Part 18

Sumner's greatest parliamentary feat was occasioned by Trumbull's introduction of a bill for the reconstruction of Louisiana in the winter of 1864. There were only ten thousand loyal white voters in the State; and nothing could be more imprudent or prejudicial than such a hasty attempt at reorganization of the rebellious South, before the war was fairly ended. It was like a man building an annex to one side of his house while the other side was on fire; yet it was known to be supported by Seward, and, as was alleged, also by Lincoln. It was thrust upon Congress at the last moment, evidently in order to prevent an extended debate, and Sumner turned this to his own advantage. For two days and nights his voice resounded through the Senate chamber, until, with the assistance of his faithful allies, Wade and Wilson, he succeeded in preventing the bill from being brought to a vote. It was an extreme instance of human endurance, without parallel before or since, and may possibly have shortened Sumner's life. Five weeks later President Lincoln, in his last speech, made the significant proposition of universal amnesty combined with universal suffrage. Would that he could have lived to see the completion of his work!

Something may be said here of Sumner's influence with Mrs. Lincoln. If Don Piatt is to be trusted, Mrs. Lincoln came to Washington with a strong feeling of antipathy towards Seward and "those eastern abolitionists." She was born in a slave state and had remained pro- slavery,--a fact which did not trouble her husband because he did not allow it to trouble him. Fifteen months in Washington brought a decided change in her opinions, and Sumner would seem to have been instrumental in this conversion. It is well known that she preferred his society to that of others. She had studied French somewhat, and he encouraged her to talk it with him,--which was looked upon, of course, as an affectation on both sides.

At the time of General McClellan's removal, October, 1862, Mrs. Lincoln was at the Parker House in Boston. Sumner called on her in the forenoon, and she said at once: "I suppose you have heard the news, and that you are glad of it. So am I. Mr. Lincoln told me he expected to remove him before I left Washington."

Sumner resembled Charles XII. of Sweden in this: there is no evidence that he ever was in love. His devotion to the law in early life, surrounded as he was by interesting friends, may have been antagonistic to matrimony. The woman he ought to have married was the noble daughter of his old friend, Cornelius Felton, whom he often met, but whose worth he never recognized. The marriage which he contracted late in life was not based on enduring principles, and soon came to a grievous end. It was more like the marriages that princes make than a true republican courtship. Sumner apparently wanted a handsome wife to preside at his dinner parties in Washington, but he chose her from among his opponents instead of from among his friends.

Since there has been much foolish talk upon this subject, it may be well to state here that the true difficulty between Mr. and Mrs. Sumner was owing to the company which he invited to his house. She only wished to entertain fashionable people, but a large proportion of Sumner's friends could not be included within these narrow limits. As Senator from Massachusetts that would not do for him at all. This is the explanation that was given by Mrs. Sumner's brother, and it is without doubt the correct one; but women in such cases are apt to allege something different from the true reason.

Sumner's most signal triumph happened on the occasion of President Johnson's first Message to Congress in January, 1865. He rose from his seat and characterized it as a "whitewashing document." That day he stood alone, yet within six weeks every Republican Senator was at his side.

Sumner knew how to be silent as well as to talk. On one occasion he was making a speech in the Senate when he suddenly heard Schuyler Colfax behind him saying, "This is all very good, Sumner, but here I have the Appropriation bills from the House, and the Democrats know nothing about them." Sumner instantly resumed his seat, and the bills were acted on without serious opposition. He would sometimes sit through a dinner at the Bird Club without saying very much, but if he once started on a subject that interested him there was no limit to it.

Sumner's speech on the "Alabama claims" was considered a failure because the administration did not afterwards support him; and it is true that no government would submit to a demand for adventitious damages so long as it could prevent this; but it was a far-reaching exposure of an unprincipled foreign policy, and this speech formed the groundwork for the Treaty of Washington and the Geneva arbitration. It was a more important case than the settlement of the Northeastern boundary.

