S: Sanborn through Swisshelm

See below for annotated biographies of Free Soil Party leaders, members and supporters. Source: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography.

SANBORN, Franklin Benjamin, 1831-1917, abolitionist leader, journalist, prison and social reformer, Secretary of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee.  Secretary of the Massachusetts Free Soil Association.  Secretly supported radical abolitionist John Brown, and his raid on the U.S. Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, (West) Virginia, on October 16, 1859.  Brother of Charles Sanborn. 

(Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 327, 338, 476, 478-479; American Reformers, pp. 715-716; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, pp. 384; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, p. 326; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 19, p. 237)

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

SANBORN, Franklin Benjamin, reformer, born  in Hampton Falls, N. H., 15 Dec., 1831, was graduated at Harvard in 1855, and in 1856 became secretary of the Massachusetts state Kansas committee. His interest in similar enterprises led to his active connection with the Massachusetts state board of charities, of which he was secretary in 1863-'8, a member in 1870-'6, and chairman in 1874-'6, succeeding Dr. Samuel G. Howe. In 1875 he made a searching investigation into the abuses of the Tewksbury almshouse, and in consequence the institution was reformed. Mr. Sanborn was active in founding the Massachusetts infant asylum and the Clarke institution for deaf-mutes, and has devoted much attention to the administration of the Massachusetts lunacy system. In 1879 he helped to reorganize the system of Massachusetts charities, with special reference to the care of children and insane persons, and in July, 1879, he became inspector of charities under the new board. He called together the first National conference of charities in 1874, and was treasurer of the conference in 1886-'8. In 1865 he was associated in the organization of the American social science association, of which he was one of the secretaries until 1868, and he has been since 1873 its chief secretary. With Bronson Alcott and William T. Harris he aided in establishing the Concord summer school of philosophy in 1879, and was its secretary and one of its lecturers. Since 1868 he has been editorially connected with the Springfield “Republican,” and has also been a contributor to newspapers and reviews. The various reports that he has issued as secretary of the organizations of which he is a member, from 1865 till 1888, comprise about forty volumes. He has edited William E. Channing's “Wanderer” (Boston, 1871) and A. Bronson Alcott's “Sonnets and Canzonets” (1882) and “New Connecticut” (1886); and is the author of “Life of Thoreau” (1882) and “Life and Letters of John Brown” (1885). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, pp. 384.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, p. 326;

SANBORN, FRANKLIN BENJAMIN (December 15, 1831-February 24, 1917), author, journalist, philanthropist, was born on his ancestral farm in Hampton Falls., New Hampshire, the fifth of the seven children of Aaron and Lydia (Leavitt) Sanborn, and the sixth in descent from John Sanborn, who settled in Hampton in 1640. His father was a farmer and, when his son was born, clerk of the town. The boy's intellectual development was stimulated by his love for Ariana Walker, daughter of James Walker of Peterborough. With her encouragement he completed his preparatory schooling at Phillips Exeter Academy and entered Harvard College as a sophomore in 1852. He enjoyed his college life, but from his teachers he derived far less than from Theodore Parker, whose preaching he attended regularly, and from Ralph Waldo Emerson, on whom he first ventured to call in 1853. On August 23, 1854, he was married to Ariana Walker, who was on her deathbed and succumbed eight days later. Sanborn graduated from Harvard in 1855 and removed to Concord, Massachusetts, where at Emerson's suggestion he had already opened a school.

It was a happy move, for Concord was his spiritual home. Less original than the elder literary men of the village, he was their fellow in vigor and independence of mind and in breadth of interests, and he had a practical sagacity and knowledge of the world that some of them lacked. He was soon in the thick of the abolition movement. As· secretary of the Massachusetts Free Soil Association he went on a tour of inspection in the West in the summer of 1856 and, although he did not actually enter Kansas Territory, brought back with him an enduring interest in the problems of that region. The next January he met John Brown in Boston, was captivated by the man, and became his New England agent. He was apprised of Brown's intentions at Harpers Ferry, did what he could to dissuade him, but, when dissuasion proved futile, aided him. Later, he refused to leave Massachusetts to testify before a committee of the United States Senate, grounding his refusal on an appeal to the doctrine of state rights, and on February 16, 1860, the Senate ordered his arrest. Sanborn retreated twice to Quebec but returned on the advice of his friends. The sergeant-at-arms of the Senate delegated the power to arrest him to one Carleton of Boston, who with four assistants apprehended him at Concord on April 3, 1860. He was released at once on a writ of habeas corpus issued by Judge E. R. Hoar; a posse comitatus chased the arresting party out of town; and the next day the state supreme court, by a decision written by Chief Justice Shaw, ordered Sanborn's discharge.

To newspaper work, philanthropy, and literature he devoted the greater part of his long life. On August 16, 1862, he married his cousin, Louisa Augusta Leavitt, by whom he had three sons. He succeeded Moncure Daniel Conway [q.v.] as editor of the Boston Commonwealth (1863-67) and was a resident editor of the Springfield Republican (1868-72). He had been a correspondent of the Republican since 1856 and remained on its staff until 1914. As a newspaper man he was noted for his blistering criticism of various Massachusetts politicians. In 1863 Governor John Albion Andrew [q.v.] appointed him secretary of the state board of charities. This office was the first of its kind in the United States, and Sanborn made it important and influential. He instituted a system of inspection and report for state charities that has been widely copied, made himself an expert on the care of the insane, and drafted many bills that were enacted into law. He retired as secretary in 1868 but remained on the board and was its chairman from 1874 to 1876; from 1879 to 1888 he was state inspector of charities. He was a founder and officer of the American Social Science Association, the National Prison Association, the National Conference of Charities, the Clarke School for the Deaf, and the Massachusetts Infant Asylum, and for all of them he worked hard and effectively. He lectured at Cornell University, Smith College, and Wellesley College, and joined with William Torrey Harris [q.v.] in establishing the Concord School of Philosophy. He knew intimately all the men and women who made Concord famous, was their sympathetic, helpful friend. while they lived and their loyal, intelligent editor and biographer after their death. His publications include: Henry D. Thoreau (1882); The Life and Letters of John Brown (1885), a fourth edition of which was issued under the title John Brown, Liberator of Kansas and Martyr of Virginia (1910); Dr. S. G. Howe, the Philanthropist (1891); A. Bronson Alcott: His Life and Philosophy (2 volumes, 1893), with W. T. Harris; Memoirs of Pliny Earle, M.D. (1898); The Personality of Thoreau (1901); Ralph Waldo Emerson (1901); The Personality of Emerson (1903); New Hampshire (1904); New Hampshire Biography and Autobiography (1905); Michael,. Anagnos (1907); Bronson Alcott at Alcott Ho1tse, England, and Fruitlands, New England (1908); Hawthorne and His Friends (1908); Recollections of  evenly Years (2 volumes, 1909); and The Life of Henry David Thoreau (1917). He published many magazine articles and did much editorial work on the literary remains of his friends. In some conservative circles his reputation as a subversive thinker lingered even into the twentieth century. He made two extensive visits to Europe and in his latter years enjoyed his membership in the Massachusetts Historical Society. Retaining his faculties to the end, he never lost his passion for liberty and justice or his admiration for the great men whom he had known in his prime. He died at his son's home in Plainfield, New Jersey, and was buried in Concord.

[Sanborn's writings contain much biog. material, especially his Recollections of Seventy Years (2 volumes, 1909) and "An Unpublished Concord Journal," ed. by G. S. Hellman, Century Magazine, April 1922. See also: V. C. Sanborn, Genealogy of the Family of Samborne or Sanborn (1899), and "Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, A.B.," New England Hist. and Genealogy Register, October 1917, and Kansas State Historical Society Collections, volume XIV (1918); Lindsay Swift, "Franklin Benjamin Sanborn," Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, volume L (1917); Ed. Stanwood, memoir, Ibid., volume LI (1918); The Report of the Secretary of the Class of 1855 of Harvard College, July 1855 to fitly 1865 (1865); Apocrypha Concerning the Class of 1855 of Harvard College and Their Deeds and Misdeeds during the Fifteen years between July, 1865, and July, 1880 (1880); Springfield Republican, February 25, 27, 1917; Alexander Johnson, " An Appreciation of Franklin B. Sanborn," Survey, March 10, 1917; W. E. Connelley, "Personal Reminiscences of F. B. Sanborn," Kan. State Historical Soc. Collections, volume XIV (1918); H. D. Carew, "Franklin B. Sanborn, an Appreciation," Granite Missouri, Nov. 1922.]

G. H.G.


SCAMMON, Jonathan Young, 1812-1890, Whitefield, Maine, lawyer, businessman, educator, newspaper publisher, Whig and Republican state leader, member of the Free Soil Party.  Introduced legislation to exclude slavery from the California and New Mexico territories.  Founded the Chicago Journal in 1844, the Chicago Republican in 1865.  T. W. Goodspeed, The University of Chicago Biographical Sketches, volume II (1925);

(Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. XVI, pp. 407-408; 

SCAMMON, JONATHAN YOUNG (July 27, 1812-March 17, 1890), lawyer and business man, was born on a farm in Whitefield. Maine, the son of Eliakim and Joanna (Young) Scammon. With a farmer's life in prospect, the boy's future was suddenly changed by the loss of two fingers on his left hand. Since he was thus handicapped in the farmer's important business of milking cows, his parents decided to equip him for a profession. He prepared for college and at eighteen entered Waterville (now Colby) College, but left at the end of his first year, probably for lack of means. He studied law in a law office in Hallowell and was admitted to the bar in 1835. Fired by enthusiastic reports of the rapid development of the Mississippi Valley, he started west and, not expecting to settle there, arrived in Chicago in September 1835. Not being greatly impressed with the town, he was preparing to move on when the temporary job of deputy clerk in the circuit court was offered him. He accept~ ed, and Chicago became his home for the remaining fifty-five years of his life. Admitted to the Illinois bar he rapidly won a place of prominence and leadership. Appointed as reporter of the Supreme Court of Illinois in 1839 he compiled four volumes of its reports, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of ... Illinois (copyright 1840-copyright 1844). Deeply interested in public education, he, probably more than anyone else, was responsible for the establishment of free schools in Chicago. For years he was a member of the board of education and president from 1845 to 1848. One of the city's elementary schools bears his name in recognition of his services. In his early years he was a Whig and later a Republican, being delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1864 and 1872. He served as state senator in 1861.

Throughout his career he was interested in newspaper publishing, in 1844 launching the Chicago Journal on its long career, in 1865 helping to found the Chicago Republican, which was brought to an end by the fire of 1871, and beginning publication of the Inter Ocean in 1872. In the late '40s he became actively interested in banking, insurance, and railroads. He did more than perhaps any other man to obtain better banking laws for Illinois. He established the Marine Bank in Chicago in 1851 and the Mechanics National Bank in 1864, serving as president of each, and he developed the Chicago Fire and Marine Insurance Company, of which also he was president in 1849. He had a prominent part in the development of the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad Company and was instrumental in bringing the Michigan Central Railroad into Chicago. Throughout his long life he continued the practice of law, although, as his career developed, business matters occupied an increasing amount of his time. Robert Todd Lincoln studied law in his office. By the early ‘50s he had become one of the leading business men of Chicago and a rich man by the standards of wealth of that day. Financial reverses were, however, encountered: temporary in 1857, when, during the panic of that year, his bank failed while he himself was absent in Europe with his family, irreparable in 1874, when the conflagration of 1871, the panic of 1873, and a second devastating fire a year later combined to give him a series of blows from which he never financially recovered. He was instrumental in founding many Chicago societies and charitable institutions, most of which he served as president. Among these were the Chicago Historical Society, the Chicago Academy of Sciences, Hahnemann Medical College, the Hahnemann hospital, the Old Ladies' Home, the old University of Chicago, of which he was one of the most liberal supporters, and the Chicago Astronomical Society, for which he provided funds for a telescope and observatory, which, by contract between the society and the university, was erected on the grounds of the latter. His name is perpetuated in the new University of Chicago by "Scammon Court" in the School of Education quadrangle, made possible by the gift of land by his widow in 1901. In religion he was a Swedenborgian, very zealous and prominent for years in the national activities of the New Jerusalem Church. He was married twice: first in 1837 to Mary Ann Haven Dearborn, of Bath, Maine, who died in 1858, and second, in 1867 to Mrs. Maria (Sheldon) Wright, of Delaware County, New York. He died in Chicago.

[T. W. Goodspeed, The University of Chicago Biographical Sketches, volume II (1925); Chicago Magazine, March 1857, reprinted with additions in Fergus' Historical Series, No. 6 (1876); H. L. Conrad, "Early Bench and Bar in Chicago," Magazine of Western History, August 1890; Chicago Daily News, March 17, 1890; Chicago Daily Tribune and Chicago Times, March 18, 1890.]

