The caning of charles sumner: Slavery, race, and ideology in the age of the civil war

Journal of the Early Republic

Volumn 23, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 233-261

  Sinha, Manisha ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34547528015     PISSN: 02751275     EISSN: 15530620     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3125037     Document Type: Article

References (118)

1. Henry Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (3 vols., Boston, 1872-77), 2:478-95
2. Elias Nason, The Life and Times of Charles Sumner: His Boyhood, Education, and Public Career (Boston, 1874), 222
3. This standard interpretation that dominates the historiography of the caning relies on David Donald's highly biased and unsympathetic biography, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1960), 278-347
4. also see Frederick J. Blue, Charles Sumner and the Conscience of the North (Arlington Heights, IL, 1994), 39, 91-93, 215-16
5. Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860 (Baton Rouge, 2000), 195-96
6. Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 1997), 166
7. Gunja SenGupta, For God and Mamnmnon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas, 1845-1860(Athens, GA, 1996), 111
8. Tyler Anbinder, Nativismn and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York, 1992), 214-15
9. Lacy K. Ford Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (New York, 1988), 348
10. and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners (Baton Rouge, 1985), 198
11. an exception is David Grimstcd,American Mobbing, 1828-1861: Toward Civil War (New York, 1998), 99-100
12. Kenneth S. Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery (Baltimore, 1985), 144- 46
13. William E. Gienapp, "The Crime Against Sumner: The Caning of Charles Sumner and the Rise of the Republican Party," Civil War History, 25 (Sept. 1979), 218-45
14. David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861, completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York, 1976), 209-11, 220-21
15. Charles S. Sydnor, "The Southerner and the Laws," Journal of Southern History, 6 (Feb. 1940), 21-23
16. Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union (2 vols., New York, 1947), 2:437-50
17. Avery 0. Craven, The Growth of Southemim Nationalismim, 1848-1861 (Baton Rouge, 1953), 223-38
18. for an anachronistic, prosouthern reading of the event, see Harlan Joel Gradin, "Losing Control: The Caning of Charles Sumner and the Breakdown of Antebellum Political Culture" (Ph.D. Diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1991)
19. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (New York, 1935), 13
20. also see Eric Foner, "The Meaning of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation," Journal of American History, 81 (Sept. 1994), 435-60
21. Paula Baker, "The Midlife Crisis of the New Political History," Journal ofAmeri can History, 86 (June 1999), 93-120, 158-66
22. James Brewer Stewart, "The Emergence of Racial Modernity and the Rise of the White North, 1790-1840," Journal of the Early Republic, 18 (Spring 1998), 181-217
23. Introduction and the articles by James Brewer Stewart, Lois E. Horton, and Joanne Pope Melish in the Special Issue on Racial Consciousness and Nation Building in the Early Republic, Journal of the Early Republic, 19 (Winter 1999), 577-78, 629-72, 691-712
24. Donald, charles Sunmer and the coming of the civil War, 5, 130-31 (quotation)
25. Leonard Levy, "The 'Abolition Riot': Boston's First Slave Rescue," New England Quarterly, 25 (1952), 85-92
26. Blue, charles Sumner and the conscience of the North, 2-10
27. C. Edwards Lester, Life and Public Services of charles Sumner (New York, 1874), 14
28. Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of charles Sumner (4 vols., Boston, 1877-93), 1:24-27
29. Archibald Grimké, The Life of Charles Sumner: The Scholar in Politics (New York, 1892), 14-18, 55, 119. Donald gives a very different explanation of Sumner's antislavery beliefs, attributing them to his alleged psychological troubles. See Donald, charles Sumner and the coming of the Civil War, 81-129
30. For his reading of abolitionists as suffering from status anxiety, see David Donald, "Toward a Reconsideration of Abolitionists," in Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the ciwl War Era (New York, 1956), 19-36
31. for a recent exhaustively researched work that shows multiple errors in Donald's use of the sources, see Anne-Marie Taylor, Young charles Sumner and the Legacy of the American Enlightenment, 1811-1851 (Amherst, 2001)
32. Hans L. Trefousse, The Radical Republicans: Lincoln's Vanguard for Racial Justice (New York, 1969), 15-20. Donald, though, questions the influence of Garrisonian abolitionism on Sumner by partially quoting his remarks from 1850. See Donald, Charles Sumner and the coming of the Civil War, 132-34