Sumner died the death of a hero. The administration of General Grant might well be called the recoil of the cannon: it was the reactionary effect of a great military movement on civil affairs. Sumner alone withstood the shock of it, and he fought against it for four years like a veteran on his last line of defence, feeling victory was no longer possible. Many of his friends found the current too strong for them; his own party deserted him; even the Legislature of his own State turned against him in a senseless and irrational manner. Still his spirit was unconquerable, and he continued to face the storm as long as life was in him. It was a magnificent spectacle.

It was the last battlefield of a veteran warrior, and although Sumner retired from it with a mortal wound, he had the satisfaction of winning a glorious victory. No end could have been more appropriate to such a life. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Since Richard Coeur de Leon forgave Bertram de Gordon, who caused his death, there has never been a more magnanimous man than Charles Sumner. Once when L. Maria Child was anathematizing Preston S. Brooks in his presence, he said: "You should not blame him. It was slavery and not Brooks that struck me. If Brooks had been born and brought up in New England, he would no more have done the thing he did than Caleb Cushing would have done it,"--Cushing always being his type of a pro-slavery Yankee.

In 1871 Charles W. Slack, the editor of the Boston Commonwealth, for whom Sumner had obtained a lucrative office, turned against his benefactor in order to save his position. When I spoke of this to Sumner, he said: "Well, it is human nature. Slack is growing old, and if he keeps his office for the next six years, he will have a competency. I have no doubt he feels grateful to me, and regrets the course he is taking." At the same time, he spoke sadly.

Sumner resembled Lord Chatham more closely than any statesman of the nineteenth century. He carried his measures through by pure force of argument and clearness of foresight. From 1854 to 1874 it was his policy that prevailed in the councils of the nation. He succeeded where others failed.

He defeated Franklin Pierce, Seward, Trumbull, Andrew Johnson, Hamilton Fish, and even Lincoln, on the extradition of Mason and Slidell. He tied Johnson down, so that he could only move his tongue.

In considering Sumner's oratory, we should bear in mind what Coleridge said to Allston, the painter,--"never judge a work of art by its defects." His sentences have not the classic purity of Webster's, and his delivery lacked the ease and elegance of Phillips and Everett. His style was often too florid and his Latin quotations, though excellent in themselves, were not suited to the taste of his audiences. But Sumner was always strong and effective, and that is, after all, the main point. Like Webster he possessed a logical mind, and the profound earnestness of his nature gave an equally profound conviction to his words. Besides this, Sumner possessed the heroic element, as Patrick Henry and James Otis possessed it. After Webster's death there was no American speaker who could hold an audience like him.

Matthew Arnold, in his better days, said that Burke's oratory was too rich and overloaded. This is true, but it is equally true that Burke is the only orator of the eighteenth century that still continues to be read. He had a faulty delivery and an ungainly figure, but if he emptied the benches in the House of Commons he secured a larger audience in coming generations. The material of his speeches is of such a vital quality that it possesses a value wholly apart from the time and occasion of its delivery.

Much the same is true of Sumner, who would have had decidedly the advantage of Burke so far as personal impressiveness is concerned. His Phi Beta Kappa address of 1845 is so rich in material that it is even more interesting to read now than when it was first delivered, and his remarks on Allston in that oration might be considered to advantage by every art critic in the country. It should always be remembered that a speech, like a play, is written not to be read, but to be acted; and those discourses which read so finely in the newspapers are not commonly the ones that sounded the best when they were delivered.

Great men create great antagonisms. The antagonism which Lincoln excited was concentrated in Booth's pistol shot, and the Montagues and Capulets became reconciled over his bier; but the antagonism against Sumner still continues to smoke and smoulder like the embers of a dying conflagration.

CHEVALIER HOWE.

The finest modern statue in Berlin is that of General Ziethen, the great Hussar commander in the Seven Years' War. [Footnote: Von Schlater's statue of the Great Elector is of course a more magnificent work of art.] He stands leaning on his sabre in a dreamy, nonchalant attitude, as if he were in the centre of indifference and life had little interest for him. Yet there never was a man more ready for action, or more quick to seize upon and solve the nodus of any new emergency. The Prussian anecdote-books are full of his exploits and hairbreadth escapes, a number of which are represented around the base of the statue. He combined the intelligence of the skilful general with the physical dexterity of an acrobat.

