Famous American Statesmen Part 18

Meantime the Republican party had been formed in 1854, the outgrowth of the "Liberty" and "Free Soil" parties. A "Bill for the Admission of Kansas into the Union" having been presented, Sumner made his celebrated speech "The Crime against Kansas," on the 19th and 20th of May, 1856. He spoke eloquently and fearlessly, arousing more than ever the hot blood of the South. Two days later, as Mr. Sumner was sitting at his desk in the Senate chamber, his head bent forward in writing, the Senate having adjourned, Preston S. Brooks, a nephew of Mr. Butler, a senator of South Carolina, stood before him. "I have read your speech twice over, carefully," he said. "It is a libel on South Carolina and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine." Instantly he struck Mr. Sumner on the back of the head, with his hollow gutta-percha cane, making a long and fearful gash, repeating the blows in rapid succession. Sumner wrenched the desk from the floor, to which it was screwed, but, unable to defend himself, fell forward bleeding and insensible. He was carried by his friends to a sofa in the lobby, and during the night lay pale and bewildered, scarcely speaking to any one about him.

The indignation and horror of the North beggar description. That a man, in this age of free speech, should be publicly beaten, and that by a member of the House of Representatives, was, of course, a disgrace to the nation. Said Joseph Quincy: "Charles Sumner needs not our sympathy.

If he dies his name will be immortal--his name will be enrolled with the names of Warren, Sidney, and Russell; if he lives he is destined to be the light of the nation." Wendell Phillips said: "The world will yet cover every one of those scars with laurels. He must not die! We need him yet, as the van-guard leader of the hosts of Liberty. Nay, he shall yet come forth from that sick-chamber, and every gallant heart in the commonwealth be ready to kiss his very footsteps."

Brooks was censured by the House of Representatives, resigned his seat, and died the following year. Sumner returned to Boston as soon as he was able. Houses were decorated for his coming, and banners flung to the breeze with the words, "Welcome, Freedom's Defender," "Ma.s.sachusetts loves, honors, will sustain and defend her n.o.ble SUMNER." The home on Hanc.o.c.k Street was surrounded by a dense crowd. He appeared at the window with his widowed mother, and bowed to their cheers. For several months he enjoyed the tender care of this mother, now almost alone. Her son Horace had been lost in the s.h.i.+p Elizabeth, July 16, 1850, when Margaret Fuller, her husband, and child were drowned. Albert, a sea-captain, had been lost with his wife and only daughter on their way to France. And now, perhaps, her distinguished son Charles was to give his life to help bring freedom to four millions in slavery.

In 1857 Sumner was almost unanimously reelected to the Senate for six years, but Brooks had done his dreadful work too well. Broken in health, he sailed for Europe. Nearly twenty years before he had gone to meet the honored and famous, his future all unknown; now he went as the stricken leader of a great cause, one of the most able and eloquent men of the new world. Twenty years before he was restless and unhappy because he did not see his life-work before him; now he was happy in spite of physical agony, because he knew he was helping humanity.

After travelling in Switzerland, Germany, and Great Britain, he returned and took his seat in Congress, but, finding his health still impaired, he sailed again to Europe. He regretted to leave the country, but was, as he says, "often a.s.sured and encouraged to feel that to every sincere lover of civilization my vacant chair was a perpetual speech." On this second visit he came under the treatment of Dr. Brown-Sequard, who, when asked by Mr. Sumner what would cure him, replied, "Fire." At once the dreadful remedy was applied. The physician says, when he first met the senator, "He could not make use of his brain at all. He could not read a newspaper, could not write a letter. He was in a frightful state as regards the activity of the mind, as every effort there was most painful to him.... I told him the truth,--that there would be more effect, as I thought, if he did not take chloroform; and so I had to submit him to the martyrdom of the greatest suffering that can be inflicted on mortal man. I burned him with the first moxa. I had the hope that after the first application he would submit to the use of chloroform; but for five times after that he was burned in the same way, and refused to take chloroform. I have never seen a patient who submitted to such treatment in that way."