G. B. U.


SEWARD, William Henry, 1801-1872, statesman, U.S. Secretary of State under Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, U.S. Senator from New York, abolitionist, member Anti-Slavery Republican Party.

(Baker, 1884; Dumond, 1961, pp. 292, 302, 355-356; Mitchell, 2007, pp. 9, 10, 54, 119-121, 160, 162, 165-167, 168, 177, 191-192, 198, 247; Pease, 1965, pp. 177-181, 483-485; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 52, 62, 136, 138, 240, 513, 634-636; Sewell, 1976, pp. 17-18, 63, 114, 122, 124-125, 126, 232, 256, 239, 242, 268-270, 271, 277-278n, 282-283, 284, 285n, 289, 308, 341, 343, 345, 351, 358, 360-361, 362;  Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, pp. 470-472; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, p. 615; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 19, p. 676).

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, p. 615;

SEWARD, WILLIAM HENRY (May 16, 1801-October 10, 1872), statesman, was born in Florida, Orange County, New York, the son of Dr. Samuel S. and Mary (Jennings) Seward. After preparatory studies in Florida and the neighboring village of Goshen, he was sent at the age of fifteen to Union College. Graduating in 1820, he began to read law and was admitted to the bar in 1822, establishing himself the next year in Auburn, New York, which was to be his home for the rest of his life. Seward's convivial temperament as well as his profession fitted him for politics; the question was with what political group he would affiliate himself. His family had been Democratic-Republicans of the strictest persuasion, but with praiseworthy independence the rising young lawyer chose to ally himself with the opposing elements. In this decision the principal factors, according to his Autobiography (p. 54) written nearly fifty years later, were his distrust of the Southern Jeffersonians, and his great interest in internal improvements. At any rate, Seward voted for De Witt Clinton for governor, and John Quincy Adams for president in 1824, and wrote a good "Address" in support of the former (Works, III, 335). The enthusiasm which he then felt for Adams was never dimmed, and undoubtedly had its part in forming his own political ideals as time went on.

The closing  years of the 1820's saw the rise of the Anti-Masonic movement in western New York. To this Seward found himself drawn, both by expediency and by conviction. In the deliberations of the new organization, as indeed in previous political discussions, the rising young politician was drawn close to Thurlow Weed [q.v.], whose casual acquaintance he had first made in 1824 and with whom he was to maintain one of the most intimate and long-standing friendships in American political annals. It was due to Weed's influence that Seward stood for and was elected in the fall of 1830 to the state Senate. In this body he served for the next four years, as a distinguished member of the minority and later as its leader. He played a prominent part in the debates on Andrew Jackson's bank policy; he sustained the President in his opposition to Nullification; he continued to advocate internal improvements; he supported abolition of imprisonment for debt. Defeated for reelection in 1833, he was unanimously nominated for governor in 1834. By this time the Whig party had supplanted the Anti-Masons, and it was under the Whig banner that Seward was to fight for the next twenty years. In this first Whig candidacy, however, he was defeated, by William L. Marcy [q.v.]. The next few years Seward devoted to the practice of law, and he acquired a modest competence through his success as agent for the Holland Company, in settling disputes with settlers in Chautauqua County (Autobiography, p. 328; Works, III, 461).

The Whigs carried the New York legislature in the election of 1837 and Seward's political ambitions, which he professed were dead in 1834, rapidly came to life again, with the governorship as their objective. The contest for the nomination lay between him and the dignified Francis Granger [q.v.], nearly nine years his senior. Seward professed to be willing to let the convention decide, but an active organization was set on foot, the young voters being particularly active in his favor. Weed, after some hesitation, decided that his protege should have the nomination, and in a closely contested convention battle Seward was chosen. In the electoral campaign itself, he was compelled for the first time to face the issue of slavery. His attitude in 1838 can hardly be called an advanced one. By the abolitionists he was asked three questions, whether he was in favor of (1) a law granting trial by jury to all fugitives, (2) of abolishing the special qualifications for negro voters, and (3) of repealing a law permitting the importation and detention of slaves in the state of New York for a period of nine months. He answered the first question in the affirmative, but the other two in the negative, declaring that the subjects with which they dealt did not enter "into the political creed" of his party (Works, III, 426-32).

The election of 1838 resulted in a victory for Seward, as did that of 1840, though by a reduced plurality. His four years in the governorship reveal the natural ardor and optimism of his temperament, his strong humanitarian sympathies, and also his impulsiveness and tendency to challenge majority opinion. Always warmly convinced of the desirability of internal improvements, Seward courageously urged them upon successive legislatures (see his message of 1840, Works, II, 212-55). In the midst of the depression, he refused to acquiesce in the suspension of activities already undertaken, and from first to last boldly defended large expenditures. In this particular case the policy cannot be said to have succeeded. The state's credit was adversely affected, its bonds selling at a discount of twenty per cent in 1841. When the Democrats regained control of both houses of the legislature in the fall elections, they proceeded to suspend virtually all but the most necessary expenditures, and to levy additional taxes. Seward, however, stoutly insisted that his policy had been wise, and that the obstacles to its accomplishment were merely a blind distrust of the future, on the part of foreign investors and of the American people. His natural impulsiveness, as well as his generosity of feeling, was illustrated also by his attitude on the question of public education in New York City. The schools there, conducted by a private corporation, the Public School Society, had been unacceptable to the rapidly growing Catholic population, and, furthermore, did not attract the children of the immigrant classes. In his message of 1840, after consulting with his old friend, Dr. Eliphalet Nott of Union College, Seward recommended "the establishment of schools in which they (the children of New York) may be instructed by teachers speaking the same language with themselves and professing the same faith" (Works, II, 215). This recommendation caused a storm of criticism from the nativist elements in the state, stronger in the Whig than in the Democratic party. Seward was compelled to retreat from the position which he had assumed, though he succeeded in securing the establishment of public schools free from sectarian influence in the city.

On the slavery question Seward took advanced ground during his term of office. He refused to surrender three sailors, who had instigated the flight of a fugitive slave to New York, when the extradition of these men was demanded by the state of Virginia. His act provoked so much irritation in Virginia as to bring about reprisals against New York shipping. But it was typical of his humanitarian spirit, and it won him the ardent support of the growing abolitionist element (for the controversy, 1839-41, see Works, II, 449 ff.). No one would maintain, however, that Seward was an uncompromising idealist in the governorship. He dispensed offices on the strict spoils basis, as was the custom of the time; he signed a law requiring registration of voters in New York City under party pressure and very much against his personal convictions; and it may be that other motives than humanitarian interest were operating in the evolution of the policies above described. But he declined to be a candidate for reelection in 1842, and his letters show that he felt himself at this time to be too far in advance of public opinion to prosper politically.

The years in the governorship depleted Seward's financial resources. During the next seven years he worked assiduously to restore them, at first in his old field, the court of chancery, but, after a little, more and more in patent cases. From time to time he took criminal cases, involving trial before a jury. One of the most striking involved the death sentence on a poor imbecile negro, Freeman, in whose defense Seward made in 1846 one of the most eloquent of his speeches (Works, I, 391-475) ; this he afterwards declared he would have repeated without the alteration of a word. A case which won him still more fame was that in which in a suit for damages he unsuccess fully defended in 1846-47 Van Zandt, an Ohio farmer, who had assisted in the flight of fugitive slaves (Ibid.,   I, 476 ff.). In these years of private practice Seward was very far from abandoning his interest in politics. He took part in almost every campaign, often outside the borders of the state. He also ardently championed the cause of Irish freedom, gaining the support of the Irish-American voters as a result. The tide was running more and more his way, also, with regard to the question of slavery. By 1848 anti-slavery sentiment had become so strong that it was possible for him to be elected to the United States Senate, many Democrats, as well as all the Whig members of the legislature, voting for him.

When Seward entered the Senate the slavery question had become acute, and the question of its relation to the disposition of the territories just acquired from Mexico was assuming portentous proportions. In the celebrated debate growing out of Henry Clay's famous resolutions of 1850, Seward took his stand firmly against all compromise, and in favor of the unconditional admission of California as a free state. In his well-known speech of March 11 he declared that there was no reason to jumble together a variety of important questions in a single measure, as Clay had wished to do; he boldly asserted that the fugitive-slave law was impossible of enforcement in the North; he wished to abolish, not only the slave trade, as proposed by Clay, but also slavery in the District of Columbia; he was opposed to leaving the territories to organize themselves with or without slavery. In a prescient sentence he declared that the slave system would either be removed "by gradual voluntary effort, and with compensation," within the framework of the Union, or the Union would be dissolved, and civil wars ensue, bringing on violent but complete and immediate emancipation he had been passed over in 1856 in the Republican National Convention for Fremont; and some of his shifts of attitude may be attributed to the fact that he had his eye on the presidential nomination of 1860.

In 1859 Seward went abroad, meeting many celebrities in England and France, and returning to a great reception in New York. In February 1860, he again advocated the admission of Kansas as a free state, and made a speech which may be regarded as an expression of the platform on which he would stand for the Republican nomination (February 29, 1860, Ibid., IV, 619-43). Its general tenor was extremely conciliatory and moderate; with rare exceptions, Seward optimistically believed that Republicanism involved no threat to the unity of the American people. When the Republican National Convention met in Chicago in June 1860, he was undoubtedly the leading candidate, but the hostility of Horace Greeley, the opposition of the Know-Nothings, and Seward's own too widely known radical utterances, conspired to deprive him of the nomination. It was a severe blow, but he bore it with his usual outward equanimity and with very real generosity. He campaigned for the Republican ticket throughout the North, minimizing the Southern threats of secession, and urging the election of Lincoln. In the crisis which followed the election Seward showed characteristic elements of strength and weakness. His invincible optimism inclined him to minimize the dangers that lay ahead; yet, in the face of secession, he employed the language and the method of conciliation. He was also one of the Senate committee of thirteen constituted to consider means of composing the situation; as the spokesman of the section, and at the suggestion of Weed, he proposed on December 24 that Congress guarantee slavery in the slave states, and request the repeal of the personal liberty laws in exchange for the grant of jury trial to fugitive slaves (Senate Report No. 288, 36 Congress, 2 Session, pp. 10, 11, 13). His speech of January 12, 1861, made after three more states had seceded, was admirable in its spirit (Works, IV, 651-69). Clearly avowing his loyalty to the Union, he again spoke in the most conciliatory vein, advocating a constitutional convention to settle outstanding difficulties, and even suggesting, in departure from the Republican platform, the admission of the remaining territories as two states without regard to slavery. It is entirely possible that he personally favored the Crittenden Compromise; but the influence of the President-elect was thrown on the other side, and Seward voted against this proposal when it came before the Senate on March 2.

As early as December 8, Seward had been offered the office of secretary of state by Lincoln. He accepted on December 28; and although he was deeply displeased at the selection of Chase and Blair as cabinet colleagues, and even sought to reverse his decision as late as March 2, he yielded to the entreaties of the President. He took office on March 4, no doubt believing that he would be, and deserved to be, the dominant figure in the administration, and the man who could best avert the perils of civil war. In the critical period from March 4 to April 12, 1861 (the date of the firing on Sumter), Seward appears at very far from his best. He still retained the delusion that he might determine the course of the administration; and his famous memorandum, "Some Thoughts for the President's Consideration, April 1, 1861," admits of no apology. In this reckless document he advocated embroiling the United States with most of Europe and waging actual war on Spain and France, as a means of solidifying the Union (Nicolay and Hay, post, II, 29). The only concrete grievance on the horizon was the Spanish re-annexation of Santo Domingo, and this had not been officially consummated. A madder or wilder project than Seward's could hardly have been devised. Nor is it possible to imagine anything more arrogant than the last sentence of his memorandum, in which he virtually suggested that the President abdicate his power to the Secretary of State. Seward's course with regard to secession itself is not easy to justify. It is understandable that he entered into negotiations with the Confederate commissioners sent to Washington to demand the surrender of the forts still held by the Union government in the South; but it is not so easy to justify machinations behind the back of the President, by which the reënforcement of Fort Pickens was delayed, and the expedition to Sumter, when it sailed, weakened by the absence of the Powhatan. Seward was not even resolutely pacifist; on one occasion he spoke of using force to collect the revenue, and in general he was in favor of holding the Gulf forts, perhaps with a view to a possible war with Spain, though not of holding Sumter. No doubt much to his discomfiture, and with many a wound to his pride, he saw himself overruled and the decisive events which culminated in the opening of the Civil War directed by the chief whose real measure he had not yet taken.