Very much such a man was Samuel Gridley Howe, born in Boston November 10, 1801, whom Whittier has taken as the archetype of an American hero in his tune.

If a transient guest at the Bird Club should have seen Doctor Howe sitting at the table with his indifferent, nonchalant air, head leaning slightly forward and his grayish-black hair almost falling into his eyes, he would never have imagined that he was the man who had fought the Turks hand-to-hand like Cervantes and Sir John Smith; who had been imprisoned in a Prussian dungeon; who had risked his life in the July Revolution at Paris; and who had taken the lead in an equally important philanthropic revolution in his own country.

Next to Sumner he is the most distinguished member of the club, even more so than Andrew and Wilson; a man with a most enviable record. He does not talk much where many are gathered together, but if he hears an imprudent statement, especially an unjust estimate of character, his eyes flash out from beneath the bushy brows, and he makes a correction which just hits the nail on the head. He is fond of his own home and is with difficulty enticed away from it. Once in awhile he will dash out to Cambridge on horseback to see Longfellow, but the lion-huntresses of Boston spread their nets in vain for him. He will not even go to the dinner parties for which Mrs. Howe is in constant demand, but prefers to spend the evening with his children, helping them about their school lessons, and listening to the stories of their everyday experiences.

There never was a more modest, unostentatious hero; and no one has recorded his hairbreadth escapes and daring adventures, for those who witnessed them never told the tale, nor would Doctor Howe willingly speak of them himself. He was of too active a temperament to be much of a scholar in his youth, although in after life he went through with whatever he undertook in a thorough and conscientious manner. He went to Brown University, and appears to have lived much the same kind of life there which Lowell did at Harvard,--full of good spirits, admired by his classmates, as well as by the young ladies of Providence, and exceptionally fond of practical jokes; always getting into small difficulties and getting out of them again with equal facility. He was so amiable and warm-hearted that nobody could help loving him; and so it continued to the end of his life.

He could not himself explain exactly why he joined the Greek Revolution. He had suffered himself while at school from the tyranny of older boys, and this strengthened the sense of right and justice that had been implanted in his nature. He had not the romantic disposition of Byron; neither could he have gone from a desire to win the laurels of Miltiades, for he never indicated the least desire for celebrity. It seems more likely that his adventurous disposition urged him to it, as one man takes to science and another to art.

It was certainly a daring adventure to enlist as a volunteer against the Turks. Byron might expect that whatever advantage wealth and reputation can obtain for an individual he could always count upon; but what chances would young Howe have in disaster or defeat? I never heard that Byron did much fighting, though he spent his fortune freely in the cause; and Doctor Howe, as it happened, was not called upon to fight in line of battle, though he was engaged in some pretty hot skirmishes and risked himself freely.

He went to Greece in the summer of 1824 and remained till after the battle of Navarino in 1827. Greece was saved, but the land was a desert and its people starving. Doctor Howe returned to America to raise funds and beg provisions for liberated Hellas, in which he was remarkably successful; but we find also that he published a history of the Greek Revolution, the second edition of which is dated 1828. For this he must have collected the materials before leaving Greece; but as it contains an account of the sea-fight of Navarino, it must have been finished after his return to America. The book was hastily written, and hastily published. To judge from appearances it was hurried through the press without being revised either by its author or a competent proofreader; but it is a vigorous, spirited narrative, and the best chronicle of that period in English. Would there were more such histories, even if the writing be not always grammatical. Doctor Howe does not sentimentalize over the ruins of Sparta or Plato's Academy, but he describes Greece as he found it, and its inhabitants as he knew them. He possesses what so many historians lack, and that is the graphic faculty. He writes in a better style than either Motley or Bancroft. His book ought to be revised and reprinted.

We quote from it this clearsighted description of the preparation for a Graeco-Turkish sea-fight: