November 24, 2025 • 35 mins
The first installment of the deeper examination of Charles Sumner's life begins with his early years, including his close relationships with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Samuel Gridley Howe.
Research:
- "Sumner, Charles (1811-1874)." Encyclopedia of World Biography, Gale, 1998. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A148425674/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=95485851. Accessed 31 Oct. 2025.
- “Roberts v. City of Boston, 5 Cush. 198, 59 Mass. 198 (1849).” Caselaw Access Project. Harvard Law School. https://case.law/caselaw/?reporter=mass&volume=59&case=0198-01
- “The Prayer of One Hundred Thousands.” https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/PrayerofOneHundredThousand.pdf
- Alexander, Edward. “The Caning of Charles Sumner.” Battlefields.org. 3/6/2024. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/caning-charles-sumner
- Beecher, Henry Ward. “Charles Sumner.” Advocate of Peace (1847-1884) , MAY, 1874. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27905613
- Berry, Stephen and James Hill Welborn III. “The Cane of His Existence Depression, Damage, and the Brooks–Sumner Affair.” Southern Cultures , Vol. 20, No. 4 (WINTER 2014). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26217562
- Boston African American National Historic Site. “Abiel Smith School.” https://www.nps.gov/boaf/learn/historyculture/abiel-smith-school.htm
- Boston African American National Historic Site. “The Sarah Roberts Case.” https://www.nps.gov/articles/the-sarah-roberts-case.htm
- Child, Lydia Maria. “Letters of Lydia Maria Child.” Houghton, Mifflin and Company. 1883. https://archive.org/details/lettersoflydiam00chil
- Commonwealth Museum. “Roberts v. The City of Boston, 1849.” https://www.sec.state.ma.us/divisions/commonwealth-museum/exhibits/online/freedoms-agenda/freedoms-agenda-8.htm
- Frasure, Carl M. “Charles Sumner and the Rights of the Negro.” The Journal of Negro History , Apr., 1928, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Apr., 1928). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2713959
- Gershon, Livia. “Political Divisions Led to Violence in the US Senate in 1856.” JSTOR Daily. 1/7/2021. https://daily.jstor.org/violence-in-the-senate-in-1856/
- History, Art and Archives. “South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks’s Attack on Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts.” U.S. House of Representatives. https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1851-1900/South-Carolina-Representative-Preston-Brooks-s-attack-on-Senator-Charles-Sumner-of-Massachusetts/
- Longfellow House Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site. “An Era of Romantic Friendships: Sumner, Longfellow, and Howe.” https://www.nps.gov/articles/an-era-of-romantic-friendships-sumner-longfellow-and-howe.htm
- Lyndsay Campbell; The “Abolition Riot” Redux: Voices, Processes. The New England Quarterly 2021; 94 (1): 7–46. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_a_00877
- Mahr, Michael. “Sumner vs. Cane.” National Museum of Civil War Medicine. 5/24/2023. https://www.civilwarmed.org/sumner-vs-cane/
- Meriwether, Robert L. “Preston S. Brooks on the Caning of Charles Sumner.” The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine , Jan., 1951, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Jan., 1951). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27571254
- Mount Auburn Cemetery. “Charles Sumner (1811-1874): U.S. Senator, Abolitionist, & Orator.” https://mountauburn.org/notable-residents/charles-sumner-1811-1874/
- National Park Service. “Charles Sumner and Romantic Friendships.” https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/charles-sumner-and-romantic-friendships.htm
- Potenza, Bob. “Charles Sumner.” West End Museum. https://thewestendmuseum.org/history/era/west-boston/charles-sumner/
- Ruchames, Louis. “Charles Sumner and American Historiography.” The Journal of Negro History , Apr., 1953, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Apr., 1953). https://www.jstor.org/stable/2715536
- Senate Historical Office. “Senate Stories | Charles Sumner: After the Caning.” United States Senate. 5/4/2020. https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/senate-stories/charles-sumner-after-the-caning.htm
- Sinha, Manisha. “The Caning of Charles Sumner: Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War.” Journal of the Early Republic , Summer, 2003, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer, 2003). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3125037
- Sumner, Charles. “Barbarism of Slavery.” 6/4/1860. https://dotcw.com/documents/barbarism_of_slavery.htm
- Sumner, Charles. “Freedom National; Slavery Sectional.” 8/26/1852. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Freedom_National;_Sl
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm TRACYV.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
If you're one of the folks who has listened to
every episode of our show going all the way back
to the beginning, you have heard how today's episodes are
a lot different from the earlier ones. If you have
not done that, today's episodes they're a lot different from
the earlier ones. It is not just that the show
went through a whole series of other hosts from when
(00:38):
it started in two thousand and eight until twenty thirteen
when Holly and I came on. Especially for the first
couple of years, the episodes could be really short, and
sometimes they were based almost entirely on an article from
the House Stuffworks website. That's where Holly and I used
to work and where the podcast got started. If you
go look at the house Stuffworks website today, there are
(01:00):
disclaimers on it that the articles were written in conjunction
with AI technology. That of course was not the case
when we worked there. Generative AI did not exist in
that way at that time. No, to be clear, our
podcast is not being written in conjunction with AI technology.
Holly and I are human beings and are doing it
(01:21):
just to be to the best of your knowledge, I'm
a human being. What if Holly has been replaced?
Speaker 3 (01:28):
What if I'm an alien?
Speaker 1 (01:29):
What if I was never a human?
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Oh, We've opened up a whole can of worms.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Anyway, When Holly and I first came on to the show,
we kind of thought of those topics that the earlier
hosts had covered as done already, even if the earlier
episode was maybe only five or ten minutes long. But
we've gotten to a point now that those five and
ten minute early episodes are more than fifteen years old.
They're not even available in most podcast players anymore, and
(01:58):
because they are really short, we don't usually put them
out as Saturday classics, so at least for most listeners
to the show, they're just they're gone. They've basically disappeared.
A while back, Holly and I started talking about the
idea of revisiting some of those early very short episodes
and giving them a deeper look, and one that I
kept mentally returning to was the eighteen fifty six caning
(02:23):
of abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor that
was covered in a twelve minute episode that came out
in two thousand and nine, and that has seemed particularly
relevant for multiple reasons at various points over the last
several years. Almost immediately after starting the research on this,
(02:44):
I decided it didn't just need to be a longer
examination of that twelve minute episode. It needed to be
a two parter, because Charles Sumner really should be remembered
for more than just being the guy who was almost
beaten to death in the US Senate Chamber. Then, to
my surprise, two parts turned into three parts, making this
(03:07):
our second ever three parter on the show.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
So let's jump into it. Charles Sumner and his twin sister,
Matilda were born on January sixth, eighteen eleven, in Boston, Massachusetts.
They were the oldest children born to Charles Pinkney and
Relief Jacob Sumner. The family were Unitarians, although Charles never
considered himself to be a member of any church.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Charles and Matilda had at least seven younger siblings. Sadly,
while those nine children all survived their earliest years, most
of the siblings died by the time they reached middle age,
and Charles survived almost all of them. This included his
twin Matilda, who died of tuberculosis when she was only
twenty one.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Charles's parents had both faced some hardships in their young lives.
Charles Pinkney Sumner, known as Pinkney, was born out of wedlock.
His father, Job, had made a name for himself serving
in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, reaching the
rank of major, and he was given lucrative appointments after
the war was over, but Job fell into debts and
(04:17):
then he died when Pinkney was in his early teens.