Sumner wrote home: "It is with a pang unspeakable that I find myself thus arrested in the labors of life and in the duties of my position.

This is harder to bear than the fire."

Four years elapsed before he regained his health; indeed his death finally resulted from the attack of Brooks. No sooner had he returned to the Senate than he made another great speech against slavery. The country was agitated by the coming presidential election. John Brown had captured, with a force of twenty-two men, the United States a.r.s.enal at Harper's Ferry, with the fallacious hope of setting the slaves at liberty. He was of course overpowered, his sons killed at his side, as others of his sons had been on the Kansas battlefields, and he led out to execution, December 2, 1859, with a radiant face and an overflowing heart, because he knew that his death would arouse the nation to action.

Mr. Sumner spoke to an immense audience at Cooper Inst.i.tute, urging the election of Abraham Lincoln. By this election, he said, "we shall save the Territories from the five-headed barbarism of slavery; we shall save the country and the age from that crying infamy, the slave-trade; we shall help save the Declaration of Independence, now dishonored and disowned in its essential, life-giving truth,--_the equality of men_....

A new order of things will begin; and our history will proceed on a grander scale, in harmony with those sublime principles in which it commenced. Let the knell sound!--

"'Ring out the old, ring in the new!

Ring out the false, ring in the true!

Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife!

Ring in the n.o.bler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws.'"

A "new order of things" was indeed begun. South Carolina very soon seceded from the Union, and other southern States followed her example.

Sumner now spoke and wrote constantly. He urged Ma.s.sachusetts to be "_firm_, FIRM, FIRM! against every word or step of concession.... More than the loss of forts, a.r.s.enals, or the national capital, I fear the loss of our principles."

In 1861, Mr. Sumner was made chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations. How different his position from that day, ten years before, when he stood almost alone in the Senate, a hated abolitionist!

When the war began, he saw with prophetic eye the necessity of emanc.i.p.ating the slaves. He urged it in his public speeches. When Lincoln hesitated and the country feared the result, he said to a vast a.s.sembly at Cooper Inst.i.tute, "There has been the cry, 'On to Richmond!'

and still another worse cry, 'On to England!' Better than either is the cry, 'On to freedom!'"

As the war went forward he was ever at his post, working for Henry Wilson's bill for the abolis.h.i.+ng of slavery in the District of Columbia, for the recognition of the independence of Hayti and Liberia, for the final suppression of the coastwise trade in slaves, for the employment of colored troops in the army, and for a law that "no person shall be excluded from the cars on account of color," on various specified lines of railroad. He spoke words of encouragement constantly to the North, "This is no time to stop. FORWARD! FORWARD! Thus do I, who formerly pleaded so often for peace, now sound to arms; but it is because, in this terrible moment, there is no other way to that sincere and solid peace without which there will be endless war.... Now, at last, by the death of slavery, will the republic begin to live; for what is life without liberty?

"Stretching from ocean to ocean, teeming with population, bountiful in resources of all kinds, and thrice happy in universal enfranchis.e.m.e.nt, it will be more than conqueror, nothing too vast for its power, nothing too minute for its care."

He wrote for the magazines on the one great subject. He helped organize the Freedman's Bureau, which he called the "Bridge from Slavery to Freedom." He urged equal pay to colored soldiers. He was invaluable to President Lincoln. Though they did not always think alike, Lincoln said to Sumner, "There is no person with whom I have more advised throughout my administration than with yourself."

When Lincoln was a.s.sa.s.sinated, Sumner wept by his bedside. "The only time," said an intimate friend, "I ever saw him weep." When he delivered his eloquent eulogy on Lincoln in Boston, he said, "That speech, uttered on the field of Gettysburg, and now sanctified by the martyrdom of its author, is a monumental act. In the modesty of his nature, he said, 'The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here.'

"He was mistaken. The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech. Ideas are more than battles."

And so the great slavery pioneer and the great emanc.i.p.ator will go down in history together. How the world wors.h.i.+ps heroic manhood! Those who, with sweet and unselfish natures, seek not their own happiness, but are ready to die if need be for the right and the truth!

Sumner aided in those three grand amendments to the Const.i.tution, the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth. "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.... All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.... The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

In June, 1866, Mr. Sumner came home to say good-bye to his dying mother.

True to her n.o.ble womanhood, she urged that he should not be sent for, lest the country could not spare him from his work. Beautiful self-sacrifice of woman! Heaven can possess nothing more angelic. O mother, wife, and loved one, know thine unlimited powers, and hold them forever for the enn.o.bling of men!

When Mrs. Sumner was buried, her son turned away sorrowfully, and exclaimed, "I have now no home." He had a house in Was.h.i.+ngton, where he had lived for many years, but it was only home to him where a sweet-faced and sweet-voiced woman loved him.

In 1869, Mr. Sumner made his remarkable speech on the "Alabama" claims, which for a time caused some bitter feeling in England. This vessel, built at Liverpool, and manned by a British crew, was sent out by the Confederate government, and destroyed sixty-six of our vessels, with a loss of ten million dollars. In 1864, she was overtaken in the harbor of Cherbourg, France, by Captain Winslow, commander of the steamer Kearsarge, and sunk, after an hour's desperate fighting. Her commander, Captain Raphael Semmes, was picked up by the English Deerhound, and taken to Southampton. In the summer of 1872, a board of arbitration met at Geneva, Switzerland, and awarded the United States over fifteen million dollars as damages, which Great Britain paid.

On May 12, 1870, Mr. Sumner introduced his supplementary Civil-Rights Bill, declaring that all persons, without regard to race or color, are ent.i.tled to equal privileges afforded by railroads, steamboats, hotels, places of amus.e.m.e.nt, inst.i.tutions of learning, religion, and courts of law. His maxim was, "Equality of rights is the first of rights."

He supported Horace Greeley for President, thus separating himself from the Republican party, and carrying out his life-long opinion that principle is above party. After another visit to Europe, in 1872, when he was sixty-one years old, feeling that, the war being over and slavery abolished, the two portions of the country should forget all animosity and live together in harmony, he introduced a resolution in the Senate, "That the names of battles with fellow-citizens shall not be continued in the army register or placed on the regimental colors of the United States."

Ma.s.sachusetts hastily pa.s.sed a vote of censure upon her idolized statesman, which she was wise enough to rescind soon after. This latter action gave Mr. Sumner great comfort. He said, "The dear old commonwealth has spoken for me, and that is enough."

In his freestone house, full of pictures and books, overlooking Lafayette Square in Was.h.i.+ngton, on March 11, 1874, Charles Sumner lay dying. The day previous, in the Senate, he had complained to a friend of pain in the left side. On the morning of the eleventh he was cold and well nigh insensible. At ten o'clock he said to Judge h.o.a.r, "Don't forget my Civil-Rights Bill." Later, he said, "My book! my book is not finished.... I am so tired! I am so tired!"

He had worked long and hard. He pa.s.sed into the rest of the hereafter at three o'clock in the afternoon. Grand, heroic soul! whose life will be an inspiration for all coming time.

The body, enclosed in a ma.s.sive casket, upon which rested a wreath of white azaleas and lilies, was borne to the Capitol, followed by a company of three hundred colored men and a long line of carriages. The most noticeable among the floral gifts, says Elias Nason, in his Life of Sumner, "was a broken column of violets and white azaleas, placed there by the hands of a colored girl. She had been rendered lame by being thrust from the cars of a railroad, whose charter Mr. Sumner, after hearing the girl's story, by a resolution, caused to be revoked." From there it was carried to the State House in Boston, and visited by at least fifty thousand people. In the midst of the beautiful floral decorations was a large heart of flowers, from the colored citizens of Boston, with the words, "Charles Sumner, you gave us your life; we give you our hearts."

Through a dense crowd the coffin was borne to Mount Auburn cemetery, and placed in the open grave just as the sun was setting, Longfellow, Holmes, Emerson, and other dear friends standing by. The grand old song of Luther was sung, "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott." Strange contrast!

the quiet, unknown Harvard law student;--the great senator, doctor of laws, author, and orator. Sumner had his share of sorrow. He lived to see seven of his eight brothers and sisters taken away by death. He who had longed for domestic bliss did not find it. He married, when he was fifty-five, Mrs. Alice Mason Hooper, but the companions.h.i.+p did not prove congenial, and a divorce resulted, by mutual consent.

He forgot the heart-hunger of his early years in living for the slaves and the down-trodden, whether white or black. Through all his struggles he kept a sublime hope. He used to say, "All defeats in a good cause are but resting-places on the road to victory at last." He had defeats, as do all, but he won the victory.

Well says Hon. James G. Blaine, in his "Twenty Years of Congress," "Mr.

Sumner must ever be regarded as a scholar, an orator, a philanthropist, a philosopher, a statesman, whose splendid and unsullied fame will always form part of the true glory of the nation."

"He belongs to all of us, in the North and in the South," said Hon. Carl Schurz, in his eulogy delivered in Music Hall, Boston, "to the blacks he helped to make free, and to the whites he strove to make brothers again. On the grave of him whom so many thought to be their enemy, and found to be their friend, let the hands be clasped which so bitterly warred against each other. Upon that grave let the youth of America be taught, by the story of his life, that not only genius, power, and success, but, more than these, patriotic devotion and virtue, make the greatness of the citizen."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Signature U. S. Grant]

U. S. GRANT.

What Longfellow wrote of Charles Sumner may well be applied to Grant:--

"Were a star quenched on high, For ages would its light, Still travelling downward from the sky, s.h.i.+ne on our mortal sight.

"So when a great man dies, For years beyond our ken The light he leaves behind him lies Upon the paths of men."

The light left by General Grant will not fade out from American history.

To be a great soldier is of course to be immortal; but to be magnanimous to enemies, heroic in affections, a master of self, without vanity, honest, courageous, true, invincible,--such greatness is far above the glory of battlefields. Such greatness he possessed, who, born in comparative obscurity, came to be numbered in that famous trio, dear to every American heart: Was.h.i.+ngton, Lincoln, Grant.

Ulysses Simpson Grant was born April 27, 1822, in a log house at Mount Pleasant, Ohio. The boy seems to have had the blood of soldiers in his veins, for his great-grandfather and great-uncle held commissions in the English army in 1756, in the war against the French and Indians, and both were killed. His grandfather served through the entire war of the Revolution.

His father, Jesse R. Grant, left dependent upon himself, learned the trade of a tanner, and by his industry made a home for himself and family. Unable to attend school more than six months in his life, he was a constant reader, and through his own privations became the more anxious that his children should be educated.

Ulysses was the first-born child of Jesse Grant and Hannah Simpson, who were married in June, 1821. When their son was about a year old, they moved to Georgetown, Ohio, and here the boy pa.s.sed a happy childhood, learning the very little which the schools of the time were able to impart.

He was not fond of study, and enjoyed the more active life of the farm.

He says in his personal memoirs: "While my father carried on the manufacture of leather and worked at the trade himself, he owned and tilled considerable land. I detested the trade, preferring almost any other labor; but I was fond of agriculture, and of all employment in which horses were used. We had, among other lands, fifty acres of forest within a mile of the village. In the fall of the year, choppers were employed to cut enough wood to last a twelve-month. When I was seven or eight years of age, I began hauling all the wood used in the house and shops. I could not load it on the wagons, of course, at that time, but I could drive, and the choppers would load, and some one at the house unload. When about eleven years old, I was strong enough to hold a plough. From that age until seventeen I did all the work done with horses, such as breaking up the land, furrowing, ploughing corn and potatoes, bringing in the crops when harvested, hauling all the wood, besides tending two or three horses, a cow or two, and sawing wood for stoves, etc., while still attending school. For this I was compensated by the fact that there never was any scolding or punis.h.i.+ng by my parents; no objection to rational enjoyments, such as fis.h.i.+ng, going to the creek a mile away to swim in summer, taking a horse and visiting my grandparents in the adjoining county, fifteen miles off, skating on the ice in winter, or taking a horse and sleigh when there was snow on the ground."