33. on Sumner's early commitment to antislavery idealism, see Taylor, Young Charles Sumner; James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and community Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York, 1979), 37
34. Sumner is quoted by Grimké, Charles Sumner, 143; Blue, Charles Sumner and the Conscience of the North, 35, 5 1-53
35. Charles Sumner, The Works of Charles Sumner (15 vols., Boston, 1870-83), 222 1-27
36. Argwnent of Charles Sumner Esq. against the Constirutionality of Separate Colored Schools in the C'ase of Sarah C. Roberts vs. the city of Boston before the Supreme Court of Mass., Dec. 4, 1849 (Boston, 1849)
37. Leonard V. Levy and Harlan B. Phillips, "The Roberts Case: Source of the 'Separate But Equal' Doctrine," American Historical Review, 56 (Apr. 1951), 5 10-18
38. Eric Foner, "Politics and Prejudice: The Free Soil Party and the Negro, 1849-1852," Journal of Negro History, 50 (Oct. 1965), 239-56; Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 153-59, 166, 178-82
39. Frederick J. Blue, The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848-1854 (Urbana, IL, 1973), 33-39, 42, 125, 133-34, 205-31
40. Dale Baum, The Civil War Party System: The Case of Massachusetts, 1848-1876 (Chapel Hill, 1984), 3-7, 28-29, 56, Sumner is quoted on 73, 21 1-12
41. Beverly Wilson Palmer, ed., "Towards a National Antislavery Party: The Giddings-Sumner Alliance," Ohio History, 99 (Winter/Spring 1990), 5 1-53
42. Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York, 1999), 640-42
43. on Sumner and the 1848 revolutions, see Taylor, Young Charles Stunner, 257-70
44. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, 3:227-29, 276-77, 390-93,413-14; Arthur Reed Hogue, ed., Charles Sumner: An Essay by CarlSchurz (Urbana, IL, 1951), 39-50
45. Grimké, Charles Sumner, 205-13, 230-35
46. Jeremiah Chaplin and J. D. Chaplin, Life of Charles Sumner (Boston, 1874), 156-59
47. Stanley J. and Anita V. Robboy, "Lewis Hayden: From Fugitive Slave to Statesman," New England Quarterly, 46 (Dec. 1973), 591-613
48. Gary Collison, Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 116
49. Albert J. Von Frank, The Trial of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston (Cambridge, MA, 1998)
50. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, 3:293-99
51. Blue, Charles Sumner and the Conscience of the North, 69-72, 80-81
52. Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionismn: Anarchy amid the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca, 1973) 282
53. Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 224-25, 236, 263-66
54. Congressional Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., Appendix 232-40
55. on Butler's life and career, see John Belton O'Neall, Biographical Sketches of the Bench and Bar of South Carolina (2 vols., Charleston, SC, 1859), 1:198-204
56. and Theodore D. Jervey, "The Butlers of South Carolina," South Carolina Historical Magazine, 4 (Oct. 1903), 306
57. For his role in the Kansas affair, see Sumner, Works of Charles Sumner, 3:336-47
58. Daniel Walker Hollis, University of South Carolina: South Carolina College (2 vols., Columbia, SC, 1951-56), 1:138-39
59. Alvy L. King, Louis T. Wigfall: Southern Fire-Eaer (Baton Rouge, 1970), 25, 29-34
60. Harold S. Schultz, Nationalism and Sectionalism in South Carolina, 1852-1860: A Study of the Movement for Southern Independence (Durham, NC, 1950), 116
61. Robert Neil Mathis, "Preston Smith Brooks: The Man and His Image," South caroliiza Historical Magazine, 79 (Oct. 1978), 296-303
62. "Hon. Preston S. Brooks," Southern Quarterly Review, 2(1857), 348-70
63. on proslavery ideology, see Eugene D. Genovese, The Slaveholders' Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820-1860 (Columbia, SC, 1992)
64. Genovese, "South Carolina's Contribution to the Doctrine of Slavery in the Abstract," in David R. Chestnut, Clyde N. Wilson, and George C. Rogers, eds., The Meaning of South Carolina History: Essays in Honor of George C. Rogers, Jr. (Columbia, SC, 1991), 146-59
65. "Introduction," Drew Gilpin Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge, 1981)
66. Stephanie McCurry, "The Two Faces of Republicanism: Gender and Proslavery Politics in Antebellum South Carolina," Journal of American History, 78 (Mar. 1992), 1245-64
67. and William Sumner Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (Chapel Hill, NC, 1935)
68. John Lyde Wilson, The Code of Honor or The Rules for the Government of Principals and Seconds in Dueling (Charleston, SC, 1858)
69. Williams, Dueling in the Old South: Vignettes of Social History (College Station, TX, 1980)
70. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, 1984)
71. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA, 1982)
72. Clement Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South (1940; rev. ed., New York, 1964)
73. Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century Amnerican South (New York, 1984)
74. Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, The Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting. Gambling in the Old South (Princeton, NJ, 1996)
75. and James E. Campbell, "Sumner-Brooks-Burlingame or The Last of the Great Challenges," Ohio Historical and Archeological Quarterly, 34 (Oct. 1925), 453-73
76. Sumner, Works of Charles Sumner, 4:278-80; the South-Side Democrat is quoted by Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 307
77. The Liberator,May 30, June 13,1856
78. Sumner, Works of Charles Summer, 4:306-09, 311-13
79. Julia Ward Howe is quoted on 325
80. Also see A. G. Meacham, Sumner: A Poem (Rushville, IL, 1856)
81. Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood: A Biography of John Brown (New York, 1970) 129, 192
82. J. H. Means to Brooks, May 28,1856 [John Hampden Brooks] to Brooks, May 30, 1856, Preston Smith Brooks Papers
83. Jacob Stroyer, My Life in the South (Salem, MA, 1898), 29
84. George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, CT, 1972), 59 (quotation)
85. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slave Made (New York 1974), 63-69
86. Charleston Mercury, Jan. 21, 1857
87. and Laura A. White, "Was Charles Sumner Shamming, 1856-1859?" New England Quarterly, 33 (Sept. 1960), 291-324
88. Congressional Globe, 34th Cong., 1st sess., 1403, 1580
89. Rev. O. B. Frothingham is quoted by SenGupta, For God and Mammon, 111
90. New York Times, June 3,1856
91. Cyril O. Packwood, Detour-Bermuda, Destination-U. S. House of Representatives: The Life of Joseph Hayne Rainey (Hamilton, Bermuda, 1977)
92. John Hope Franklin, The Militant South, 1800-1861 (Cambridge, MA, 1956)
93. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 34-35
94. Dickson D. Bruce Jr., Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (Austin, 1979), 76. On proslavery criticisms of abolitionists as race and gender traitors
95. Bernard F. Reilly Jr., "The Art of the Antislavery Movement," in Donald M. Jacobs, ed., Courage and Conscience: Black and White Abolitionists in Boston (Bloomington, IN, 1993), 69-70
96. D. R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States (New York, 1860), 224. For northern notions of masculinity, see Charles E. Rosenberg, "Sexuality, Class and Role in 19th Century America," in John and Elizabeth Pleck, eds., The American Man (Prentice Hall, NJ, 1980), 219-54
97. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds., Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800-1940 (New York, 1989); for a different argument on bourgeois ideals of masculinity
98. see E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993), 227-32
99. Leonard Richards, "Gentlemen of Property and Standing ": Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York, 1970)
100. William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (New York, 1990), Part V
101. Russel Nye, Fettered Freedom: Civil Liberties and the Slavery Controversy, 1830-1860 (East Lansing, MI, 1949)
102. Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle; George C. Rable, "Slavery, Politics and the South: The Gag Rule as a Case Study," Capitol Studies, 3 (Fall 1975), 69-87
103. William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York, 1996)
104. Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York, 1969), 180, 245-47. While Sumner had corresponded with prominent African-American abolitionists such as Douglass before the caning, during and after the caning ordinary African Americans from all parts of the country wrote to him
105. Sumner, The Works of Charles Sumner, 4:60, 108-10
106. Joshua B. Smith to Sumner, June 7, 1860
107. John S. Rock to Sumner, June 16, 19, 1860
108. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Simner, 3:605-13
109. Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 245-47
110. Hogue, ed., Charles Simner: An Essay by Carl Schurz, 73
111. Chaplin, Life of Charles Simner, 386
112. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York, 1988)
113. On Sumner's death, see "Recollections of Charles Sumner," Scribner's Monthly, 8 (Aug. 1874), 488
114. George F. Hoar, "Some Political Reminiscences," ibid., 25 (May 1899), 555-64
115. Garnet is quoted by Lester, Life and Services of Charles Simner, 551-52; A Memorial of Charles Simner (Boston, 1874), 57-60, 86, 267-87
116. Also see Stephen W. Angell, "A Black Minister Befriends the 'Unquestioned Father of Civil Rights': Henry McNeal Turner, Charles Sumner, and the African-American Quest for Freedom," Georgia Historical Quarterly, 85 (Spring 2001), 27-58
117. Louis Ruchames, "Charles Sumner and American Historiography," Journal of Negro History, 38 (Apr. 1953), 139-60
118. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 723