Job had paid for Pinckney to attend the elite Phillips
Exeter Academy, and Pinckney used the money he inherited after
Job's death to pay for his tuition at Harvard. He
became a lawyer, but he faced a lot of derision
and stigma over the fact that his parents had not
(04:37):
been married, and as a consequence, his law practice was
not very lucrative relief. Jacobs had been born into an
affluent family, but then her parents and a younger sister
had all died in a disease outbreak when she was
only fourteen. She supported herself by becoming a seamstress, and
when she met Pinckney Sumner, they were both living in
(05:00):
the same boarding house in Boston. Some articles you'll find
described Charles Sumner growing up in Boston's affluent Beacon Hill neighborhood,
which is only partly correct. Sumner did grow up in
Beacon Hill, but it wasn't on the wealthier South Slope
next to Boston Common. The Sumners lived on the North Slope,
(05:20):
which was home to Boston's largest black community in the
nineteenth century. Some of the other people we've talked about
on the show who lived in this neighborhood were Rebecca Crumpler,
the first black woman in the US known to have
earned an MD, and Kitty Knox, a black cyclist who
was part of the late nineteenth century bicycle boom.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
While the Sumners were white, they were a part of
this black community. Their friends and their neighbors included a
lot of Boston's most prominent black residents and black social
and political leaders. Pinckney was an abolitionist. Slavery had already
been abolished in Massachusetts after a series of court decisions
in the seventeen eighties, and Pinkney thought it should be
(06:01):
abolished in the rest of the country as well. He
also thought abolition was just a starting point, and that
abolitionists should also be working toward just treatment of free
black people in society. He was quoted as saying, quote,
the best thing the abolitionists can do for the people
of color is to make their freedom a blessing to
(06:22):
them in the states where they are free.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
While Pinckney's opinions on abolition and racial justice surely had
an influence on Charles, they did not see eye to
eye on a lot of things. One of those was
Charles's education. While Pinkney had gone to prestigious schools, he
didn't think that education had actually been very useful to him,
and he had also seen the way that those schools
could deepen and reinforce class divisions among the students. The
(06:50):
family also needed money, and he wanted Charles to get
an education that would allow him to help the family quickly,
not something that would need years of apprenticeship for further
study or lead him into academic pursuits that really didn't
bring in much of an income. That was not what
Charles wanted.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
Though.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
He was a bookworm and to use today's terminology kind
of a nerd. He was a sort of kid who
would compile lists of facts about things that interested him
because that was the sort of thing he liked to do.
I have an affinity for him in this regard. He
wanted more than just to attend the local public school
(07:30):
that his father sent him to, so he started studying
Latin on his own in secret. He kept that up
until he felt ready to surprise his father by knowing Latin.
So after that, Pinkney agreed to let Charles and one
of his brothers sit for an exam to attend the
prestigious Boston Latin School.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
That was an exam they both passed.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Charles, who had started going by the name Sumner, graduated
from Boston Latin School at the age of fifteen. It
sounds early by today's standards, but it was pretty typical
for the time. He had not really fit in with
most of his peers there, not really surprising considering how
much he liked to do serious, studious things for fun.
(08:14):
This included sneaking into an address given by then Senator
Daniel Webster after the deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams,
and he had to sneak into that address because he
did not have the money for a ticket.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
By the time.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Sumner graduated from Boston Latin School, his father had been
made high Sheriff of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, which took a
lot of the financial pressure off the family. It did
not make them rich by any means, but this was
a respectable job with a steady income. Pinkney's career as
sheriff could be a whole separate episode, but at various
(08:49):
points it intersected with his views as an abolitionist. This
included protecting William Lloyd Garrison from a mob that attacked
the Massachusetts Anti Slavery Society in eighteen thirty five, and
being blamed for the escape of two people who had
liberated themselves from slavery in eighteen thirty six. Legally, Sheriff
(09:10):
Pinkney was required to help capture people who liberated themselves,
but in this case people just thought that he had
allowed them to get away. Somebody claimed they had heard
him say he was happy about it, and when he
was questioned, Pinkney said, quote, I should be ashamed of
myself if I did not wish that every person claimed
(09:31):
as a slave might be proved to be a freeman,
which is the purport of the words attributed to me.
Pinkney's job as sheriff also meant that when Charles wanted
to go to Harvard, the family could afford to pay
for his tuition. He graduated from Harvard in eighteen thirty
and we will get into his life after graduating after
(09:52):
we pause for a sponsor break. After graduating from Harvard College,
Charles Sumner continued his education at Harvard Law School, graduating
from there in eighteen thirty three. The law school was
(10:13):
only about fifteen years old at this point, and the
idea of becoming a lawyer by attending a law school
was still pretty new. It was more common for people
to apprentice with an established lawyer. We've talked about that
transition from apprenticeships to law schools on the show before.
When Sumner was studying law, Joseph's Story was Harvard's lead
(10:36):
law professor. He was a close friend of Charles Pinckney
Summer and also a US Supreme Court justice. Sumner really
loved studying law, and he especially loved how he was
being taught. He had always been studious and he loved
to learn, but he hadn't always found his earlier education
very engaging, but that was not the case with Story.
(10:58):
Story would lecture on law and then call on students
at random to give their response and analysis. This has
roots in the Socratic method, and it's still part of
a lot of law schools today. It's known as cold calling.
Cold calling was very new in the world of higher
education in the US in the early nineteenth century, and
Sumner absolutely loved it. After finishing law school, Sumner was
(11:23):
asked to stay at Harvard as the law school's first librarian,
and he served in that role for about a year.
Then he started working for a commercial lawyer named Benjamin
Rand to get some more practical law experience and eventually
build up to having his own practice. It turned out
that while Sumner had really loved learning about the law,
(11:45):
he did not actually like being a lawyer, especially with
the commercial cases that Rand was focused on. Sumner really
preferred to read and study and just immersed himself in
the intellectual side of law rather than doing things like
meeting with clients and arguing cases. It also turned out
that he was not great in front of a jury.
(12:06):
He kind of came off as an annoying and overly
educated pedant. For years, Sumner was prone to just doing
other stuff instead of focusing on his legal cases, including
acting as Charles Dickens's personal tour guide when he was
in Massachusetts in eighteen forty two. In eighteen thirty four,
Sumner made a trip to Washington, d C. So that
(12:29):
he could hear cases being argued before the Supreme Court.
He absolutely hated Washington, d C. And said that he
thought he would never go back. That cracks me up
a little bit. I'm like, I'm sorry, Sumner, I have
some bad news for you.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Right. It's like a portend. He was like, this place
is bad for me.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Around this same time that he made the trip to Washington,
d C. Sumner started subscribing to William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper,
The Liberator. While Sumner and Garrison were both abolitionists, they
had some really different views about what needed to be
done to achieve abolition and justice in the United States.
Sumner's views were really influenced by his study of law,
(13:11):
including study of the US Constitution, which is at its core,
a legal document establishing the framework for the United States
as a nation. Garrison and a lot of other abolitionists
thought that the Constitution was a pro slavery document. Garrison
described it as quote an agreement with Hell, and Garrison
(13:32):
thought that the union that had been founded under the
Constitution needed to be dissolved. But Sumner vigorously defended the Constitution.