Seward's conduct of the office of secretary of state during the four years of the war deserves high praise. More than any preceding secretary he conducted his diplomatic correspondence with an eye to public opinion at home. It is no chance that the publication of diplomatic dispatches in one or more annual volumes put out by the State Department begins with him (Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 2 volumes, 1861). He no doubt wrote almost too much for the American public, as compared with those to whom his dispatches were actually directed. But in so doing he did much both to inspirit and to restrain public opinion as occasion demanded. His early dispatches were too blustering in tone, and might have gotten him into serious trouble sometimes had it not been for the wisdom of Lincoln. As time went on, he dropped the truculent tone and expressed the views of the United States with dignity and force. On the occasion of the seizure of Mason and Slidell on board the Trent, an act received with something like ecstasy by Northern opinion, he behaved with great coolness in the midst of popular excitement. When the protest of the British government against such action arrived, it was the Secretary, this time somewhat against the opinion of the President, who decided that the protest must be heeded. The dispatch in which he conceded the surrender of the Southern commissioners is a masterpiece (Works, V, 295-309). Written with an eye to making palatable an act sure to be violently condemned by the hotheads in the United States, it flattered Northern opinion by its specious reasoning, and made the action appear as in accord with fundamental American traditions.

The possibility of European intervention in the Civil War Seward met, on the whole, with similar adroitness. The optimism of his dispatches, their profound self-confidence, and their array of facts, could hardly fail to make an impression. This tone, maintained through good fortune and bad, and coupled with warning after warning of the dangerous consequences of intervention, was, in general, just what the situation demanded. At times Seward was still a little bumptious, and his habit of publishing many of his dispatches was often irritating, but the general principle was sound. He could depend, too, on the tact and high diplomatic skill of Charles Francis Adams in interpreting his instructions. Seward made skilful use abroad of the question of slavery to check the anti-Northern agitation in France and England. On the Emancipation Proclamation he was at first conservative, because of his fear of its domestic consequences. When it was first discussed in July 1862, he urged Lincoln to postpone action, at least until a Federal victory (Nicolay and Hay, II, 479). But when the preliminary proclamation was issued after Antietam, he used it with great effect in his dispatches to Adams and W. L. Dayton. The danger of intervention seemed greatest in the fall of 1862 and the winter of 1863. At the end of October, the French government sought to secure joint action with Great Britain and Russia looking to an armistice. The proposal was rejected, and Seward wisely made no protest. But when the French directly proffered mediation early in 1863, Seward responded in one of his most effective dispatches (February 6, 1863, Senate Executive Document No. 38, 37 Congress, 3 Session, p. 11-16).

In his correspondence Seward adroitly defended the broad interpretation of continuous voyage in dispatches that suggest Sir Edward Grey's half a century later, and he protested vigorously against the outfitting of Confederate privateers in British ports. His steady pressure, combined with the skill of Adams, finally led the British government to take due precautions, in the case of the Laird rams, while his protests in the case of the Alabama laid the basis for solid pecuniary claims later. Nowhere was Seward more adroit than in his treatment of the French intervention in Mexico, and the establishment of Maximilian on a Mexican throne. From an early period he made the distaste of the United States for the whole project obvious; yet he suavely assumed the rumors of monarchy to be ill-founded as long as he could do so, and until the end of the war never let anything like menace enter into his tone. When the House of Representatives on April 4, 1864, condemned the schemes of Louis Napoleon (Congressional Globe, 38 Congress, l Session, p. 1408), Seward penned a masterly dispatch in which he soothed French susceptibilities, explaining that the opinion of the legislative branch of the government did not alter executive policy (April 7, 1864, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, 1865, volume III, 356-57). When the Civil War was over, there was much sentiment for vigorous action against the French. Seward handled this delicate situation magnificently. He temporized while he could; the situation of the French grew more and more difficult; and then in dispatches gradually mounting in tone he edged his adversary, Drouyn de L'huys, from one position to another, until he finally secured the promise of the evacuation of Mexico in a fixed period of time. In the latter part of the correspondence Seward fell into his old habit of writing for domestic consumption; and the same may be said of his correspondence with Austria on the same subject; but the total effect of his activity is admirable.

Seward was, in temperament and conviction, an expansionist. During the 1850's this sentiment came in conflict with his anti-slavery views, and led him to oppose such projects as the purchase of Cuba. But when the war was over the strong instinct revived. In 1867 he negotiated the cession of Alaska, and with the aid of Sumner secured the prompt ratification of the treaty by the Senate. He sought to acquire the two most important islands of the Danish West Indies; but this agreement was never ratified. He encouraged overtures from the Dominican Republic looking to incorporation in the United States, again unsuccessfully. In his instructions to the American minister at Honolulu he advocated the annexation of Hawaii. Seward's views were those which a later generation was to accept.

In domestic affairs Seward exercised a constant influence both on the Lincoln and the Johnson administrations. He had a large, indeed it may be said the chief, responsibility for the treatment of political prisoners at the beginning of the war, and contrary to his general temperament he here showed much rigor. He exercised, as has been seen, a positive influence on the policy of the administration with regard to the border states and emancipation. He performed heavy labors as a sort of political liaison officer, and his interest in problems of patronage, while not always wisely exerted, was continuous. In the Johnson administration he was a central figure. He advocated a conciliatory policy towards the South, wrote some of Johnson's most important veto messages, and supported the President in many speeches, making "the swing around the circle" with him in 1866. By doing so he lost both popularity and influence, and he valued both dearly; but whatever the reaction of the moment, the judgment of time has been that he was wiser than his opponents.

The burdens of his last four years at Washington Seward sustained in circumstances that would have daunted a man less tenacious and industrious. He had suffered serious injury in a carriage accident in the spring of 1865, and this had been followed by the brutal attack upon him in his house which was contemporaneous with the assassination of Lincoln; yet he was soon transacting the public business with as much skill and coolness as ever. At the end of his term of office, despite the fact that he was partially crippled, he went around the world, the first important American political figure to do so, and much enjoyed the enthusiasm which his visit evoked. He returned to Auburn in the autumn of 1871, and there increasing paralysis overtook him. He died on October 10, 1872. On October 20, 1824, he had married Frances Miller, the daughter of his law partner. A woman of liberal sympathies and humanitarian views, she undoubtedly influenced his later career, and especially his attitude toward slavery. They had three sons and two daughters, one of whom died in infancy. Fredrick William Seward [q.v.] was closely associated with his father. A nephew, Clarence Armstrong Seward (October 27, 1828-July 24, 1897), who became an orphan in childhood and was brought up in his uncle's family, served for a brief time in 1865 as assistant secretary of state and attained prominence as a corporation lawyer. His cousin, George Frederick Seward [q.v.], another nephew of William H. Seward, was launched upon his diplomatic career under the latter's influence.

In Seward the politician and the statesman are interestingly, and on the whole happily, commingled. It is easy to discover occasions on which he equivocated, as politicians do; it is easy to discover occasions on which he sought the applause of the multitude, not always careful of the consequences. Even in his diplomacy, and strikingly in his early utterances on questions of foreign affairs, this is true. Yet Seward chose his early political creed, it would appear, from conviction; he associated himself with definite policies, and loved to do so; much earlier than most anti-slavery leaders of the political stripe, he adopted that important cause; he often showed real courage in advocating it. He made serious blunders, and might have made more, in estimating the true value of the conflicting forces at the end of 1860 and the beginning of 1861 but his years at the State Department are years of steady growth, and of very creditable achievement, while his role in maintaining national morale must not be underestimated. He was the partisan of a wise policy of reconciliation when the war was over. The unswervingly independent mind has its uses in the world; but its possessor is not apt to succeed in politics. It may be fairly argued that Seward combined devotion to principle, and flexibility as to means, in such proportions as to make him most effective.

As a human being, few could have been more lovable. Cheerful, generous, loathing personal controversy, he had a wide range of interests and of sympathies. He read much and widely; he traveled extensively, going to Europe several times, and seeing a great deal of his own country. He was a little vain, and he had his political enemies; he is dwarfed by the master-spirit of his great chief; but, compared with the irascible Stanton, the pompous Sumner, the intriguing Chase, and many others, he looms up as one of the most attractive, as well as most important, figures in a critical period of American history.

[Autobiography of William H. Seward, from 1801 to 1834, with a Memoir of His Life, and Selections from His Letters, from 1831 to 1846 (1877), ed. by F. W. Seward, the continuation of this by F. W. Seward, Seward at Washington (2 volumes, 1891); G. E. Baker, ed.,   The Works of William H. Seward (5 volumes, 1884); Life of Thurlow Weed (2 volumes, 1883-84), including his autobiography, ed. by Harriet A. Weed, and a memoir by T. W. Barnes; J. D. Hammond, The History of Political Parties in the State of New York (3 volumes, 1842-48); D. S. Alexander, A Political History of the State of New York, volume II (1906); Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the U. S. (2 volumes, 1861), and Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs (14 volumes, 1862-66), bound and usually cited as Diplomatic Correspondence of the U.S.; Gideon Welles, Lincoln and Seward (1874); F. W. Seward, Reminiscences of a War-Time Statesman and Diplomat (1916); Olive R. Seward, ed., William H. Seward's Travels Around the World (1873); J. G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Complete Works (2 volumes, 1894); Frederic Bancroft, The Life of William H. Seward (2 volumes, 1900), which is sympathetic yet critical, and is exceedingly well proportioned; T. K. Lothrop, William Henry Seward (1896) and E. E. Hale, Jr., William H. Seward (1910), of less importance; an interesting sketch in Gamaliel Bradford, Union Portraits (1916); C. F. Adams, Seward and the Declaration of Paris (1912); Tyler Dennett, "Seward's Far Eastern Policy," in American History Review, October 1922; studies of Seward's Mexican policy in J. M. Callahan, American Foreign Policy in Mexican Relations (1932), and Dexter Perkins, The Monroe Doctrine, 1826- 1867 (1933); detailed study of his policy toward Great Britain in E. D. Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War (2 volumes, 1925); general treatment by H. W. Temple in S. F. Bemis, ed., The American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy, volume VII (1928); unpublished materials in the possession of Mrs. Thomas G. Spencer, Rochester, New York, and W. H. Seward, Auburn, New York ;unpublished correspondence in Department of State, Washington, D. C.]

D.P.


SMITH, Gerrit, 1797-1874, Peterboro, New York, large landowner, reformer, philanthropist, radical abolitionist.  Smith was one of the most important leaders of the abolitionist movement.  Originally, he supported the American Colonization Society (ACS) and served as a Vice President, 1833-1836.  Smith later came to reject the idea of sending freed slaves back to Africa.  Smith became a leader and important supporter of William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS).  He served as a Vice President of the AASS, 1836-1840, 1840-1841.  Smith also served as Vice President of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1840.  He was the founding President of  the New York State Anti-Slavery Society, October 1836, in Utica, New York.  Smith came to believe that slavery could be abolished by political means and he was instrumental in the founding of the Liberty Party in 1840.  He was the President and co-founder of the Liberty League in 1848 and was its presidential candidate in 1848.  He was active in supporting the Underground Railroad.  Smith was a member of the Pennsylvania Free Produce Association.  He supported the New England Emigrant Aid Company of Massachusetts, which sent anti-slavery settlers to the Kansas Territory.  He was one of six abolitionists (known as the “Secret Six”) who secretly supported radical abolitionist John Brown.  Supported women’s rights and suffrage.  He served as an anti-slavery member of Congress, 1853-1854.  After the Civil War, he supported the right to vote for Blacks. 

(Blue, 2005, pp. 19, 20, 25, 26, 32-36, 50, 53, 54, 68, 101, 102, 105, 112, 132, 170; Dumond, 1961, pp. 200, 221, 231, 295, 301, 339, 352; Filler, 1960; Friedman, 1982; Frothingham, 1876; Harrold, 1995; Mabee, 1970, pp. 37, 47, 55, 56, 71, 72, 104, 106, 131, 135, 150, 154, 156, 187-189, 195, 202, 204, 219, 220, 226, 227, 237, 239, 246, 252, 253, 258, 307, 308, 315, 320, 321, 327, 342, 346; Mitchell, 2007, pp. 5, 8, 13, 16, 22, 29, 31, 36, 112, 117-121, 137, 163, 167, 199, 224-225, 243; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 46, 50, 51, 56, 138, 163, 206, 207, 327, 338, 452-454; Sernett, 2002, pp. 22, 36, 49-55, 122-126, 129-132, 143-146, 169, 171, 173-174, 205-206, 208-217, 219-230; Sewell, 1976, pp. 14, 16-18, 22, 45, 54, 58, 61, 63, 69-72, 75-76, 80, 83, 84, 85-87, 89-92, 107, 117-120, 124, 159, 163, 244-246, 247, 255-256, 287, 325, 334, 362;  Sorin, 1971, pp. 25-38, 47, 49, 52, 66, 95, 96, 102, 126, 130; Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, pp. 128, 129, 165, 189-190, 201, 213, 221, 224, 225, 230-231; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, pp. 583-584; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 270; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 20; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. II. New York: James T. White, 1892, pp. 322-323; Harlow, Ralph Volney. Gerrit Smith: Philanthropist and Reformer, New York: Holt, 1939.)

