Content Warning: brief talk of sexual violence in the second post
You might want to grab a snack and find a comfortable chair. Let's start at the very beginning, which I am told is a very good place to start.
1
On Monday, May 19, 1856, Charles Sumner (R-MA) stands up in the Senate, under the eye of packed galleries, to deliver a major speech. As a Republican decidedly in the Senate minority and just barely elected a few years back after months of wrangling by an unstable coalition of Free Soilers, dissident Whigs, and Democrats back in Boston, Sumner doesn't actually have a lot else to do. Furthermore, his political future is in some doubt because his coalition has basically fallen apart back home.
Sumner is a well-regarded rhetorical stylist, if kind of a stuffy one, and also a bit of a research monster so when he delivers a major speech, it's a big deal. He spent months preparing, taking a copy of Don Quixote out of the Library of Congress to make sure he got his insults right and busied himself with histories of Georgia and the Carolinas to check his facts.
Sumner wrote a massive oration, then memorized the whole thing so he wouldn’t have to check his notes as he spoke. Most politicians at the time wrote their speeches in advance and then just read them. Sumner drilled himself on tone, posture, gestures, and all that rest; he aimed to put on a show. A legend developed at the time that Sumner did most of his practicing at night, with a black boy holding up a mirror and/or a candle so he could watch himself in the mirror. There's no truth to it so far as his biographer could determine, but it's one of those stories that stuck around. Sumner did a dry run with William Seward (Whig-turning-Republican-NY) and then deemed himself ready.
Sumner's previous big speeches all involved his opposition to slavery. He associated with other reform causes, but antislavery made him famous. Previously, Sumner focused on the injustices of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. -He coined the antislavery slogan Freedom National.- Those ills were considerable, but old news. Instead Sumner turned to the nation's most troubled territory. Amid great controversy and with much political wrangling, Kansas (and also Nebraska, which at the time extended to Canada) were opened to white settlement without restriction on slavery by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This is a direct repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which had for thirty years previously promised that land to northern white men. (Technically it barred slavery there; same effect.) The fate of slavery in Kansas would be decided by popular sovereignty, which meant the white men on the ground would vote. That was just fine with everybody, if and only if their side won. Seeing this as a betrayal of a near-constitutional pact, antislavery northerners organized sympathetic white colonists and subsidized their movement into the territory. Kansas is right next to Missouri, a slave state, and specifically next to the most enslaved portion of it. The Missourians decide they're going to keep the Yankees out, violently if need be.
Things go to pot in territorial Kansas, to the point where there's nearly a pitched battle in late 1855. As Sumner spoke, a second proslavery army was enrolled as a posse aimed at arresting the antislavery leadership and moving toward their headquarters at Lawrence. People have been killed, homes burned, arrested, rescued, recaptured, and all the rest. It's a remarkably tangled, weird fascinating situation where I'm skipping over almost completely. What you need to know is that the proslavery Missourians came over armed to the teeth, including cannons, any time Kansas ran an election. They all voted and dared anyone to vote against them, even to the point of overruling proslavery Kansans in favor of their own proslavery guys. The long and short of this is that by the end of 1855, not two years after first being opened to white colonization, Kansas has two governments, two constitutions, and both governments seek admission to the Union as the sole legitimate government of the state. The Senate is in the process of considering their applications. Charles Sumner has opinions, which he voices in an oration he calls The Crime Against Kansas.
The whole speech is 30+ pages of two column, small print in its original pamphlet edition and north of 100 in his (single-column) collected works. I've read every word, most of it more than once. Suffice it to say that Sumner's oratory appeals to a very specific set of tastes. Here's his opening paragraph:
Mr. President: You are now called to redress a great transgression. Seldom in the history of nations has such a question been presented. Tariffs, army bills, navy bills, land bills, are important, and justly occupy your care; but these all belong to the course of ordinary legislation. As means and instruments only, they are necessarily subordinate to the conservation of government itself. Grant them or deny them, in greater or less degree, and you will inflict no shock. The machinery of government will continue to move. The State will not cease to exist. Far otherwise is it with the eminent question now before you, involving, as it does, liberty in a broad territory, and also involving the peace of the whole country with our good name in history for evermore.
Then Sumner walks you through a map to tell you where Kansas is and dives into historical allusions (Militiades, Marathon, Sparta, Rome, Crecy, Agincourt...). The nice thing about Sumner's style is that it's trivial to follow where he's going and drop in and out when looking for specific parts, but he also repeats himself often and spends a lot of time showing off his education. None of us on the sub can relate. None of us.
I'll spare us all extensive quotes from the speech. It's available in full here if you'd like, in just the version that plays a part in the story. The crux of the thing is him excoriating the various explanations and solutions for Kansas already proposed. The problem was that Kansans were victims of a "swindle" -Sumner apologized for not using a word with a Latinate pedigree; he's that kind of guy- and gave us four of each. I'll run them down.
The Apology Tyrannical held that Kansas proslavery government was recognized by the nation and that was that. The circumstances of its birth in fraudulent elections didn't matter. The Apology Imbecile basically said that whatever happened in Kansas, the United States did not have the power to fix it. The Apology Absurd blamed everything on antislavery militias in Kansas, which were a thing and occasionally burned proslavery colonists off their claims...but the other guys preferred to straight up murder people so you can kind of see why they wanted armed protection. The Apology Infamous was a close relative, blaming the societies of northerners who funded colonization in Kansas for all the troubles.
That took up the first day of the speech. (The whole thing took about three hours to deliver.) On Tuesday the 20th, Sumner gets up to continue. He proceeds to the solutions offered to Kansas' problems: the Remedies of Tyranny (compelling obedience to the proslavery government by force), Folly (disarming the free state colonists entirely and wishing them luck), Injustice and Civil War (giving the proslavery government the go-ahead for statehood), and Justice and Peace (admitting the antislavery government to statehood). You can guess which Sumner preferred.
All that's maybe a little nasty, but basically within the bounds of acceptable discourse at the time. If Sumner only said those things, he would probably be an obscure one-term Senator no one much cared about. Sumner also found it necessary to make some remarks about the people who brought Kansas and the nation to this point.
before entering upon the argument, I must say something of a general character, particularly in response to what has fallen from Senators who have raised themselves to eminence on this floor in championship of human wrongs; I mean the Senator from South Carolina, [Mr. Butler.] and the Senator from Illinois, [Mr. Douglas.] who, though unlike as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, yet, like this couple, sally forth together in the same cause.
Butler is Andrew Pickens Butler, who actually sat next to Sumner in the Senate. They had gotten on well and Butler asked Sumner to check the Latin he used in speeches. Stephen Douglas is the chief architect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and thus literally the man who made all this possible. -Salmon Chase, another antislavery Senator, called him an Accomplished Architect of Ruin- Sumner has things to say about Douglas and others, but Butler is the important one. He's also not in the chamber at the time, being instead back home in South Carolina. Sumner says Butler
has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight-I mean the harlot, Slavery.