He would do this for his whole life. He saw
it as an extraordinary and groundbreaking text, a document that
had established one of the first nations in the world
to be founded with a written work of law. In
(13:55):
eighteen thirty seven, Sumner left the US for a tour
of Europe, learning French, at and German. While he was there,
and he already knew Latin and Greek. One of the
things he observed was that relationships among people of different
races in Europe were often really different from what he'd
experienced in the United States. Even in Massachusetts, where slavery
(14:15):
had been abolished, he saw things like integrated schools and monasteries.
Sumner interpreted this as meaning that there wasn't any racial
prejudice in Europe and that everyone was equal, which of
course was not really true, but he also saw it
as evidence of multi racial integrated societies as a possible
(14:35):
thing to achieve now. He was for sure not the
only American to go to Europe and be like, Wow,
there is no bigotry here, which I mean in comparison
to what people were witnessing in the US. It was
a different situation, but it did not mean that there
was no racial prejudice anywhere in Europe. Sumner's father died
(14:56):
on April twenty fourth, eighteen thirty nine, while Sumner was
still in Europe.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
He does not seem to.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Have spoken much about his father after that, and he
returned to the United States in eighteen forty.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
After getting back to Boston, Sumner reconnected with a close
group of friends who called themselves the Five of Clubs.
Two of the other members were men that Sumner had
met separately back in eighteen thirty seven, poet Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow and physician Samuel Gridley Howe. Howe had helped found
the Perkins School for the Blind, which was the first
(15:29):
school for blind people in the United States, and he
had also become its first director. Sumner would be close
to both of these men for the rest of their lives.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Today, in the United States, white heterosexual men are really
not encouraged to develop deep, emotionally intimate and physically demonstrative
relationships with one another. That was not the case in
the nineteenth century. It was a lot more common and
even expected for men to develop very close and sometimes
(15:59):
physically affectionate friendships, especially before they got married to a woman.
These kinds of same sex friendships are sometimes described as
romantic friendships, which is a term that was also used
to describe similar friendships between women. The term romantic friendship
was in use by the eighteenth century, including in descriptions
(16:20):
of past podcast subjects Eleanor Butler and Sarah ponsonby the
Ladies of Vangoughlin. In the early eighteen forties, Sumner spent
a lot of time with both Longfellow and how and
these relationships have been described as romantic friendships. Sumner would
divide weekends between the two of them, spending Saturday with
(16:40):
how and Sunday with Longfellow. He was especially close to
how to the point that Sumner's law partner, George Hillard,
who was also in the Five of Clubs, commented on it, saying, quote,
he is quite in love with Howe and spends so
much time with him that I begin to feel the
shooting pains of jealousy. In eighteen forty two, Sumner wrote
(17:02):
a letter to his friend and colleague Francis Lieber, which
set in part quote, I am with how a great
deal bachelors. Both we ride and drive together, and pass
our evenings far into the watches of the night, in
free and warm communion. I think, however, he will be
married very soon. What then will become of me? It
(17:23):
is a dreary world to travel in alone.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
As that quote suggests. While it was expected for men
to have these kinds of relationships with one another, it
was also expected for them to just put them aside
after getting married. Longfellow and Sumner encouraged a match between
Samuel Gridley Howe and Julia Ward, and those two got
married on April twenty sixth, eighteen forty three. Sumner also
(17:49):
encouraged a relationship between Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Fanny Appleton.
Longfellow's first wife had died before he and Sumner had met,
and Longfellow married fan Danny Appleton on July thirteenth, eighteen
forty three. Theirs was a long courtship, with Sumner often
acting as chaperone on their dates. Fanny rejected Henry the
(18:11):
first time he asked her to marry him, and Henry
asked her again after Sumner's encouragement. My favorite definition of
the word queer comes from the National Museum of Iceland. Quote,
the term queer refers to sex, gender, and sexuality that
don't coincide with the traditions and customs of a particular
time period. Sumner's relationships with How and Longfellow fit with
(18:35):
this definition. Especially Sumner and How, people commented on how
close they were before the other men got married and afterwards.
Sumner really struggled to put these relationships aside in the
way that he was expected to. It seems like How
also had similar struggles. Sumner became deeply depressed after How
(18:56):
got married. In a letter to Francis Lieber on How's
wedding day, Sumner wrote, quote, I am alone alone. My
friends fall away from me. A few weeks later, Longfellow
told Sumner that he was getting married as well, and
later that same day Sumner wrote to him and said, quote,
I fear much, dear Henry, that I may have seemed
(19:17):
dull and indifferent to your great happiness when you first
broke it to me this morning how has gone, and
now you have gone, and nobody has left with which
I can have sweet sympathy. What shall I do these
long summer evenings? And what will become of those sabbaths
sacred to friendship and repose.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
After the Longfellows got married, they were both close to Sumner.
Fanny invited him to be part of the wedding and
to accompany them on their honeymoon. Sumner was not the
only honeymoon guests. Some of Fanny's female friends accompanied them
as well. Sumner was a frequent guest at the Longfellow
home for the rest of his life, and he retained
(19:57):
his connection with Longfellow while all so developing a close
friendship with his wife.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
But the same was not true of the How's. How
seems to have been really torn over his feelings for
both Sumner and Julia. He wrote forty letters on their honeymoon,
and thirty three of them were to Sumner. Julia seems
to have been understandably envious of her husband's relationship with Sumner,
(20:24):
and she started to resent it. At one point, she said, quote,
Sumner ought to have been a woman, and you to
have married her.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
On top of that, the Howe's marriage just wasn't very happy.
Julia was, of course a poet and a writer, and
Samuel did not encourage these pursuits or want her to
have a public career in them. He seems to have
really been pretty controlling. Sumner sided with how on this.
When Julia Ward Howe published work during her lifetime, a
(20:53):
lot of the time she published it anonymously because her
husband didn't want her doing it. She also wrote a
book called The her man Aphrodite, which was first published
long after her death. This book tells the story of
an intersex person who sometimes lives as a man and
sometimes as a woman. This book is sometimes interpreted as
a reflection of her husband's relationships with her and with
(21:16):
Charles Sumner. More than a year after how and Longfellow
each got married, Sumner was still grief stricken and depressed.
At one point, how wrote him a letter that said, quote,
if you will go on neglect, exercise, neglect, sleep, study
late and early, stoop over your table, work yourself to death,
grieve all your friends and break my heart for where,
(21:40):
dear Charlie, at my time of life shall I find
a friend to love as I love you? A few
months after that, Sumner wrote to How saying, quote, I
am going to say what will offend you, but what
I trust God will pardon for me. There is no
future either of usefulness or happiness throughout all all of this,
(22:00):
Longfellow and How, we're both encouraging Sumner to get married himself,
and that is something he seems to have genuinely wanted
to do. The Five of Clubs even shifted its focus
to finding Sumner a wife, but Sumner had trouble connecting
with the women that his friends introduced him to. Sometimes
things would get off to a promising start with women
(22:23):
who seemed like they were intellectually and socially combatible with him,
but then he would just seem to lose interest or
stop responding to them.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
It is obvious that all three of these men loved
one another, and that the loss of his intimacy with
How and Longfellow was deeply painful for Sumner, even as
Longfellow and his wife tried to welcome him into their
lives together. There are also some gaps in what we
know about all of their thoughts and feelings. Sumner heavily
(22:51):
edited his letters, especially the ones he received from How
blotting out or cutting out portions of them, and burning
some of them entirely. When Sumner was eventually elected to
be a senator, Howe wrote to him and told him
that he was burning any letters that quote might be
disagreeable to you to have seen by unfriendly eyes. Ultimately,
(23:14):
most of Sumner's letters to how were destroyed.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
In the first year after how and Longfellow each got married,
Sumner was sometimes so depressed that he could not get
out of bed. As he recovered, he largely left the
practice of commercial law to focus on social causes and reform,
including joining the Peace Society and working on prison reforms,
and of course focusing on the abolition of slavery. We
(23:41):
will get into some things more related to that after
a sponsor break. Broadly speaking, Charles Sumner was an expansionist.