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

SMITH, Gerrit, philanthropist, born in Utica, New York, 6 March, 1797; died in New York City, 28 December, 1874, was graduated at Hamilton College in 1818, and devoted himself to the care of his father's estate, a large part of which was given to him when he attained his majority. At the age of fifty-six he studied law, and was admitted to the bar. He was elected to Congress as an independent candidate in 1852, but resigned after serving through one session. During his boyhood slavery still existed in the state of New York, and his father was a slave-holder. One of the earliest forms of the philanthropy that marked his long life appeared in his opposition to the institution of slavery, and his friendship for the oppressed race. He acted for ten years with the American Colonization Society, contributing largely to its funds, until he became convinced that it was merely a scheme of the slave-holders for getting the free colored people out of the country. Thenceforth he gave his support to the Anti-Slavery Society, not only writing for the cause and contributing money, but taking part in conventions, and personally assisting fugitives. He was temperate in all the discussion, holding that the north was a partner in the guilt, and in the event of emancipation without war should bear a portion of the expense; but the attempt to force slavery upon Kansas convinced him that the day for peaceful emancipation was past, and he then advocated whatever measure of force might be necessary. He gave large sums of money to send free-soil settlers to Kansas, and was a personal friend of John Brown, to whom he had given a farm in Essex County, New York, that he might instruct a colony of colored people, to whom Mr. Smith had given farms in the same neighborhood. He was supposed to be implicated in the Harper's Ferry affair, but it was shown that he had only given pecuniary aid to Brown as he had to scores of other men, and so far as he knew Brown's plans had tried to dissuade him from them. Mr. Smith was deeply interested in the cause of temperance, and organized an anti-dramshop party in February, 1842. In the village of Peterboro, Madison County, where he had his home, he built a good hotel, and gave it rent-free to a tenant who agreed that no liquor should be sold there. This is believed to have been the first temperance hotel ever established. But it was not pecuniarily successful. He had been nominated for president by an industrial congress at Philadelphia in 1848, and by the land-reformers in 1856, but declined. In 1840, and again in 1858, he was nominated for governor of New York. The last nomination, on a platform of abolition and prohibition, he accepted, and canvassed the state. In the election he received 5,446 votes. Among the other reforms in which he was interested were those relating to the property-rights of married women and female suffrage and abstention from tobacco. In religion he was originally a Presbyterian, but became very liberal in his views, and built a non-sectarian church in Peterboro, in which he often occupied the pulpit himself. He could not conceive of religion as anything apart from the affairs of daily life, and in one of his published letters he wrote: “No man's religion is better than his politics; his religion is pure whose politics are pure; whilst his religion is rascally whose politics are rascally.” He disbelieved in the right of men to monopolize land, and gave away thousands of acres of that which he had inherited, some of it to colleges and charitable institutions, and some in the form of small farms to men who would settle upon them. He also gave away by far the greater part of his income, for charitable purposes, to institutions and individuals. In the financial crisis of 1837 he borrowed of John Jacob Astor a quarter of a million dollars, on his verbal agreement to give Mr. Astor mortgages to that amount on real estate. The mortgages were executed as soon as Mr. Smith reached his home, but through the carelessness of a clerk were not delivered, and Mr. Astor waited six months before inquiring for them. Mr. Smith had for many years anticipated that the system of slavery would be brought to an end only through violence, and when the Civil War began he hastened to the support of the government with his money and his influence. At a war-meeting in April, 1861, he made a speech in which he said: “The end of American slavery is at hand. The first gun fired at Fort Sumter announced the fact that the last fugitive slave had been returned. . . . The armed men who go south should go more in sorrow than in anger. The sad necessity should be their only excuse for going. They must still love the south; we must all still love her. As her chiefs shall, one after another, fall into our hands, let us be restrained from dealing revengefully, and moved to deal tenderly with them, by our remembrance of the large share which the north has had in blinding them.” In accordance with this sentiment, two years after the war, he united with Horace Greeley and Cornelius Vanderbilt in signing the bail-bond of Jefferson Davis. At the outset he offered to equip a regiment of colored men, if the government would accept them. Mr. Smith left an estate of about $1,000,000, having given away eight times that amount during his life. He wrote a great deal for print, most of which appeared in the form of pamphlets and broadsides, printed on his own press in Peterboro. His publications in book-form were “Speeches in Congress” (1855); “Sermons and Speeches” (1861); “The Religion of Reason” (1864); “Speeches and Letters” (1865); “The Theologies” (2d ed., 1866); “Nature the Base of a Free Theology” (1867); and “Correspondence with Albert Barnes” (1868). His authorized biography has been written by Octavius BORN Frothingham (New York, 1878).  Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, pp. 583-584.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 270;

SMITH, GERRIT (March 6, 1797-December 28, 1874), philanthropist and reformer, was born at Utica, New York, the grandson of James Livingston [q.v.] and the son of Elizabeth (Livingston) and Peter Smith [q.v.]. In 1806 the family moved to Peterboro, Madison County, New York, where Smith spent the greater part of his adult life. He graduated from Hamilton College in 1818 and helped his father manage the substantial fortune, the product of shrewd land purchases. On January 11, 1819, he married Wealthy Ann Backus, the daughter of Azel Backus [q.v.]. She died the next August, and on January 3, 1822, he married Ann Carroll Fitzhugh. Of their four children, only two lived to maturity. In 1826 he became a member of the Presbyterian Church.

He succeeded to the entire control of his father's property, which, real and personal, was valued at about $400,000, and was able to increase it in amount and in value. His father, melancholy and later estranged from his second wife who had gone back to Charleston, S. C., to live, withdrew into himself more and more. Smith used his wealth, in so far as he could find guidance on the subject from prayer and from his own conscience, for what he considered the good of mankind. For a time he helped to build churches, and he gave generously to several theological schools and to various colleges. He experimented with systematic charity on a large scale, giving both land and money to needy men and women throughout his own state (see sketch of James McCune Smith); but his carefully selected "indigent females" made poor farmers, and the blacks whom he tried to colonize in the Adirondack wilderness found the environment unsuited to their needs. Much of the property he disposed of in this work was subsequently sold for non-payment of taxes.

His greatest reputation was made in the field of reform. He labored in the cause of the Sunday School and of Sunday observance; he was an anti-Mason; he advocated vegetarianism; and he opposed the use of tobacco and alcoholic beverages; he joined the national dress reform association and the woman's suffrage cause; he believed in prison reform and in the abolition of capital punishment. He contributed to home and foreign missions and to the causes of the op. pressed Greeks, the Italians, and the Irish. Through his influence his cousin, Elizabeth Cady Stanton [q.v.], was interested in temperance and abolition movements. He was vice-president of the American Peace Society and advocated compensated emancipation of slaves. He joined the anti-slavery crusade in 1835 with his customary enthusiasm, and he became one of the be st-known abolitionists in the United States. Although on terms of intimate friendship with William Lloyd Garrison, he never went to the extremes of the Garrison group; but he was always ready to help escaped slaves to Canada and in 1851 participated in the "Jerry rescue" in Syracuse. After the enactment of the Kansas Nebraska law he joined the Kansas Aid Societies in New York, and he helped Eli Thayer's New England Emigrant Aid Company in Massachusetts. This work cost him at least fourteen thousand dollars; how much more it is difficult to determine. In spite of his advocacy of peace, he urged the use of force against the pro-slavery contingent in Kansas, and forcible resistance to the federal authorities there, because, as he said, the federal government upheld the pro-slavery cause. In February 1858 John Brown went to Smith's home in Peterboro, not to plan his campaign in Virginia but to obtain Smith's moral and financial support for plans already made. On this occasion, at a second vi sit in April 1859, and in several letters, Smith gave Brown assurance of his approval and some money. After the raid at Harpers Ferry, Smith became temporarily insane. He made a quick recovery, however, and six months later he was in his usual good health. From then on to the end of his life he denied complicity in Brown's plot, but the available evidence bears out newspaper charges made at the time, that he was an accessory before the fact.

Unlike the Garrisonians, he believed in political action as a means of reform, and for a full fifty years, from 1824 to 1874, he took an active part in politics. He was one of the leaders in forming the Liberty party; in 1840 he was its candidate for governor. In 1848 the "true" Liberty party m en, those who refused to indorse the Free Soil "heresy," nominated him for the presidency, though he declined. In 1852 he was elected a member of Congress on an independent ticket and served from March 4, 1853, to August 7, 1854, when he resigned. In 1858 he ran for governor on the "People's State Ticket," advocating temperance, anti-slavery, and land reform. During the Civil War he wrote and spoke often in support of the Union cause. This work led him gradually into the Republican party, so that he campaigned for Lincoln's reelection in 1864 and for Grant in 1868. In reconstruction he advocated a policy of moderation toward the Southern whites with suffrage for the blacks. In 1867 he was one of the signers of the bail bond to release Jefferson Davis from captivity. He published many of his speeches and letters on important subjects. Of his published books the more important are Religion of Reason (1864), an exposition of his later religion of Nature or Rationalism; Speeches of Gerrit Smith in Congress (1856); and the two volumes (1864-65) of his Speeches and Letters of Gerrit Smith on the Rebellion. He died in New York City.

[Family papers in Library of Syracuse University; 0. B. Frothingham, Gerrit Smith (1878); 2nd ed. (1879) "corrected" by Smith's daughter in order to bring it into harmony with the family belief that Smith was not an accomplice of John Brown; C. A. Hammond, Gerrit Smith (1900); K. W. Porter, John Jacob Astor (2 volumes, 1931); Appletons' Annual Cyclopedia, 1874; R. V. Hadow, "Gerrit Smith and the John Brown Raid" and " Rise and Fall of the Kansas Aid Movement," Annual Historical Review, October 1932, October 1935; New York Tribune, December 29-30, 1874.]

R. V. H.


SMITH, Horace E., New York, abolitionist leader, member of the Free Soil Party.  Co-editor of the Free Soiler newspaper with Francis W. Bird and John B. Alley.

(Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. 2.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872)


SPALDING, Rufus Paine, 1798-1886, Massachusetts, lawyer, jurist.  Republican Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Ohio, 1863-1869.  Opposed the extension of slavery into the new territories.  In 1847, declared: “If the evil of slavery had been restricted, as it should have been, to the thirteen original states, self-interest might have led to the extinction of the practice long before now.”  Spalding joined the anti-slavery Free Soil Party in 1850.  He opposed the Fugitive Slave Act.  He encouraged fellow attorneys in Cleveland to oppose the Act.  He represented Underground Railroad conductor Simon Buswell in his defense, arguing the Fugitive Slave Act was unconstitutional.  He opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.  Spalding was elected to Congress in 1862.  While there, he introduced legislation to repeal the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850.  One of the organizers of the Republican Party.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.

(Sinha, 2016, pp. 524, 525; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, pp. 620-621; Congressional Globe.)

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

SPALDING, Rufus Paine, jurist, born in West Tisbury, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, 3 May, 1798; died in Cleveland, Ohio, 29 August, 1886. He was graduated at Yale in 1817, and subsequently studied law under Zephaniah Swift, chief justice of Connecticut, whose daughter, Lucretia, he married in 1822. In 1819 he was admitted to practice in Little Rock, Arkansas, but in 1821 he went to Warren, Ohio. Sixteen years later he moved to Ravenna, Ohio, and he was sent to the legislature in 1830-'40 as a Democrat, serving as speaker in 1841-'2. In 1840 he was elected judge of the Supreme Court of Ohio for seven years, but when, three years later, the new state constitution was adopted, he declined a re-election and began practice in Cleveland. In l852 he entered political life as a Free-Soiler, and he was one of the organizers of the Republican Party. He was a member of Congress in 1863-'9, where he served on important committees, but he subsequently declined all political honors. Judge Spalding exercised an important influence in restoring the Masonic Order to its former footing after the disappearance of William Morgan. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, pp. 620-621.


STANTON, Edwin McMasters, 1814-1869, statesman, lawyer, anti-slavery activist.  U. S. Secretary of War, 1862-1867.  Favored Wilmot Proviso to exclude slavery from the new territories acquired by the U.S. after the War with Mexico in 1846.  Member of the Free Soil movement. 

(Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 65, 67, 69, 72, 144, 147-148; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, pp. 648-649; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 517; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 20, p. 558)

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

STANTON, Edwin McMasters, statesman, born in Steubenville Ohio, 19 December, 1814; died in Washington, D. C., 24 December, 1869. His father, a physician died while Edwin was a child. After acting for three years as a clerk in a book-store, he entered Kenyon College in 1831, but left in 1833 to study law. He was admitted to the bar in 1836, and, beginning practice in Cadiz, was in 1837 elected prosecuting attorney. He returned to Steubenville in 1839, and was supreme court reporter in 1842-'5, preparing vols. xi., xii., and xiii. of the Ohio reports. In 1848 he moved to Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, and in 1857, on account of his large business in the U. S. Supreme Court, he established himself in Washington. During 1857-'8 he was in California, attending to important land cases for the government. Among the notable suits that he conducted were the first Erie Railway litigation, the Wheeling Bridge Case, and the Manney and McCormick reaper contest in 1859. When Lewis Cass retired from President Buchanan's cabinet, and Jeremiah S. Black was made Secretary of State, Stanton was appointed the latter's successor in the office of Attorney-General, 20 December, 1860. He was originally a Democrat of the Jackson school, and, until Van Buren's defeat in the Baltimore Convention of 1844, took an active part in political affairs in his locality. He favored the Wilmot proviso, to exclude slavery from the territory acquired by the war with Mexico, and sympathized with the Free-Soil movement of 1848, headed by Martin Van Buren. He was an anti-slavery man, but his hostility to that institution was qualified by his view of the obligations imposed by the Federal Constitution. He had held no public offices before entering President Buchanan's cabinet except those of prosecuting attorney for one year in Harrison County, Ohio, and reporter of the Ohio Supreme Court for three years, being wholly devoted to his profession. While a member of Mr. Buchanan's cabinet, he took a firm stand for the Union, and at a cabinet meeting, when John B. Floyd, then Secretary of War, demanded the withdrawal of the United States troops from the forts in Charleston Harbor, he indignantly declared that the surrender of Fort Sumter would be, in his opinion, a crime, equal to that of Arnold, and that all who participated in it should be hung like André. After the meeting, Floyd sent in his resignation. President Lincoln, though since his accession to the presidency he had held no communication with Mr. Stanton, called him to the head of the War Department on the retirement of Simon Cameron, 15 January, 1862. As was said by an eminent senator of the United States: “He certainly came to the public service with patriotic and not with sordid motives, surrendering a most brilliant position at the bar, and with it the emolument of which, in the absence of accumulated wealth, his family was in daily need.” Infirmities of temper he had, but they were incident to the intense strain upon his nerves caused by his devotion to duties that would have soon prostrated most men, however robust, as they finally prostrated him. He had no time for elaborate explanations for refusing trifling or selfish requests, and his seeming abruptness of manner was often but rapidity in transacting business which had to be thus disposed of, or be wholly neglected. As he sought no benefit to himself, but made himself an object of hatred to the dishonest and the inefficient, solely in the public interest, and as no enemy ever accused him of wrong-doing, the charge of impatience and hasty temper will not detract from the high estimate placed by common consent upon his character as a man, a patriot, and a statesman.

Mr. Stanton's entrance into the cabinet marked the beginning of a vigorous military policy. On 27 January, 1862, was issued the first of the president's war orders, prescribing a general movement of the troops. His impatience at General George B. McClellan's apparent inaction caused friction between the administration and the general-in-chief, which ended in the latter's retirement. He selected General Ulysses S. Grant for promotion after the victory at Fort Donelson, which General Henry W. Halleck in his report had ascribed to the bravery of General Charles F. Smith, and in the autumn of 1863 he placed Grant in supreme command of the three armies operating in the southwest, directed him to relieve General William S. Rosecrans before his army at Chattanooga could be forced to surrender. President Lincoln said that he never took an important step without consulting his Secretary of War. It has been asserted that, on the eve of Mr. Lincoln's second inauguration, he proposed to allow General Grant to make terms of peace with General Lee, and that Mr. Stanton dissuaded him from such action. According to a bulletin of Mr. Stanton that was issued at the time, the president wrote the despatch directing the general of the army to confer with the Confederate commander on none save purely military questions without previously consulting the members of the cabinet. At a cabinet council that was held in consultation with General Grant, the terms on which General William T. Sherman proposed to accept the surrender of General Joseph E. Johnston were disapproved by all who were present. To the bulletin announcing the telegram that was sent to General Sherman, which directed him to guide his actions by the despatch that had previously been sent to General Grant, forbidding military interference in the political settlement, a statement of the reasons for disapproving Sherman's arrangement was appended, obviously by the direction of Secretary Stanton. These were: (1) that it was unauthorized; (2) that it was an acknowledgment of the Confederate government; (3) that it re-established rebel state governments; (4) that it would enable rebel state authorities to restore slavery; (5) that it involved the question of the Confederate states debt; (6) that it would put in dispute the state government of West Virginia; (7) that it abolished confiscation, and relieved rebels of all penalties; (8) that it gave terms that had been rejected by President Lincoln; (9) that it formed no basis for peace, but relieved rebels from the pressure of defeat, and left them free to renew the war. General Sherman defended his course on the ground that he had before him the public examples of General Grant's terms to General Lee's army, and General Weitzel's invitation to the Virginia legislature to assemble at Richmond. His central motive, in giving terms that would be cheerfully accepted, he declared to be the peaceful disbandment of all the Confederate armies, and the prevention of guerilla warfare. He had never seen President Lincoln's telegram to General Grant of 3 March, 1865, above quoted, nor did he know that General Weitzel's permission for the Virginia legislature to assemble had been rescinded.

A few days before the president's death Secretary Stanton tendered his resignation because his task was completed, but was persuaded by Mr. Lincoln to remain. After the assassination of Lincoln a serious controversy arose between the new president, Andrew Johnson, and the Republican Party, and Mr. Stanton took sides against the former on the subject of reconstruction. On 5 August, 1867, the president demanded his resignation; but he refused to give up his office before the next meeting of Congress, following the urgent counsels of leading men of the Republican Party. He was suspended by the president on 12 August on 13 January, 1868, he was restored by the action of the Senate, and resumed his office. On 21 February, 1868, the president informed the Senate that he had removed Secretary Stanton, and designated a secretary ad interim. Mr. Stanton refused to surrender the office pending the action of the Senate on the president's message. At a late hour of the same day the Senate resolved that the president bad not the power to remove the secretary. Mr. Stanton, thus sustained by the Senate, refused to surrender the office. The impeachment of the president followed, and on 26 May, the vote of the Senate being “guilty,” 35, “not guilty,” 19, he was acquitted—two thirds not voting for conviction. After Mr. Stanton's retirement from office he resumed the practice of law. On 20 December, 1869, he was appointed by President Grant a justice of the Supreme Court, and he was forthwith confirmed by the Senate. Four days later he expired.

The value to the country of his services during the Civil War cannot be overestimated. His energy, inflexible integrity, systematized industry, comprehensive view of the situation in its military, political, and international aspects, his power to command and supervise the best services of others, and his unbending will and invincible courage, made him at once the stay of the president, the hope of the country, and a terror to dishonesty and imbecility. The vastness of his labors led to brusqueness in repelling importunities, which made him many enemies. But none ever questioned his honesty, his patriotism, or his capability. A “Memoir” of Mr. Stanton is at present in preparation by his son, Lewis M. Stanton. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, pp. 648-649.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 517;

STANTON, EDWIN MCMASTERS (December 19, 1814-December 24, 1869), attorney-general and secretary of war, a native of Steubenville, Ohio, was the eldest of the four children of David and Lucy (Norman) Stanton. His father, a physician of Quaker stock, was descended from Robert Stanton, who came to America between 1627 and 1638, and, after living in New Plymouth, moved to Newport, Rhode Island, before 1645, and from the latter's grandson, Henry, who went to North Carolina between 1721 and 1724 (W. H. Stanton, post, pp. 27-34). His mother was the daughter of a Virginia planter. The death of Dr. Stanton in 1827 left his wife in straitened circumstances and Edwin was obliged to withdraw from school and supplement the family income by employment in a local bookstore. He continued his studies in his spare time, however, and in 1831 was admitted to Kenyon College at Gambier, Ohio. During his junior year his funds gave out and he was again obliged to accept a place in a bookstore, this time in Columbus. Unable to earn enough to return to Kenyon for the completion of his course, he turned to the study of law in the office of his guardian, Daniel L. Collier, and in 1836 was admitted to the bar. His practice began in Cadiz, the seat of Harrison County, but in 1839 he removed to Steubenville to become a partner of Senator-elect Benjamin Tappan.

Stanton's ability, energy, and fidelity to his profession brought him quick recognition and a comfortable income. To give wider range to his talents he moved to Pittsburgh in 1847 and later, in 1856 he became a resident of Washington, D. C., in order to devote himself more to cases before the Supreme Court. His work as counsel for the state of Pennsylvania (1849-56) against the Wheeling & Belmont Bridge Company (13 Howard, 518; 18 Howard, 421) gave him a national reputation and resulted in his retention for much important litigation. He was one of the leading counsel in the noted patent case of McCormick vs. Manny (John McLean, Reports of Cases  ... in the Circuit Court of the United States for the Seventh Circuit, volume VI, 1856, p. 539) and made a deep impression upon one of his associates, Abraham Lincoln, because of his masterly defense of their client, Manny (A. J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1928, volume I, 581). Stanton's practice was chiefly in civil and constitutional law, but in 1859 in defending Daniel E. Sickles [q.v.], charged with murder, he demonstrated that he was no less gifted in handling criminal suits. More important than any of these cases, however, was his work in California in 1858 as special counsel for the United States government in combatting fraudulent claims to lands alleged to have been deeded by Mexico to numerous individuals prior to the Mexican War. It was a task requiring prodigious and painstaking research in the collection of data and the most careful presentation, but Stanton proved equal to the occasion and won for the government a series of notable victories. It has been estimated that the lands involved were worth $150,000,000. His services in this connection were undoubtedly the most distinguished of his legal career. As a lawyer Stanton was capable of extraordinary mental labor; he was orderly and methodical, mastering with great precision the law and the facts of his cases, and he was able apparently to plead with equal effectiveness before judges and juries.

It was his success in the California land cases, together with the influence of Jeremiah S. Black [q.v.], that won for him the appointment of attorney-general on December 20, 1860, when Buchanan reorganized his cabinet. Prior to that time Stanton had taken little part in politics and had held only two minor offices, those of prosecuting attorney of Harrison County, Ohio (1837-39), and reporter of Ohio supreme court decisions (1842-45). Jacksonian principles enlisted his sympathies while an undergraduate and he appears to have adhered quite consistently to the Democratic party from that time until his entrance into Lincoln's cabinet in 1862. He favored the Wilmot Proviso, however, and was critical of the domination of the Southern wing of the party during the two decades before 1860. Like his forebears he disapproved of the institution of slavery, but he accepted the Dred Scott decision without question and contended that all laws constitutionally enacted for the protection of slavery should be rigidly enforced. He supported Breckinridge's candidacy for the presidency in 1860 in the belief that the preservation of the Union hung on the forlorn hope of his election (Gorham, post, I, 79). Above all Stanton was a thorough-going Unionist.

In Buchanan's cabinet he promptly joined with Black and Joseph Holt [q.v.] in opposition to the abandonment of Fort Sumter and was zealous in the pursuit of persons whom he believed to be plotting against the government. Since he was of an excitable and suspicious temperament, his mind was full of forebodings of insurrection and assassination, and, while he hated the "Black Republicans," he collogued with Seward, Sumner, and others in order that they might be apprised of the dangers he apprehended to be afoot. The disclosure of this later resulted in the charge that he had betrayed Buchanan (Atlantic Monthly and Galaxy, post). If Stanton was at odds with the President at that time he gave him no indication of it for Buchanan wrote in 1862: "He was always on my side and flattered me ad nauseam" (G. T. Curtis, Life of James Buchanan, 1883, volume II, 523).

During the early months of Lincoln's presidency, Stanton, now in private life, was utterly distrustful of him and unsparing in his criticism of "the imbecility of this administration" (Ibid., II, 559). When George B. McClellan [q.v.] took over the control of the operations of the army in 1861, Stanton became his friend and confidential legal adviser and expressed to him his contempt for the President and his cabinet. Oddly enough, soon afterwards he also became legal adviser to Secretary of War Simon Cameron [q.v.] and aided in framing the latter's annual report recommending the arming of slaves (Atlantic Monthly, February 1870, p. 239; October 1870, p. 470 ). It was this proposal, offensive to Lincoln, which hastened Cameron's departure from the War Department and inadvertently helped to pave the way for Stanton's succession to the post. Although he had had no personal contacts of any kind with Lincoln since March 4, 1861, Stanton was nominated for the secretaryship, confirmed on January 15, 1862, and five days later entered upon his duties. Various plausible explanations for his selection by Lincoln have been given. Gideon Welles firmly believed that Seward was responsible for it, but Cameron claimed the credit for himself (American Historical Review, April 1926, pp. 491 ff.; Meneely, post, pp. 366-68). The true circumstances may never be known.

Stanton was generally conceded to be able, energetic, and patriotic, and his appointment was well received. It presaged a more honest and efficient management of departmental affairs and a more aggressive prosecution of the war. In these respects the new secretary measured up to the public expectations. He immediately reorganized the department, obtained authorization for the increase of its personnel, and systematized the work to be done. Contracts were investigated, those tainted with fraud were revoked, and their perpetrators were prosecuted without mercy. Interviews became public hearings; patronage hunters received scant and usually brusque consideration; and the temporizing replies of Cameron gave way to the summary judgments of his successor. At an early date Stanton persuaded Congress to authorize the taking over of the railroads and telegraph lines where necessary, and prevailed upon the President to release all political prisoners in military custody and to transfer the control of extraordinary arrests from the State to the War Department. Also he promptly put himself in close touch with generals, governors, and others having to do with military affairs, and especially with the congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War.

For a few months after entering office Stanton continued his friendly relations with McClellan and assured the general of his desire to furnish all necessary materiel, but he became impatient when McClellan proved slow in accomplishing tangible results. Despite the Secretary's professions of confidence and cooperation, McClellan soon became distrustful and suspected Stanton of seeking his removal. The withdrawing of McDowell's forces from the main army in the Peninsular campaign was attributed to Stanton and editorial attacks upon him began to appear in the New York press which were believed to have been inspired by McClellan (Gorham, I, 415-21). Both men were too suspicious, jealous, and otherwise ill-suited to work in harmony; trouble between them was inevitable. Stanton was particularly irked by McClellan's disobedience to orders and in August 1862 joined with Chase and others in the cabinet in seeking to have him deprived of any command (Welles, Diary, I, 83, 93, 95- 101; "Diary and Correspondence of Salmon P. Chase," Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1902, 1903, volume II, 62-63).

Although McClellan constantly complained of a shortage of men, supplies, and equipment, Stanton appears to have made vigorous efforts to meet his requisitions. The same was true with respect to other commanders in the several theatres of operations. His dispatch of 23,000 men to the support of Rosecrans at Chattanooga (September 1863) in less than seven days and under trying circumstances was one of the spectacular feats of the war. Quickness of decision, mastery of detail, and vigor in execution were among Stanton's outstanding characteristics as a war administrator, and he became annoyed when his subordinates proved deficient in these qualities. He was frequently accused of meddling with military operations and was probably guilty of it on many occasions; but Grant had no complaint to make of him in this respect. His severe censorship of the press was also a source of much criticism in newspaper circles, and his exercise of the power of extraordinary arrest was often capricious and harmful. Soldiers and civilians alike found him arrogant, irascible, and often brutal and unjust. Grant said that he "cared nothing for the feeling of others" and seemed to find it pleasanter "to disappoint than to gratify" (Personal Memoirs, volume II, 1886, p. 536). A noted instance of his harshness was his published repudiation of General Sherman's terms to the defeated Johnston in May 1865. That Sherman had exceeded his authority was generally admitted, but the severity of the rebuke was as unmerited as it was ungrateful. Again, Stanton's part in the trial and execution of Mrs. Surratt, charged with complicity in Lincoln's assassination, and his efforts to implicate Jefferson Davis in the murder of the President were exceedingly discreditable (Milton, post, Ch. x; DeWitt, post, pp. 232-34; 272-76). His vindictiveness in both instances was probably owing in part to a desire to avenge the death of his chief, whose loss he mourned. Intimate association for three years had gradually revealed Lincoln's nature and capacities to Stanton, and while he was sometimes as discourteous to him as to others, there developed between the two men a mutual trust and admiration.

At the request of President Johnson, Stanton retained his post after Lincoln's death and ably directed the demobilization of the Union armies. At the same time he entered upon a course with respect to reconstruction. and related problems that brought him into serious conflict with the President and several of his colleagues. During the war he appears to have been deferential and ingratiating in his relations with the radical element in Congress, particularly with the powerful congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War, and when peace came he began almost immediately to counsel with leading members of that faction as to the course to be pursued in reconstruction. Although he expressed approval in cabinet meetings of the President's proclamation of May 29, 1865, initiating a reasonable policy of restoration under executive direction, it was soon suspected by many of Johnson's supporters that Stanton was out of sympathy with the administration and intriguing with the rising opposition. In this they were not mistaken (Beale, post, pp. 101-06). When Charles Sumner in a speech on September 14, 1865, denounced the presidential policy, insisted on congressional control of reconstruction, and sponsored negro suffrage, Stanton hastened to assure him that he indorsed "every sentiment, every opinion and word of it" (Welles, II, 394). From the summer of 1865 onward, upon nearly every issue he advised a course of action which would have played into the hands of the Radicals and fostered a punitive Southern policy. He urged the acceptance of the Freedmen's Bureau and Civil Rights bills of 1866, and while he was evasive regarding the report of the Stevens committee on reconstruction, he subsequently expressed approval of the Military Reconstruction bill based upon it which was passed over the President's veto on March 2, 1867 (Welles, III, 49; Gorham, II, 420). Stanton actually dictated for Boutwell [q.v.] an amendment to the army appropriation act of 1867 requiring the president to issue his army orders through the secretary of war or the general of the army and making invalid any order issued otherwise (G. S. Boutwell, Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, 1902, volume II, 107-08; Milton, p. 378). He was also responsible for the supplementary reconstruction act of July 19, 1867, which exempted military commanders from any obligation to accept the opinions of civil officers of the government as to their rules of action (Gorham, II, 373). The one important measure in the rejection of which the Secretary concurred was the Tenure of Office bill which was chiefly intended to insure his own retention in the War Department. He was emphatic in denouncing its unconstitutionality and "protested with ostentatious vehemence that any man who would retain his seat in the Cabinet as an adviser when his advice was not wanted was unfit for the place" (Welles, III, 158; J. D. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1897, volume VI, 587). He aided Seward in drafting the veto message.

For more than a year Johnson had been importuned by his supporters to remove Stanton and he repeatedly gave the Secretary to understand "by every mode short of an expressed request that he should resign" (Richardson, ante, VI, 584), but Stanton ignored them and with fatal hesitation the President permitted him to remain. In doing so he virtually gave his opponents a seat in the cabinet. By the beginning of August 1867, however, Johnson could tolerate his mendacious minister no longer. He had become convinced that the insubordination of General Sheridan and other commanders in the military districts was being encouraged by the Secretary and he was now satisfied that Stanton had plotted against him in the matter of the reconstruction legislation. Consequently, on August 5, he called for his resignation, but Stanton brazenly declined to yield before Congress reassembled. in December, contending that the Tenure of Office bill had become law by its passage over the veto and Johnson was bound to obey it. A week later he was suspended, but in January 1868 he promptly resumed his place when the Senate declined to concur in his suspension. Johnson then resolved to dismiss him regardless of the consequences and did so on February 21, 1868. Stanton with equal determination declared that he would "continue in possession until expelled by force" (Gorham, II, 440), and was supported by the Senate. He ordered the arrest of Adjutant-General Lorenzo Thomas, who had been designated secretary ad interim, and had a guard posted to insure his own occupancy and protect the department records from seizure. For several weeks thereafter he remained in the War Department building day and night, but when the impeachment charges failed (May 26, 1868) he accepted the inevitable and resigned the same day.  

Over-exertion during his public life, together with internal ailments, had undermined Stanton's health and he found it necessary after leaving the department to undergo a period of rest. During the fall of 1868 he managed to give some active support to Grant's candidacy and to resume to a limited extent his law practice, but he never regained his former vigor. He was frequently importuned to be a candidate for public office, but steadfastly refused. His friends in Congress, however, prevailed upon Grant to offer him a justiceship on the United States Supreme Court and this he accepted. His nomination was confirmed on December 20, 1869, but death overtook him before he could occupy his seat.

With the gradual rehabilitation of Andrew Johnson's reputation Stanton's has suffered a sharp decline. His ability as a lawyer and his achievements as a tireless and versatile administrator during the Civil War have not been seriously questioned, but his defects of temperament and the disclosures of his amazing disloyalty and duplicity in his official relations detract from his stature as a public man. In 1867 he explained his remaining in the War Department by contending that his duties as a department head were defined by law and that he was not "bound to accord with the President on all grave questions of policy or administration" (Gorham, II, 421; J. F. Rhodes, History of the United States, 1920, VI, 210, note 3); but shortly before his death he is said to have admitted that "he had never doubted the constitutional right of the President to remove members of his Cabinet without question from any quarter whatever," and that in his reconstruction program Johnson advocated measures that had been favorably considered by Lincoln (Hugh McCulloch, 20 Men and Measures of Half a Century, 1888, pp. 401-02). Stanton was encouraged in his disloyalty and defiance by Republican politicians, newspapers, and Radical protagonists generally, but his conduct has found few defenders among modern students of the post-war period. Whether he was motivated by egotism, mistaken patriotism, or a desire to stand well with the congressional opposition is difficult to determine.

In appearance Stanton was thick-set and of medium height; a strong, heavy neck supported a massive head thatched with long, black, curling hair. His nose and eyes were large, his mouth was wide and stern. A luxuriant crop of coarse black whiskers concealed his jaws and chin. Altogether he was a rather fierce looking man; there was point to Montgomery Blair's characterization, the "black terrier." Stanton was twice married. Mary Ann Lamson of Columbus, Ohio, with whom he was united on December 31, 1836, died in 1844. On June 25, 1856, he married Ellen M. Hutchison, the daughter of a wealthy merchant of Pittsburgh. Two children were born of the first union; four of the second. His biographers assure us that in his family life Stanton was a model husband and father, and for his mother, who survived him, he appears to have cherished a lifelong filial devotion.

[There is no satisfactory biography of Stanton. G. C. Gorham, The Life and Public Services of Edwin M. Stanton (2 volumes, 1899), and F. A. Flower,   Edwin McMasters Stanton (1905) contain much useful data, but both are extremely laudatory. The Diary of Gideon Welles (3 volumes, 1911), although hostile, is a very serviceable documentary source. The writings and biographical literature of other public men of the day contain numerous references to Stanton. Of especial value for the war period are J. G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History (10 volumes, 1890), and Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln (12 volumes, Gettysburg ed., 1905).

See also A. H. Meneely, The War Department-1861 (1928). G. F. Milton, The Age of Hate: Andrew Johnson and the Radicals ( 1931), and H. K. Beale, The Critical Year (1930) are the most scholarly of the recent studies of the reconstruction era.

D. M. DeWitt, The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson (1903), is the standard book on the subject and has a sharply critical chapter on Stanton's public career.

Revealing disclosures of his conduct while in Buchanan's cabinet are to be found in the Black-Wilson controversy in the Atlantic Monthly, February, October 1870, and the Galaxy, June 1870, February 1871, reprinted as A Contribution to History (1871).

The papers of Stanton and many of his associates are deposited in the Library of Congress these, together with War of the Rebellion: Official Records (Army), and other government publications pertaining to the war and reconstruction problems are the basic sources for the study of Stanton's official life. Genealogical material is in

W. H. Stanton. A Book Called Our Ancestors the Stantons (1922). For an obituary, see New York Daily Tribune, December 25, 1869.]

A.H.M.


STANTON, Elizabeth Cady, 1815-1902, reformer, suffragist, abolitionist leader, co-founder of the Women’s National Loyal League in 1863, co-founded American Equal Rights Association (AERA) in 1866.

(Drake, 1950; Filler, 1960, pp. 35, 137, 277; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 47, 170, 388, 465, 519; Sorin, 1971, pp. 66-67; Yellin, 1994, pp. 30, 85-87, 149, 157, 301, 302n; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, p. 650; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 521; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 20, p. 562)


STANTON, Henry Brewster, 1805-1887, New York, New York, Cincinnati, Ohio, abolitionist leader, anti-slavery agent, journalist, author.  Worked with William T. Allan and Birney.  Financial Secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), Manager, 1834-1838, Corresponding Secretary, 1838-1840, and Executive Committee of the Society, 1838.  Secretary, 1840-1841, and Member of the Executive Committee, American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1840-1844.  Leader of the Liberty Party.  Wrote for abolitionist newspapers.  Worked against pro-slavery legislation at state level.  Later edited the New York Sun. 

(Dumond, 1961, pp. 164, 219, 238-240, 286; Filler, 1960, pp. 68, 72, 134, 137, 156, 189, 301; Mitchell, 2007, pp. 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 14016, 18, 28, 36, 45, 47, 101, 162, 223; Rodriguez, 2007, p. 162; Sewell, 1976, pp. 10, 14, 30, 31-32,  33, 36, 38, 41, 47, 57, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65, 109, 124, 125, 134, 137,  152, Sorin, 1971 p. 63-67, 97, 131, 132, 156-159, 162n, 225, 227, 228; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, pp. 649-650; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 525)

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

STANTON, Henry Brewster, journalist, born in Griswold, New London County, Connecticut., 29 June, 1805; died in New York City, 14 January, 1887. His ancestor, Thomas, came to this country from England in 1635 and was crown interpreter-general of the Indian dialects, and subsequently judge of the New London County court. His father was a manufacturer of woollens and a trader with the West Indies. After receiving his education, the son went in 1826 to Rochester, New York, to write for Thurlow Weed's newspaper, “The Monroe Telegraph,” which was advocating the election of Henry Clay to the presidency. He then began to make political speeches. He moved to Cincinnati to complete his studies in Lane Theological Seminary, but left it to become an advocate of the anti-slavery cause. At the anniversary of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York City in 1834 he faced the first of the many mobs that he encountered in his tours throughout the country. In 1837-'40 he was active in the movement to form the Abolitionists into a compact political party, which was resisted by William Lloyd Garrison and others, and which resulted in lasting dissension. In 1840 he married Elizabeth Cady, and on 12 May of that year sailed with her to London, having been elected to represent the American Anti-Slavery Society at a convention for the promotion of the cause. At its close they travelled through Great Britain and France, working for the relief of the slaves. On his return, he studied law with Daniel Cady, was admitted to the bar, and practised in Boston, where he gained a reputation especially in patent cases, but he abandoned his profession to enter political life, and removing to Seneca Falls, New York, in 1847, represented that district in the state senate. He was a member of the Free-Soil Party previous to the formation of the Republican Party, of which he was a founder. Before this he had been a Democrat. For nearly half a century he was actively connected with the daily press, his contributions consisting chiefly of articles on current political topics and elaborate biographies of public men. Mr. Stanton contributed to Garrison's “Anti-Slavery Standard” and “Liberator,” wrote for the New York “Tribune,” and from 1868 until his death was an editor of the New York “Sun.” Henry Ward Beecher said of him: “I think Stanton has all the elements of old John Adams; able, stanch, patriotic, full of principle, and always unpopular. He lacks that sense of other people's opinions which keeps a man from running against them.” Mr. Stanton was the author of “Sketches of Reforms and Reformers in Great Britain and Ireland” (New York, 1849), and “Random Recollections” (1886). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, pp. 649-650.


Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 525;

STANTON, HENRY BREWSTER (June 27, 1805-January 14, 1887), lawyer, reformer, journalist, was born in Griswold, Connecticut. His father, Joseph, a woolen manufacturer and merch ant, traced his ancestry to Thomas Stanton who emigrated to America from England, and about 1637 settled in Connecticut. He was Crown interpreter of the Indian tongues in New England and judge of the New London county court. Henry's mother, Susan Brewster, was a descendant of William Brews ter [q.v.] who arrived on the Mayflower. After studying at the academy in Jewett City, Connecticut, Henry went to Rochester in 1826 to write for Thurlow Weed's Monroe Telegraph, which was then supporting Henry Clay for the presidency. In 1828 he delivered addresses and wrote for the Telegraph in behalf of John Quincy Adams. The next year he became deputy clerk of Monroe County, New York, and continued in that office until 1832, meanwhile studying law and the classics. Converted by Charles G. Finney [q. v.], and having come into contact with Theodore D. Weld [q.v.], he then entered Lane Theological Seminary, in Cincinnati, where in th e fall of 1834 he helped organize an anti-slavery society. This the trustees, who tried to prevent all discussion of the question, opposed, and in consequence about fifty students left, including Stanton (Liberator, January 10, 1835), who at once associated himself with James G. Birney [q.v.] in his anti-slavery work. Soon he was made agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and was later a member of its executive committee.

For many years thereafter he devoted practically all of his time to this reform. He wrote for the Liberator and other abolitionist journals, for religious publications, and for some political papers, including the National Era of Washington and the New York American. He also appeared before many legislative commissions, and made platform speeches from Maine to Indiana. As a speaker he was quick-witted, eloquent, and impassioned, capable of making his hearers laugh as well as weep, and was ranked by many as the ablest anti-slavery orator of his day. His handsome, distinguished appearance, personal charm, and rare conversational powers added to his general popularity. His thunderous denunciations of human bondage subjected him, however, to scores of mob attacks. From 1837 to 1840 he busied himself with trying to get the abolitionists to form a strong political organization, a project which William Lloyd Garrison [q.v.] opposed, thereby causing a permanent break in the relation of the two men. On May 10, 1840, he married Elizabeth Cady [see Elizabeth Cady Stanton], daughter of Judge Daniel Cady [q.v.] of Johnstown, New York; seven children were born to them.

Immediately after his marriage Stanton sailed with his wife for London to attend the World Anti-Slavery Convention, to which he was a delegate. Later, he traveled through Great Britain and Ireland delivering many speeches on the slavery question. One result of this tour was his Sketches of Reforms and Reformers, of Great Britain and Ireland (1849). Upon his return to the United States he studied law with his father-in- law, was admitted to the bar, and began practising in Boston. Finding the Massachusetts winters too severe for his health, he removed about 1847 to Seneca Falls, New York, making this place his home for the next sixteen years. He was successful at the law, but his continued interest in abolition led him into increased political activity. In 1849 he was elected to the state Senate from Seneca Falls. He was one of the senators who resigned to prevent a quorum in the Senate and the passage of the bill appropriating millions of dollars for the enlargement of the canals. In 1851 he was reelected but was not again a candidate. He helped draft the Free-Soil platform at Buffalo in 1848; in 1855 he helped organize the Republican party in New York State; and in 1856 he campaigned for Fremont. He remained a Republican until Grant's administration, during which he joined the Democrats. After the Civil War he gave most of his time to journalism, being connected with the New York Tribune under the editorship of Greeley, and with the Sun from 1869 to his death. He died in New York City.

[H. B. Stanton, Random Recollections (3rd ed., 1887); Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as Revealed in her Letters, Diary, and Reminiscences (copyright 1922), ed. by Theodore Stanton and Harriot Stanton Blatch; Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke Weld and Sarah Grimke (2 volumes, copyright 1934); annual reports of the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1835 ff.; New York Senate Journal and Documents, 1850-51; William Birney, James G. Birney and His Times (1890); W. A. Stanton, A Record ... of Thomas Stanton, of Connecticut, and His Descendants (1891); Liberator (Boston), January 10, 1835; New York Tribune and New York Sun, Jan. 15, 1887.]

M. W. W.


STEARNS, George Luther, 1809-1867, Medford, Massachusetts, merchant, industrialist, Free Soil supporter, abolitionist.  Chief supporter of the Emigrant Aid Company which financed anti-slavery settlers in the Kansas Territory.  Founded the Nation, Commonwealth, and Right of Way newspapers.  Member of the “Secret Six” who secretly financially supported radical abolitionist John Brown, and his raid on the U.S. Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, (West) Virginia, on October 16, 1859.  Recruited African Americans for the all-Black 54th and 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiments, U.S. Army. 

(Filler, 1960, p. 268; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 207, 327, 338; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, p. 655; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 543)

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

STEARNS, George Luther, merchant, born in Medford, Massachusetts, 8 January, 1809; died in New York, 9 April, 1867. His father, Luther, was a teacher of reputation. In early life his son engaged in the business of ship-chandlery, and after a prosperous career undertook the manufacture of sheet and pipe-lead, doing business in Boston and residing in Medford. He identified himself with the anti-slavery cause, became a Free-Soiler in 1848, aided John Brown in Kansas, and supported him till his death. Soon after the opening of the Civil War Mr. Stearns advocated the enlistment of Negroes in the National Army. The 54th and 55th Massachusetts Regiments, and the 5th Cavalry (colored), were largely recruited through his instrumentality. He was commissioned major through the recommendation of Secretary of War Stanton, and was of great service to the National cause by enlisting Negroes for the volunteer service in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Tennessee. He was the founder of the “Commonwealth” and “Right of Way” newspapers for the dissemination of his ideas. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, pp. 655.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 543;

STEARNS, GEORGE LUTHER (January 8, 1809-April 9, 1867),. Free-Soiler, was born in Medford, Massachusetts, the eldest son of Luther and Mary (Hall) Stearns and the descendant of Charles Stearns who became a freeman of Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1646. Such formal education as the boy received was in a preparatory school for boys established by his father, a physician. At the age of fifteen he began his business career in Brattleboro, Vermont, in 1827 entered a ship chandlery firm in Boston. and in 1835 returned to Medford to manufacture linseed oil and to marry, on January 31, 1836, Mary Ann Train. He became a Unitarian and was prominent in church activities. After the death of his wife in 1840, he reentered business in Boston, at first with a ship-chandlery company but later, very successfully, as a manufacturer of lead pipe. By 1840 he felt strongly enough on the subject of slavery to support James G. Birney and the Liberty party. His marriage, on October 12, 1843, to Mary Elizabeth Preston probably furthered his interest in the anti-slavery cause for his wife was a niece of Lydia Maria Child [q.v.]. In 1848, as a Conscience Whig, he liberally supported the Free-soil campaign with his money. He was greatly disturbed by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 and is known to have aided at least one slave to escape. He was among the leaders in the movement that put Charles Sumner in the federal Senate, and later, as a member of the famous Bird Club, he played a considerable part in the rise of the Republican party in Massachusetts, becoming particularly interested in the political fortunes of his friend John A. Andrew.

He was in the group that, in 1856, raised a subscription to equip the free state forces in Kansas with Sharpe's rifles. The subsequently successful operations of the Kansas committee of Massachusetts, of which he became chairman, were largely due to the willingness with which he contributed his time and money. In 1857 he met John Brown and made him the committee's agent to receive the arms and ammunition for the defense of Kansas and also aided in purchasing a farm for the Brown family at North Elba, New York Indeed, from this time on Stearns practically put his purse at Brown's disposal. That he ever appreciated Brown's responsibility for the murders on the

Potawatomi is doubtful, but in March 1858 Brown confided to him the general outline of his proposed raid into Virginia, an enterprise that Stearns approved, as did S. G. Howe, Theodore Parker, T. W. Higginson and Franklin B. Sanborn [qq.v.]. These five men constituted an informal committee in Massachusetts to aid Brown in whatever attack he might make on slavery. Stearns acted as treasurer for the enterprise in New England. Gerrit Smith of New York and Martin F. Conway of Kansas were also in the secret. Stearns, however, does not appear to have known just when and where Brown proposed to strike, and the blow at Harpers Ferry took him by surprise. On learning of Brown's capture he authorized two prominent Kansas jayhawkers to go to Brown's relief if they thought they could effect his rescue. Stearns himself, becoming somewhat apprehensive of the attitude of the Federal government, fled with Howe to Canada. He soon returned, however, and appeared before the Mason committee of the Senate that was investigating the Brown conspiracy. No further action was taken by the government respecting Stearns.

During the Civil War, upon Governor Andrew's authorization he recruited many negro soldiers for the 54th and 55th Massachusetts regiments, especially from the middle and western states. So satisfactory were his efforts that in the summer of 1863 Secretary Stanton commissioned him as major with headquarters in Philadelphia and directed him to recruit colored regiments for the Federal government. A few months later he was sent to Nashville, where he successfully continued his work until a misunderstanding with Stanton led him to resign from the army early in 1864. In 1865 he established the Right Way, a paper that supported radical Republican policies, particularly negro suffrage, and attained a circulation of 60,000, largely at his expense. He died of pneumonia while on a business trip to New York.

[F. P. Stearns, The Life and Public Services of George Luther Stearns (1907) and Cambridge Sketches (1905); O. G Villard, John Brown (1910); J. F. Rhodes, History of the U.S., volume II (1892); Sen. Report, No. 278, 36 Congress, 1 Session (1860); A. S. Van Wagenen, Genealogy and Memoirs of Charles and Nathaniel Stearns, and Their Descendants (1901).]

W.R.W.


SUMNER, Charles, 1811-1874, Boston, Massachusetts, statesman, lawyer, writer, editor, educator, reformer, peace advocate, anti-slavery political leader.  U.S. Senatorial candidate on the Free Soil ticket.  Entered the Senate in December 1851.  Opposed the Fugitive Slave Law and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.  Organizer and co-founder of the Republican party.  He was severely beaten on the Senate floor by pro-slavery Senator Preston S. Brooks.  It took him three and a half years to recover.  Strong supporter of Lincoln and the Union. He was among the first to support emancipation of slaves.  As a U.S. Senator, voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.

(Blue, 1994, 2005; Mabee, 1970, pp. 74, 103, 173, 178, 248, 354, 261, 299, 329, 337, 356, 368, 393n17; Mitchell, 2007, pp. 60, 62, 67-68, 89, 174, 238, 243; Potter, 1976; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 54, 59, 201-203, 298, 657-660; Sewell, 1976, pp. 219-220, 222,  131-132, 207, 208, 224, 236, 237, 239, 254, 269, 277, 279, 284, 290, 308, 341, 343, 345, 365; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, pp. 744-750; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, p. 214; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 783-785; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 21, p. 137; Congressional Globe; Donald, David. Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War. New York: Knopf, 1960.)

