in some ways he thought it was cordial, but in retrospect, was he wrong.
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Zakir Tammies
So Sumner didn't have any sense of moderation. One of his friends said that Sumner uses words as boys do stones to break windows and knock down flower pots. He was extremely vituperative in his speech. Another friend said that if Sumner attacks you, he attacks you in broad daylight. He did not scheme behind the scenes. He did not know how to be two faced, to be nice to you in front of you and then to scheme behind you, which was a good quality in some respects, but in other respects it meant that if he disagreed with you politically, he would just ichuyu up on the Senate floor and he would do so with really extreme but also clever language. So for example, he, I mean, there's so many, but he would bring all these classical illusions into his speech. He once said that we have the whole arsenal of God, including Scorn, mockery, denunciation, disgust. And to him, he said, the whole arsenal of God is ours, and I will not renounce one of the weapons. Not one.
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Alison Stewart
I'm ready to talk about the Canning incident. Are you ready to talk about the Canning incident?
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Zakir Tammies
Let's do it.
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Alison Stewart
May 22, 1856. Abolitionist Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. He was nearly beaten to death on the Senate floor by pro slavery South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks, for criticizing his equally pro slavery cousin, South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler. I tried to squish that into one sentence. When you think about this incident, which most of us learned about in school, what is a piece of information about the canning incident that you think has been overlooked?
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Zakir Tammies
We lose the context of why Sumner delivered this speech. By 1856, more than 4 million people are in chains in the South. That's one quarter of the Southern population. Slaveholders are terrified of domestic rebellion, and for that reason, they are doing everything to spread slavery into the west and to suppress abolitionist speech. Southern states are monitoring the mail for abolitionist newspapers and letters. You could get sentenced to prison, even the death penalty for helping an enslaved person escape. There was no freedom under slavery, not even for white people. All this came to fore in Kansas, which is going to have a vote on whether to become a slave state or a free state. And pro slavery politicians are desperate to make sure that Kansas becomes a slave state. So desperate that Sumner's colleague, David Rice Acheson, a senator from Missouri, the former President pro tempore of the Senate, goes back to his home state, organizes a gang of more than 1,000 men, storms into Kansas, takes over polling locations at gunpoint and stuffs the ballots. So Sumner is in Washington, seeing one of his former colleagues organize a treasonous insurrection with violence. And what is more shocking is that many of Sumner's colleagues were too afraid to speak out against this tremendous threat to American democracy because they lived in Washington, D.C. where if you were anti slavery, you could get death threats, you could get harassed and accosted on the streets. And Sumner decides that, you know what, he has to speak out anyway. And he is going to do so in the most extreme way possible, because that's the only way Sumner ever did anything.
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Alison Stewart
What is something about the caning incident that has been that people give too much credit to? They pay a little too much attention to this particular part of the story.
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Zakir Tammies
Yeah. So Sumner gives a speech and he condemns Senator Acheson for being a Roman traitor who should be hung for treason. He condemns President Pierce as a Roman dictator. He condemns Stephen Douglas as Lucifer, Incarnate and then he targets Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina. He condemns Butler as an apologist for slavery. And he says that Butler has a harlot, a mistress, slavery. What he's doing is he is highlighting that Butler was an enslaver who had more than 70 slaves. And through this research, I was able to find that one of Butler's former slaves actually recalled Butler having a, quote, unquote mistress and having two children by her, probably a woman that he had raped. Which is something that no previous biography of Charles Sumner has ever mentioned. No account of the caning ever acknowledges that Butler probably was indeed a rapist. So Sumner gives all this, and Preston Brooks, Butler's nephew, a congressman, decides to, quote, unquote, avenge his uncle's honor. And the Caning story is often framed as a question of Southern honor, that Brooks is standing up for his family's dignity. What is missed is that Brooks is also trying to silence an anti slavery voice in Washington. Brooks comes from a place where you could be sentenced to death for helping an enslaved person escape, where you could go to jail for speaking against slavery, even as a white person. Brooks is raised as a slaveholder. He is taught from a young age to resort to violence, even torture, to get their way. He knew how to flog someone, he knew how to whip someone. That's what he did on his own plantation. And so he decides, by attacking Sumner, to give Sumner the same treatment that he would give on the Daily to his own slaves. It is to degrade Sumner and to equate him with a slave. Essentially, according to one Southern newspaper, forgive the language, Sumner represented the sentiments of a Negro and Brooks decided that for that reason, Sumner needed to be attacked. So was there some Southern honor going on? Yes. But another huge part of the story is that this is Brooks, a slaveholder, attempting to assert dominance over anyone who spoke against his right to be a slaveholder.
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Alison Stewart
Charles Sumner, it took a very long time for him to recover. In your research, did you discover, did he have a traumatic brain injury?
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Zakir Tammies
It takes him years to recover. He definitely had a severe concussion. He struggled to read or write for months. He even struggled to walk and had trouble with his balance. All indications of a severe concussion. He probably had some neuralgic pains, occipital neuralgia or something like that because of just the sheer physical wounds that he had experienced, both on his back, his shoulders and his head didn't give him necessarily nerve damage, but pinched the nerves and aggravated them. He also had PTSD when he came back to the Senate two years later. Feeling good, feeling like he's ready to resume his duties. He gets a throbbing headache as soon as he enters the Senate chamber and he comes home and just cries and cries and cries. He tried for a few weeks to go back, but every time he went there he would get this headache and then come back crying. It was only in 1860, when there is a new Senate chamber, the modern one is constructed, that Sumner is able to resume his duties, probably because he was in a new room that did not trigger the traumatic memory of what had happened to him years before.
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Alison Stewart
Tomorrow we'll hear about Charles Sumner's personal life and hear how he was a friend of Lincoln's, not the President, but Mary Todd Lincoln and the fight he had until his death to push for a civil rights bill.
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