This was the era of manifest destiny, when a lot
of white people in the United States believed it was
(24:03):
inevitable for the nation to spread across the entire continent.
But there were limits to Sumner's expansionism. He thought embarking
on a war to conquer and claim new territory was
a violation of international law, and he thought any expansion
of the United States should not involve the expansion of
(24:25):
the institution of slavery.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
That means, when President James K. Polk started talking about
annexing Texas, which had declared itself an independent republic, and
possibly annexing additional land from Mexico, Sumner was solidly against it.
Annexing Texas would add another slave state to the United States,
an annexing part of Mexico would almost certainly lead to war.
(24:51):
He called a possible war with Mexico mean and cowardly,
and he would eventually join the State Anti Texas Committee.
Forty five, when Sumner was thirty four, the United States
was in the process of annexing Texas and was also
facing the possibility of a war with Mexico. At that point,
(25:11):
Sumner was invited to be the keynote speaker for Boston's
Independence Day celebration. For his address, Sumner delivered an anti
war speech called True Grandeur of Nations. This speech was
more than one hundred pages long.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
That's so long everything He was not long with every
speech that he ever gave, but there were a lot
of long speeches for both like how many people really
paid attention to one hundred pages worth of speech. We're
gonna get to longer speeches later.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
At which point they're checking out. Nobody's hearing your message,
My love, Okay, Sumner said in part quote in our age.
There can be no peace that is not honorable. There
can be no war that is not dishonorable. The true
honor of a nation is to be found only in
deeds of justice and in the happiness of its people,
(26:04):
all of which are inconsistent with war. In the clear
eye of Christian judgment. Vain are its victories, infamous are
its spoils. He is the true benefactor and alone worthy
of honor. Who brings comfort where before was wretchedness, Who
dries the tear of sorrow, who pours oil into the
wounds of the unfortunate, who feeds the hungry, and clothes
(26:27):
the naked, who unlooses the fetters of the slave, Who
does justice, who enlightens the ignorant, Who enlivens and exalts
by his virtuous genius in art, in literature, in science,
the hours of life, Who by words or actions inspires
a love for God and for man. This is the
(26:48):
Christian hero, This is the man of honor. In a
Christian Land.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
Later on in this speech, Sumner said quote war is
utterly ineffectual to secure or advance the object at which
it aims, the misery which it excites, contributes to no end,
helps to establish no right, and therefore, in no respect
determines justice between the contending nations.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
In other words, peace was the grandeur of nations, not war.
This being an Independence Day event, there were a lot
of military veterans in the audience, and they found this
speech to be deeply insulting. Some people approved of it,
including Samuel Gridley Howe, but overall the people of Boston
(27:34):
were furious. After the speech, a private dinner was held
at Fanuel Hall, where a whole series of speakers publicly
criticized Sumner and denounced what he had said.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
When Sumner stood up to make his own speech that night,
he toasted the dinner's earlier speakers and he wished them happiness.
He did not try to argue back against their criticisms.
And then afterward he and on kind of an apology tour.
He visited a lot of prominent people who had been
offended by his remarks, including some of those veterans. He
(28:09):
didn't really take back what he had said, but he
explained that he was talking about principles, not the actions
of the individual men who had served in the military.
When he provided a copy of the speech for publication,
he also clarified his intent a little bit quote. Believing
that in the present state of Christian society, all war
(28:32):
and all preparation for war are irrational, unnecessary, and inconsistent
with that true greatness at which our republic should aim.
I deemed it my duty on that occasion to uphold
that truth. I was also anxious that our country should
seek the true glory, and what is higher than glory,
the great good of taking the lead in the disarming
(28:53):
of the nations. Allow me to add that I wish
to be understood as restraining my opinions precisely within the
limits which I have assigned them in these pages, and
particularly to disclaim the suggestion which has been volunteered with
regard to them, that force may not be employed under
the sanction of justice in the conservation of the laws
(29:14):
and of domestic quiet. All good men must unite in
condemning as barbarous and unchristian the resort to external force,
in other words, to the arbitrament of war to international
lynch law, or the great trial by battle to determine
justice between nations. This is like the most conciliatory Charles
(29:39):
Sumner would be regarding one of his speeches in at
least in terms of like all the ones that I
read in part of this research, the person who was
chosen to give this Independence Day speech in Boston was
usually somebody who was seen as up and coming and promising,
somebody sort of imagined as representing the future of Boston.
(30:00):
Unlike in his earlier school years when Sumner had really
had trouble connecting with his peers, as an adult, he'd
made a lot of friends that included a lot of
really prominent people in the United States and Europe. After
getting back from that trip abroad, he had been the
recipient of a lot of very fashionable invitations. He was
very tall, striking to look at, and usually well dressed.
(30:22):
Sometimes he's described as a little foppish.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
But this speech was a turning point.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
People started to distance themselves from him a little bit
and his purportedly radical views.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
Even after this kind of.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Conciliatory aftermath, he started to fall out with some of
those high profile friends and acquaintances, He also lost.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
One of his mentors, Joseph Story, who died a couple
of months after the Independence Day speech. Story's last letter
to Sumner had been about the speech, praising its quote,
elegance of diction and classical beauty, while saying that Story
dissented from its core message. Sumner was devastated at the
(31:04):
loss of his mentor and colleague.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Beyond that loss and grief, a lot of people, including Sumner,
really thought that he would be succeeding Story as the
Dane Professor of Law at Harvard. Sumner had been lecturing
there in law since graduating from the law school. He'd
been filling in when Story or other professors were absent,
but Harvard instead hired William Kent, who was the son
(31:29):
of Chancellor James Kent. In addition to losing this position,
Sumner was hurt that another one of his mentors at Harvard,
Simon Greenleaf, had not really advocated for him in all
of this. The next big moment in Charles Sumner's legal
career involved a school segregation case, and we're going to
get into that next time, but for now, Tracy, do
(31:52):
you have listener mail?
Speaker 3 (31:53):
I Do I have listener mail?
Speaker 2 (31:54):
I'm catching up on some really old listener mail that
I meant to read a while ago that didn't get
read for various reasons, and I don't think I read
it and forgot to check it off.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
This one is from Armas, who.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Wrote, Hi, Tracy and Holly, I just listened to part
one of your Unearthed episodes for July till how long
ago this was, and was delighted to hear you mentioned
the hand painted slightly sacrilegious condom recently acquired by the
Reis Museum, because I actually saw the condom in person
on a recent trip to Amsterdam. Looking back at when
(32:29):
the episode came out, I realized I actually saw the
condom just a few days before your episode came out,
which is just a little funny coincidence. Honestly, the condom
and the exhibit around it of sexual art was one
of my favorite parts of the museum. I have a
master's degree in art history and focused a lot of
my studies on depictions and histories of sexuality in art.
(32:50):
But aside from that, I think the condom would have
been one of the most memorable parts of the museum. Anyway,
the collection of the Reis Museum is so massive that
it's a little bit overwhelming, and a condom definitely manages
to stand out for its novelty if nothing else. While
in Amsterdam, I also went on a red light district tour,
which was fascinating in a lot of ways. But it's
(33:12):
interesting to note that the tour started in front of
a shop called the Condomerie, the first condom shop in
the world, and the front window display was full of
hand painted novelty condoms. Interesting to see just how that
particular art form has continued on all those years later,
and gives a little insight into the way that humans
have found the same types of things funny across the generations.
(33:36):
I adore your podcast and all the things that you do,
especially in these difficult historical times when so much of
education and access to good historical information is under threat.
I've been listening for many years now and hope to
continue for many years to come. I've attached a photo
I took of the condom in questioned, as.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
Well as some.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
Less salacious pictures of my rabbit's dog and a horse
for the pet tax. The little white and gray bunny
is theo. He likes to sleep on my bed with
me every night. The gray bunny is Sulky. She's a
bundle of energy that does not get along with theo.
The pupp is Tasca. She loves everybody and has just
enough herding instincts to always try her absolute hardest to
(34:17):
keep her sheepies my family in the same room together.
And the horse is Ben. He's a bit useless, but
we love him anyway. Thanks for all you too are
Thank you so much for this email and for the picture.
I love all of it. I love all of it.
I love all these bunny rabbits. I love this dog
who looks a little bit forlorn, and I also love
the useless horse. Many years ago I knew some folks
(34:39):
who had adopted or rescued a herding dog. I don't
remember the exact breed of dog, but they had two
horses and they lived out in the country, obviously, and
the dog basically herded the two horses around like all
the time, just making sure both the horses were where
they needed to because working dogs were bred to do that,
(35:03):
which means if you get one and you are expecting
to just have a pet, it might not work out.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
As plants, you got to give them busy work.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
They gotta have stuff to do. That is what they
are inclined for. So thank you so much again for
this email and the pictures.
Speaker 3 (35:19):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
If you'd like to send us a note about this
or any other podcasts, we are at history podcast atiheartradio
dot com and you can subscribe to our show on
the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd like to get
your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
(35:44):
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm TRACYV.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
If you're one of the folks who has listened to
every episode of our show going all the way back
to the beginning, you have heard how today's episodes are
a lot different from the earlier ones. If you have
not done that, today's episodes they're a lot different from
the earlier ones. It is not just that the show
went through a whole series of other hosts from when
(00:38):
it started in two thousand and eight until twenty thirteen
when Holly and I came on. Especially for the first
couple of years, the episodes could be really short, and
sometimes they were based almost entirely on an article from
the House Stuffworks website. That's where Holly and I used
to work and where the podcast got started. If you
go look at the house Stuffworks website today, there are
(01:00):
disclaimers on it that the articles were written in conjunction
with AI technology. That of course was not the case
when we worked there. Generative AI did not exist in
that way at that time. No, to be clear, our
podcast is not being written in conjunction with AI technology.
Holly and I are human beings and are doing it
(01:21):
just to be to the best of your knowledge, I'm
a human being. What if Holly has been replaced?
Speaker 3 (01:28):
What if I'm an alien?
Speaker 1 (01:29):
What if I was never a human?
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Oh, We've opened up a whole can of worms.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Anyway, When Holly and I first came on to the show,
we kind of thought of those topics that the earlier
hosts had covered as done already, even if the earlier
episode was maybe only five or ten minutes long. But
we've gotten to a point now that those five and
ten minute early episodes are more than fifteen years old.
They're not even available in most podcast players anymore, and
(01:58):
because they are really short, we don't usually put them
out as Saturday classics, so at least for most listeners
to the show, they're just they're gone. They've basically disappeared.
A while back, Holly and I started talking about the
idea of revisiting some of those early very short episodes
and giving them a deeper look, and one that I
kept mentally returning to was the eighteen fifty six caning
(02:23):
of abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor that
was covered in a twelve minute episode that came out
in two thousand and nine, and that has seemed particularly
relevant for multiple reasons at various points over the last
several years. Almost immediately after starting the research on this,
(02:44):
I decided it didn't just need to be a longer
examination of that twelve minute episode. It needed to be
a two parter, because Charles Sumner really should be remembered
for more than just being the guy who was almost
beaten to death in the US Senate Chamber. Then, to
my surprise, two parts turned into three parts, making this
(03:07):
our second ever three parter on the show.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
So let's jump into it. Charles Sumner and his twin sister,
Matilda were born on January sixth, eighteen eleven, in Boston, Massachusetts.
They were the oldest children born to Charles Pinkney and
Relief Jacob Sumner. The family were Unitarians, although Charles never
considered himself to be a member of any church.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Charles and Matilda had at least seven younger siblings. Sadly,
while those nine children all survived their earliest years, most
of the siblings died by the time they reached middle age,
and Charles survived almost all of them. This included his
twin Matilda, who died of tuberculosis when she was only
twenty one.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Charles's parents had both faced some hardships in their young lives.
Charles Pinkney Sumner, known as Pinkney, was born out of wedlock.
His father, Job, had made a name for himself serving
in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, reaching the
rank of major, and he was given lucrative appointments after
the war was over, but Job fell into debts and
(04:17):
then he died when Pinkney was in his early teens.
Job had paid for Pinckney to attend the elite Phillips
Exeter Academy, and Pinckney used the money he inherited after
Job's death to pay for his tuition at Harvard. He
became a lawyer, but he faced a lot of derision
and stigma over the fact that his parents had not
(04:37):
been married, and as a consequence, his law practice was
not very lucrative relief. Jacobs had been born into an
affluent family, but then her parents and a younger sister
had all died in a disease outbreak when she was
only fourteen. She supported herself by becoming a seamstress, and
when she met Pinckney Sumner, they were both living in
(05:00):
the same boarding house in Boston. Some articles you'll find
described Charles Sumner growing up in Boston's affluent Beacon Hill neighborhood,
which is only partly correct. Sumner did grow up in
Beacon Hill, but it wasn't on the wealthier South Slope
next to Boston Common. The Sumners lived on the North Slope,
(05:20):
which was home to Boston's largest black community in the
nineteenth century. Some of the other people we've talked about
on the show who lived in this neighborhood were Rebecca Crumpler,
the first black woman in the US known to have
earned an MD, and Kitty Knox, a black cyclist who
was part of the late nineteenth century bicycle boom.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
While the Sumners were white, they were a part of
this black community. Their friends and their neighbors included a
lot of Boston's most prominent black residents and black social
and political leaders. Pinckney was an abolitionist. Slavery had already
been abolished in Massachusetts after a series of court decisions
in the seventeen eighties, and Pinkney thought it should be
(06:01):
abolished in the rest of the country as well. He
also thought abolition was just a starting point, and that
abolitionists should also be working toward just treatment of free
black people in society. He was quoted as saying, quote,
the best thing the abolitionists can do for the people
of color is to make their freedom a blessing to
(06:22):
them in the states where they are free.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
While Pinckney's opinions on abolition and racial justice surely had
an influence on Charles, they did not see eye to
eye on a lot of things. One of those was
Charles's education. While Pinkney had gone to prestigious schools, he
didn't think that education had actually been very useful to him,
and he had also seen the way that those schools
could deepen and reinforce class divisions among the students. The
(06:50):
family also needed money, and he wanted Charles to get
an education that would allow him to help the family quickly,
not something that would need years of apprenticeship for further
study or lead him into academic pursuits that really didn't
bring in much of an income. That was not what
Charles wanted.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
Though.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
He was a bookworm and to use today's terminology kind
of a nerd. He was a sort of kid who
would compile lists of facts about things that interested him
because that was the sort of thing he liked to do.
I have an affinity for him in this regard. He
wanted more than just to attend the local public school
(07:30):
that his father sent him to, so he started studying
Latin on his own in secret. He kept that up
until he felt ready to surprise his father by knowing Latin.
So after that, Pinkney agreed to let Charles and one
of his brothers sit for an exam to attend the
prestigious Boston Latin School.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
That was an exam they both passed.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Charles, who had started going by the name Sumner, graduated
from Boston Latin School at the age of fifteen. It
sounds early by today's standards, but it was pretty typical
for the time. He had not really fit in with
most of his peers there, not really surprising considering how
much he liked to do serious, studious things for fun.
(08:14):
This included sneaking into an address given by then Senator
Daniel Webster after the deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams,
and he had to sneak into that address because he
did not have the money for a ticket.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
By the time.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Sumner graduated from Boston Latin School, his father had been
made high Sheriff of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, which took a
lot of the financial pressure off the family. It did
not make them rich by any means, but this was
a respectable job with a steady income. Pinkney's career as
sheriff could be a whole separate episode, but at various
(08:49):
points it intersected with his views as an abolitionist. This
included protecting William Lloyd Garrison from a mob that attacked
the Massachusetts Anti Slavery Society in eighteen thirty five, and
being blamed for the escape of two people who had
liberated themselves from slavery in eighteen thirty six. Legally, Sheriff
(09:10):
Pinkney was required to help capture people who liberated themselves,
but in this case people just thought that he had
allowed them to get away. Somebody claimed they had heard
him say he was happy about it, and when he
was questioned, Pinkney said, quote, I should be ashamed of
myself if I did not wish that every person claimed
(09:31):
as a slave might be proved to be a freeman,
which is the purport of the words attributed to me.
Pinkney's job as sheriff also meant that when Charles wanted
to go to Harvard, the family could afford to pay
for his tuition. He graduated from Harvard in eighteen thirty
and we will get into his life after graduating after
(09:52):
we pause for a sponsor break. After graduating from Harvard College,
Charles Sumner continued his education at Harvard Law School, graduating
from there in eighteen thirty three. The law school was
(10:13):
only about fifteen years old at this point, and the
idea of becoming a lawyer by attending a law school
was still pretty new. It was more common for people
to apprentice with an established lawyer. We've talked about that
transition from apprenticeships to law schools on the show before.
When Sumner was studying law, Joseph's Story was Harvard's lead
(10:36):
law professor. He was a close friend of Charles Pinckney
Summer and also a US Supreme Court justice. Sumner really
loved studying law, and he especially loved how he was
being taught. He had always been studious and he loved
to learn, but he hadn't always found his earlier education
very engaging, but that was not the case with Story.
(10:58):
Story would lecture on law and then call on students
at random to give their response and analysis. This has
roots in the Socratic method, and it's still part of
a lot of law schools today. It's known as cold calling.
Cold calling was very new in the world of higher
education in the US in the early nineteenth century, and
Sumner absolutely loved it. After finishing law school, Sumner was
(11:23):
asked to stay at Harvard as the law school's first librarian,
and he served in that role for about a year.
Then he started working for a commercial lawyer named Benjamin
Rand to get some more practical law experience and eventually
build up to having his own practice. It turned out
that while Sumner had really loved learning about the law,
(11:45):
he did not actually like being a lawyer, especially with
the commercial cases that Rand was focused on. Sumner really
preferred to read and study and just immersed himself in
the intellectual side of law rather than doing things like
meeting with clients and arguing cases. It also turned out
that he was not great in front of a jury.
(12:06):
He kind of came off as an annoying and overly
educated pedant. For years, Sumner was prone to just doing
other stuff instead of focusing on his legal cases, including
acting as Charles Dickens's personal tour guide when he was
in Massachusetts in eighteen forty two. In eighteen thirty four,
Sumner made a trip to Washington, d C. So that
(12:29):
he could hear cases being argued before the Supreme Court.
He absolutely hated Washington, d C. And said that he
thought he would never go back. That cracks me up
a little bit. I'm like, I'm sorry, Sumner, I have
some bad news for you.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Right. It's like a portend. He was like, this place
is bad for me.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Around this same time that he made the trip to Washington,
d C. Sumner started subscribing to William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper,
The Liberator. While Sumner and Garrison were both abolitionists, they
had some really different views about what needed to be
done to achieve abolition and justice in the United States.
Sumner's views were really influenced by his study of law,
(13:11):
including study of the US Constitution, which is at its core,
a legal document establishing the framework for the United States
as a nation. Garrison and a lot of other abolitionists
thought that the Constitution was a pro slavery document. Garrison
described it as quote an agreement with Hell, and Garrison
(13:32):
thought that the union that had been founded under the
Constitution needed to be dissolved. But Sumner vigorously defended the Constitution.
He would do this for his whole life. He saw
it as an extraordinary and groundbreaking text, a document that
had established one of the first nations in the world
to be founded with a written work of law. In
(13:55):
eighteen thirty seven, Sumner left the US for a tour
of Europe, learning French, at and German. While he was there,
and he already knew Latin and Greek. One of the
things he observed was that relationships among people of different
races in Europe were often really different from what he'd
experienced in the United States. Even in Massachusetts, where slavery
(14:15):
had been abolished, he saw things like integrated schools and monasteries.
Sumner interpreted this as meaning that there wasn't any racial
prejudice in Europe and that everyone was equal, which of
course was not really true, but he also saw it
as evidence of multi racial integrated societies as a possible
(14:35):
thing to achieve now. He was for sure not the
only American to go to Europe and be like, Wow,
there is no bigotry here, which I mean in comparison
to what people were witnessing in the US. It was
a different situation, but it did not mean that there
was no racial prejudice anywhere in Europe. Sumner's father died
(14:56):
on April twenty fourth, eighteen thirty nine, while Sumner was
still in Europe.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
He does not seem to.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Have spoken much about his father after that, and he
returned to the United States in eighteen forty.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
After getting back to Boston, Sumner reconnected with a close
group of friends who called themselves the Five of Clubs.
Two of the other members were men that Sumner had
met separately back in eighteen thirty seven, poet Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow and physician Samuel Gridley Howe. Howe had helped found
the Perkins School for the Blind, which was the first
(15:29):
school for blind people in the United States, and he
had also become its first director. Sumner would be close
to both of these men for the rest of their lives.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Today, in the United States, white heterosexual men are really
not encouraged to develop deep, emotionally intimate and physically demonstrative
relationships with one another. That was not the case in
the nineteenth century. It was a lot more common and
even expected for men to develop very close and sometimes
(15:59):
physically affectionate friendships, especially before they got married to a woman.
These kinds of same sex friendships are sometimes described as
romantic friendships, which is a term that was also used
to describe similar friendships between women. The term romantic friendship
was in use by the eighteenth century, including in descriptions
(16:20):
of past podcast subjects Eleanor Butler and Sarah ponsonby the
Ladies of Vangoughlin. In the early eighteen forties, Sumner spent
a lot of time with both Longfellow and how and
these relationships have been described as romantic friendships. Sumner would
divide weekends between the two of them, spending Saturday with
(16:40):
how and Sunday with Longfellow. He was especially close to
how to the point that Sumner's law partner, George Hillard,
who was also in the Five of Clubs, commented on it, saying, quote,
he is quite in love with Howe and spends so
much time with him that I begin to feel the
shooting pains of jealousy. In eighteen forty two, Sumner wrote
(17:02):
a letter to his friend and colleague Francis Lieber, which
set in part quote, I am with how a great
deal bachelors. Both we ride and drive together, and pass
our evenings far into the watches of the night, in
free and warm communion. I think, however, he will be
married very soon. What then will become of me? It
(17:23):
is a dreary world to travel in alone.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
As that quote suggests. While it was expected for men
to have these kinds of relationships with one another, it
was also expected for them to just put them aside
after getting married. Longfellow and Sumner encouraged a match between
Samuel Gridley Howe and Julia Ward, and those two got
married on April twenty sixth, eighteen forty three. Sumner also
(17:49):
encouraged a relationship between Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Fanny Appleton.
Longfellow's first wife had died before he and Sumner had met,
and Longfellow married fan Danny Appleton on July thirteenth, eighteen
forty three. Theirs was a long courtship, with Sumner often
acting as chaperone on their dates. Fanny rejected Henry the
(18:11):
first time he asked her to marry him, and Henry
asked her again after Sumner's encouragement. My favorite definition of
the word queer comes from the National Museum of Iceland. Quote,
the term queer refers to sex, gender, and sexuality that
don't coincide with the traditions and customs of a particular
time period. Sumner's relationships with How and Longfellow fit with
(18:35):
this definition. Especially Sumner and How, people commented on how
close they were before the other men got married and afterwards.
Sumner really struggled to put these relationships aside in the
way that he was expected to. It seems like How
also had similar struggles. Sumner became deeply depressed after How
(18:56):
got married. In a letter to Francis Lieber on How's
wedding day, Sumner wrote, quote, I am alone alone. My
friends fall away from me. A few weeks later, Longfellow
told Sumner that he was getting married as well, and
later that same day Sumner wrote to him and said, quote,
I fear much, dear Henry, that I may have seemed
(19:17):
dull and indifferent to your great happiness when you first
broke it to me this morning how has gone, and
now you have gone, and nobody has left with which
I can have sweet sympathy. What shall I do these
long summer evenings? And what will become of those sabbaths
sacred to friendship and repose.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
After the Longfellows got married, they were both close to Sumner.
Fanny invited him to be part of the wedding and
to accompany them on their honeymoon. Sumner was not the
only honeymoon guests. Some of Fanny's female friends accompanied them
as well. Sumner was a frequent guest at the Longfellow
home for the rest of his life, and he retained
(19:57):
his connection with Longfellow while all so developing a close
friendship with his wife.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
But the same was not true of the How's. How
seems to have been really torn over his feelings for
both Sumner and Julia. He wrote forty letters on their honeymoon,
and thirty three of them were to Sumner. Julia seems
to have been understandably envious of her husband's relationship with Sumner,
(20:24):
and she started to resent it. At one point, she said, quote,
Sumner ought to have been a woman, and you to
have married her.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
On top of that, the Howe's marriage just wasn't very happy.
Julia was, of course a poet and a writer, and
Samuel did not encourage these pursuits or want her to
have a public career in them. He seems to have
really been pretty controlling. Sumner sided with how on this.
When Julia Ward Howe published work during her lifetime, a
(20:53):
lot of the time she published it anonymously because her
husband didn't want her doing it. She also wrote a
book called The her man Aphrodite, which was first published
long after her death. This book tells the story of
an intersex person who sometimes lives as a man and
sometimes as a woman. This book is sometimes interpreted as
a reflection of her husband's relationships with her and with
(21:16):
Charles Sumner. More than a year after how and Longfellow
each got married, Sumner was still grief stricken and depressed.
At one point, how wrote him a letter that said, quote,
if you will go on neglect, exercise, neglect, sleep, study
late and early, stoop over your table, work yourself to death,
grieve all your friends and break my heart for where,
(21:40):
dear Charlie, at my time of life shall I find
a friend to love as I love you? A few
months after that, Sumner wrote to How saying, quote, I
am going to say what will offend you, but what
I trust God will pardon for me. There is no
future either of usefulness or happiness throughout all all of this,
(22:00):
Longfellow and How, we're both encouraging Sumner to get married himself,
and that is something he seems to have genuinely wanted
to do. The Five of Clubs even shifted its focus
to finding Sumner a wife, but Sumner had trouble connecting
with the women that his friends introduced him to. Sometimes
things would get off to a promising start with women
(22:23):
who seemed like they were intellectually and socially combatible with him,
but then he would just seem to lose interest or
stop responding to them.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
It is obvious that all three of these men loved
one another, and that the loss of his intimacy with
How and Longfellow was deeply painful for Sumner, even as
Longfellow and his wife tried to welcome him into their
lives together. There are also some gaps in what we
know about all of their thoughts and feelings. Sumner heavily
(22:51):
edited his letters, especially the ones he received from How
blotting out or cutting out portions of them, and burning
some of them entirely. When Sumner was eventually elected to
be a senator, Howe wrote to him and told him
that he was burning any letters that quote might be
disagreeable to you to have seen by unfriendly eyes. Ultimately,
(23:14):
most of Sumner's letters to how were destroyed.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
In the first year after how and Longfellow each got married,
Sumner was sometimes so depressed that he could not get
out of bed. As he recovered, he largely left the
practice of commercial law to focus on social causes and reform,
including joining the Peace Society and working on prison reforms,
and of course focusing on the abolition of slavery. We
(23:41):
will get into some things more related to that after
a sponsor break. Broadly speaking, Charles Sumner was an expansionist.
This was the era of manifest destiny, when a lot
of white people in the United States believed it was
(24:03):
inevitable for the nation to spread across the entire continent.
But there were limits to Sumner's expansionism. He thought embarking
on a war to conquer and claim new territory was
a violation of international law, and he thought any expansion
of the United States should not involve the expansion of
(24:25):
the institution of slavery.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
That means, when President James K. Polk started talking about
annexing Texas, which had declared itself an independent republic, and
possibly annexing additional land from Mexico, Sumner was solidly against it.
Annexing Texas would add another slave state to the United States,
an annexing part of Mexico would almost certainly lead to war.
(24:51):
He called a possible war with Mexico mean and cowardly,
and he would eventually join the State Anti Texas Committee.
Forty five, when Sumner was thirty four, the United States
was in the process of annexing Texas and was also
facing the possibility of a war with Mexico. At that point,
(25:11):
Sumner was invited to be the keynote speaker for Boston's
Independence Day celebration. For his address, Sumner delivered an anti
war speech called True Grandeur of Nations. This speech was
more than one hundred pages long.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
That's so long everything He was not long with every
speech that he ever gave, but there were a lot
of long speeches for both like how many people really
paid attention to one hundred pages worth of speech. We're
gonna get to longer speeches later.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
At which point they're checking out. Nobody's hearing your message,
My love, Okay, Sumner said in part quote in our age.
There can be no peace that is not honorable. There
can be no war that is not dishonorable. The true
honor of a nation is to be found only in
deeds of justice and in the happiness of its people,
(26:04):
all of which are inconsistent with war. In the clear
eye of Christian judgment. Vain are its victories, infamous are
its spoils. He is the true benefactor and alone worthy
of honor. Who brings comfort where before was wretchedness, Who
dries the tear of sorrow, who pours oil into the
wounds of the unfortunate, who feeds the hungry, and clothes
(26:27):
the naked, who unlooses the fetters of the slave, Who
does justice, who enlightens the ignorant, Who enlivens and exalts
by his virtuous genius in art, in literature, in science,
the hours of life, Who by words or actions inspires
a love for God and for man. This is the
(26:48):
Christian hero, This is the man of honor. In a
Christian Land.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
Later on in this speech, Sumner said quote war is
utterly ineffectual to secure or advance the object at which
it aims, the misery which it excites, contributes to no end,
helps to establish no right, and therefore, in no respect
determines justice between the contending nations.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
In other words, peace was the grandeur of nations, not war.
This being an Independence Day event, there were a lot
of military veterans in the audience, and they found this
speech to be deeply insulting. Some people approved of it,
including Samuel Gridley Howe, but overall the people of Boston
(27:34):
were furious. After the speech, a private dinner was held
at Fanuel Hall, where a whole series of speakers publicly
criticized Sumner and denounced what he had said.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
When Sumner stood up to make his own speech that night,
he toasted the dinner's earlier speakers and he wished them happiness.
He did not try to argue back against their criticisms.
And then afterward he and on kind of an apology tour.
He visited a lot of prominent people who had been
offended by his remarks, including some of those veterans. He
(28:09):
didn't really take back what he had said, but he
explained that he was talking about principles, not the actions
of the individual men who had served in the military.
When he provided a copy of the speech for publication,
he also clarified his intent a little bit quote. Believing
that in the present state of Christian society, all war
(28:32):
and all preparation for war are irrational, unnecessary, and inconsistent
with that true greatness at which our republic should aim.
I deemed it my duty on that occasion to uphold
that truth. I was also anxious that our country should
seek the true glory, and what is higher than glory,
the great good of taking the lead in the disarming
(28:53):
of the nations. Allow me to add that I wish
to be understood as restraining my opinions precisely within the
limits which I have assigned them in these pages, and
particularly to disclaim the suggestion which has been volunteered with
regard to them, that force may not be employed under
the sanction of justice in the conservation of the laws
(29:14):
and of domestic quiet. All good men must unite in
condemning as barbarous and unchristian the resort to external force,
in other words, to the arbitrament of war to international
lynch law, or the great trial by battle to determine
justice between nations. This is like the most conciliatory Charles
(29:39):
Sumner would be regarding one of his speeches in at
least in terms of like all the ones that I
read in part of this research, the person who was
chosen to give this Independence Day speech in Boston was
usually somebody who was seen as up and coming and promising,
somebody sort of imagined as representing the future of Boston.
(30:00):
Unlike in his earlier school years when Sumner had really
had trouble connecting with his peers, as an adult, he'd
made a lot of friends that included a lot of
really prominent people in the United States and Europe. After
getting back from that trip abroad, he had been the
recipient of a lot of very fashionable invitations. He was
very tall, striking to look at, and usually well dressed.
(30:22):
Sometimes he's described as a little foppish.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
But this speech was a turning point.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
People started to distance themselves from him a little bit
and his purportedly radical views.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
Even after this kind of.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Conciliatory aftermath, he started to fall out with some of
those high profile friends and acquaintances, He also lost.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
One of his mentors, Joseph Story, who died a couple
of months after the Independence Day speech. Story's last letter
to Sumner had been about the speech, praising its quote,
elegance of diction and classical beauty, while saying that Story
dissented from its core message. Sumner was devastated at the
(31:04):
loss of his mentor and colleague.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Beyond that loss and grief, a lot of people, including Sumner,
really thought that he would be succeeding Story as the
Dane Professor of Law at Harvard. Sumner had been lecturing
there in law since graduating from the law school. He'd
been filling in when Story or other professors were absent,
but Harvard instead hired William Kent, who was the son
(31:29):
of Chancellor James Kent. In addition to losing this position,
Sumner was hurt that another one of his mentors at Harvard,
Simon Greenleaf, had not really advocated for him in all
of this. The next big moment in Charles Sumner's legal
career involved a school segregation case, and we're going to
get into that next time, but for now, Tracy, do
(31:52):
you have listener mail?
Speaker 3 (31:53):
I Do I have listener mail?
Speaker 2 (31:54):
I'm catching up on some really old listener mail that
I meant to read a while ago that didn't get
read for various reasons, and I don't think I read
it and forgot to check it off.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
This one is from Armas, who.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Wrote, Hi, Tracy and Holly, I just listened to part
one of your Unearthed episodes for July till how long
ago this was, and was delighted to hear you mentioned
the hand painted slightly sacrilegious condom recently acquired by the
Reis Museum, because I actually saw the condom in person
on a recent trip to Amsterdam. Looking back at when
(32:29):
the episode came out, I realized I actually saw the
condom just a few days before your episode came out,
which is just a little funny coincidence. Honestly, the condom
and the exhibit around it of sexual art was one
of my favorite parts of the museum. I have a
master's degree in art history and focused a lot of
my studies on depictions and histories of sexuality in art.
(32:50):
But aside from that, I think the condom would have
been one of the most memorable parts of the museum. Anyway,
the collection of the Reis Museum is so massive that
it's a little bit overwhelming, and a condom definitely manages
to stand out for its novelty if nothing else. While
in Amsterdam, I also went on a red light district tour,
which was fascinating in a lot of ways. But it's
(33:12):
interesting to note that the tour started in front of
a shop called the Condomerie, the first condom shop in
the world, and the front window display was full of
hand painted novelty condoms. Interesting to see just how that
particular art form has continued on all those years later,
and gives a little insight into the way that humans
have found the same types of things funny across the generations.
(33:36):
I adore your podcast and all the things that you do,
especially in these difficult historical times when so much of
education and access to good historical information is under threat.
I've been listening for many years now and hope to
continue for many years to come. I've attached a photo
I took of the condom in questioned, as.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
Well as some.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
Less salacious pictures of my rabbit's dog and a horse
for the pet tax. The little white and gray bunny
is theo. He likes to sleep on my bed with
me every night. The gray bunny is Sulky. She's a
bundle of energy that does not get along with theo.
The pupp is Tasca. She loves everybody and has just
enough herding instincts to always try her absolute hardest to
(34:17):
keep her sheepies my family in the same room together.
And the horse is Ben. He's a bit useless, but
we love him anyway. Thanks for all you too are
Thank you so much for this email and for the picture.
I love all of it. I love all of it.
I love all these bunny rabbits. I love this dog
who looks a little bit forlorn, and I also love
the useless horse. Many years ago I knew some folks
(34:39):
who had adopted or rescued a herding dog. I don't
remember the exact breed of dog, but they had two
horses and they lived out in the country, obviously, and
the dog basically herded the two horses around like all
the time, just making sure both the horses were where
they needed to because working dogs were bred to do that,
(35:03):
which means if you get one and you are expecting
to just have a pet, it might not work out.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
As plants, you got to give them busy work.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
They gotta have stuff to do. That is what they
are inclined for. So thank you so much again for
this email and the pictures.
Speaker 3 (35:19):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
If you'd like to send us a note about this
or any other podcasts, we are at history podcast atiheartradio
dot com and you can subscribe to our show on
the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd like to get
your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
(35:44):
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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