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

SUMNER, Charles, statesman, born in Boston, Massachusetts, 6 January, 1811; died in Washington, D. C., 11 March, 1874. The family is English, and William Sumner, from whom Charles was descended in the seventh generation, came to America about 1635 with his wife and three sons, and settled in Dorchester, Massachusetts. The Sumner’s were generally farmers. Job, grandfather of Charles, entered Harvard in 1774, but in the next year he joined the Revolutionary Army, and served with distinction during the war. He was not graduated, but he received in 1785 an honorary degree from the college. He died in 1789, aged thirty-three. Charles Pinckney Sumner (born 1776, died 1839), father of Charles, was graduated at Harvard in 1796. He was a lawyer and was sheriff of Suffolk County from 1825 until a few days before his death. In 1810 he married Relief Jacob, of Hanover, New Hampshire, and they had nine children, of whom Charles and Matilda were the eldest and twins. Matilda died in 1832. Sheriff Sumner was an upright, grave, formal man, of the old Puritan type, fond of literature and public life. His anti-slavery convictions were very strong, and he foretold a violent end to slavery in this country. In his family he was austere, and, as his income was small, strict economy was indispensable. Charles was a quiet boy, early matured, and soon showed the bent of his mind by the purchase for a few cents of a Latin grammar and '”Liber Primus” from a comrade at school. In his eleventh year he was placed at the Latin-school where Wendell Phillips, Robert C. Winthrop, James Freeman Clarke, and other boys, afterward distinguished men, were pupils. Sumner excelled in the classics, in general information, and in writing essays, but he was not especially distinguished. Just as he left the Latin-school for college he heard President John Quincy Adams speak in Faneuil hall, and at about the same time he heard Daniel Webster's eulogy upon Adams and Jefferson. It was in a New England essentially unchanged from the older, but refined and softened, that Sumner grew up. At the age of fifteen he was reserved and thoughtful, caring little for sports, slender, tall, and awkward. His thirst for knowledge of every kind, with singular ability and rapidity in acquiring it, was already remarkable. He had made a compend of English history in eighty-six pages of a copybook, and had read Gibbon's history.

In September, 1826, he began his studies at Harvard. In the classics and history and forensics, and in belles-lettres, he was among the best scholars. But he failed entirely in mathematics. His memory was extraordinary and his reading extensive. Without dissipation of any kind and without sensitiveness to humor, generous in his judgment of his comrades, devoted to his books, and going little into society, he was a general favorite, although his college life gave no especial promise of a distinguished career. In his junior year he made his first journey from home, in a pedestrian tour with some classmates to Lake Champlain, returning by the Hudson River and the city of New York. In 1830 he was graduated, and devoted himself for a year to a wide range of reading and study in the Latin classics and in general literature. He resolutely grappled with mathematics to repair the defect in his education in that branch of study, wrote a prize essay on commerce, and listened carefully to the Boston orators, Webster, Everett, Choate, and Channing. No day, no hour, no opportunity, was lost by him in the pursuit of knowledge. His first interest in public questions was awakened by the anti-Masonic movement, which he held to be a “great and good cause,” two adjectives that were always associated in his estimate of causes and of men. Mindful of Dr. Johnson's maxim, he diligently maintained his friendships by correspondence and intercourse. On 1 September, 1831, he entered Harvard Law-School, of which Judge Joseph Story was the chief professor. Story had been a friend of Sumner's father, and his friendly regard for the son soon ripened into an affection and confidence that never ceased. Sumner was now six feet and two inches in height, but weighing only 120 pounds, and not personally attractive. He was never ill, and was an untiring walker; his voice was strong and clear, his smile quick and sincere, his laugh loud, and his intellectual industry and his memory were extraordinary. He began the study of law with the utmost enthusiasm, giving himself a wide range, keeping careful notes of the moot-court cases, writing for the “American Jurist,” and preparing a catalogue of the library of the Law-school. He joined the temperance society of the professional schools and the college. His acquirements were already large, but he was free from vanity. His mental habit was so serious that, while his talk was interesting, he was totally disconcerted by a jest or gay repartee. He had apparently no ambition except to learn as much as he could, and his life then, as always, was pure in word and deed.

The agitation of the question of slavery had already begun. “The Liberator” was established by Mr. Garrison in Boston on 1 January, 1831. The “nullification movement” in South Carolina occurred while Sumner was at the Law-school. He praised President Jackson's proclamation, and saw civil war impending; but he wrote to a friend in 1832: “Politics I begin to loathe; they are for a day, but the law is for all time.” He entered the law-office of Benjamin Rand, in Boston, in January, 1834, wrote copiously for the “Jurist,” and went to Washington for the first time in April. The favor of Judge Story opened to Sumner the pleasantest houses at the capital, and his professional and general accomplishments secured an ever-widening welcome. But Washington only deepened his love for the law and his aversion to politics. In September, 1834, he was admitted to the bar. During the month that he passed in Washington, Sumner described his first impression of the unfortunate race to whose welfare his life was to be devoted: “For the first time I saw slaves [on the journey through Maryland], and my worst preconception of their appearance and ignorance did not fall as low as their actual stupidity. They appear to be nothing more than moving masses of flesh, unendowed with anything of intelligence above the brutes. I have now an idea of the blight upon that part of our country in which they live.” Anticipating hearing Calhoun, he says: “He will be the last man I shall ever hear speak in Washington.” In 1835 he was appointed by Judge Story a commissioner of the circuit court of the United States and reporter of Story's judicial opinions, and he began to teach in the Law-school during the judge's absence. This service he continued in 1836-'7, and he aided in preparing a digest of the decisions of the Supreme Court of Maine. He wrote upon literary and legal topics, he lectured and edited and pleaded, and he was much overworked in making a bare livelihood. In 1835 his interest in the slavery question deepened. The first newspaper for which he subscribed was “The Liberator,” and he writes to Dr. Francis Lieber, then professor in the college at Columbia, South Carolina: “What think you of it? [slavery] Should it longer exist? Is not emancipation practicable? We are becoming Abolitionists, at the north, fast.” The next year, 1836, his “blood boils” at an indignity offered by a slave master to the Boston counsel of a fugitive slave. Sumner now saw much of Channing, by whose wisdom and devotion to freedom he was deeply influenced. His articles in the “Jurist” had opened correspondence with many eminent European publicists. His friends at home were chiefly among scholars, and already Longfellow was one of his intimate companions. In the summer of 1836 he made a journey to Canada, and in December, 1837, he sailed for France.

He carried letters from distinguished Americans to distinguished Europeans, and his extraordinary diligence in study and his marvellous memory had equipped him for turning every opportunity to the best account. During his absence he kept a careful diary and wrote long letters, many of which are printed in the memoir by Edward L. Pierce, and there is no more graphic and interesting picture than they present of the social and professional life at that time of the countries he visited. Sumner remained in Paris for five months, and carefully improved every hour. He attended 150 university lectures by the most renowned professors. He walked the hospitals with the great surgeons. He frequented the courts and theatres and operas and libraries and museums. He was a guest in the most famous salons, and he saw and noted everything, not as a loiterer, but as a student. On 31 May, 1838, he arrived in England, where he remained for ten months. No American had ever been so universally received and liked, and Carlyle characteristically described him as “Popularity Sumner.” He saw and studied England in every aspect, and in April, 1839, went to Italy and devoted himself to the study of its language, history, and literature, with which, however, he was already familiar. In Rome, where he remained for some months, he met the sculptor Thomas Crawford, whom he warmly befriended. Early in October, 1839, he left Italy for Germany, in the middle of March, 1840, he was again in England, and in May, 1840, he returned to America.

He showed as yet no sign of political ambition. The “hard-cider campaign” of 1840, the contest between Harrison and Van Buren, began immediately after his return. He voted for Harrison, but without especial interest in the measures of the Whig Party. In announcing to a brother, then in Europe, the result of the election, he wrote: “I take very little interest in politics.” The murder of Lovejoy in November, 1837, and the meeting in Faneuil Hall, where Wendell Phillips made his memorable speech, and the local disturbances that attended the progress of the anti-slavery agitation throughout the northern states, had plainly revealed the political situation. But Sumner's letters during the year after his return from Europe do not show that the question of slavery had especially impressed him, while his friends were in the most socially delightful circles of conservative Boston. But in 1841 the assertion by Great Britain, of a right to stop any suspected slaver to ascertain her right to carry the American flag, produced great excitement. Sumner at once showed his concern for freedom and his interest in great questions of law by maintaining in two elaborate articles, published in a Boston newspaper early in 1842, the right and the justice of such an inquiry. Kent, Story, Choate, and Theodore Sedgwick approved his position. This was his first appearance in the anti-slavery controversy. In 1842 Daniel Webster, as Secretary of State, wrote his letter upon the case of the “Creole,” contending that the slaves who had risen against the ship's officers should not be liberated by the British authorities at Nassau. Sumner strongly condemned the letter, and took active part in the discussion. He contended that the slaves were manumitted by the common law upon passing beyond the domain of the local law of slavery; and if this were not so, the piracy charged was an offence under the local statute and not under the law of nations, and no government could be summoned to surrender offenders against the municipal law of other governments. In April, 1842, he writes: “The question of slavery is getting to be the absorbing one among us, and growing out of this is that other of the Union.” He adjured Longfellow to write verses that should move the whole land against the iniquity. But his social relations were still undisturbed, and his unbounded admiration of Webster showed his generous mind. “With the moral devotion of Channing,” he said of Webster, “he would be a prophet.”

In July, 1843, Sumner published in the “North American Review” an article defending Commodore Alexander Slidell Mackenzie for his action in the case of the “Somers” mutiny, when a son of John C. Spencer, Secretary of War, was executed. He published also a paper upon the political relations of slavery, justifying the moral agitation of the question. In this year he contributed largely to the “Law Reporter,” and taught for the last time in the Law-school. In the election of 1844 Sumner took no part. He had no special sympathy with Whig views of the tariff and the bank, and already slavery seemed to him to be the chief public question. He was a Whig, as he said in 1848, because it seemed to him the party of humanity, and John Quincy Adams was the statesman whom he most admired. He was overwhelmed with professional work, which brought on a serious illness. But his activity was unabated, and he was elected a member of various learned societies. His letters during 1844 show his profound interest in the slavery question. He speaks of the “atrocious immorality of John Tyler in seeking to absorb Texas,” and “the disgusting vindication of slavery” by Calhoun, which he regrets that he is too busy to answer. In 1845 he was deeply interested in the question of popular education, and was one of the intimate advisers of Horace Mann. Prison-discipline was another question that commanded his warmest interest, and his first public speech was made upon this subject at a meeting of the Prison-discipline Society, in May, 1845. This was followed, on 4 July, by the annual oration before the civil authorities of Boston, upon “The True Grandeur of Nations.” The oration was a plea for peace and a vehement denunciation of war, delivered, in commemoration of an armed revolutionary contest, to an audience largely military and in military array. This discourse was the prototype of all Sumner's speeches. It was an elaborate treatise, full of learning and precedent and historical illustration, of forcible argument and powerful moral appeal. The effect was immediate and striking. There were great indignation and warm protest on the one hand, and upon the other sincere congratulation and high compliment. Sumner's view of the absolute wrong and iniquity of war under all circumstances was somewhat modified subsequently; but the great purpose of a peaceful solution of international disputes he never relinquished. The oration revealed to the country an orator hitherto unknown even to himself and his friends. It showed a moral conviction, intrepidity, and independence, and a relentless vigor of statement, which were worthy of the best traditions of New England. Just four months later, on 4 November, 1845, Sumner made in Faneuil hall his first anti-slavery speech, at a meeting of which Charles Francis Adams was chairman, to protest against the admission of Texas. This first speech had all the characteristics of the last important speech he ever made. It was brief, but sternly bold, uncompromising, aggressive, and placed Sumner at once in the van of the political anti-slavery movement. He was not an Abolitionist in the Garrisonian sense. He held that slavery was sectional, not national; that the constitution was meant to be a bond of national liberty as well as union, and nowhere countenanced the theory that there could be property in men; that it was to be judicially interpreted always in the interest of freedom; and that, by rigorous legal restriction and the moral force of public opinion, slavery would be forced to disappear. This was subsequently the ground held by the Republican Party. Sumner added to his reputation by an elaborate oration at Cambridge, in August, 1846, upon “The Scholar, the Jurist, the Artist, the Philanthropist,” of which the illustrations were his personal friends, then recently dead, John Pickering, Judge Story, Washington Allston, and Dr. Channing. The reference to Channing gave him the opportunity, which he improved, to urge the duty of anti-slavery action. It was the first time that the burning question of the hour had been discussed in the scholastic seclusion of the university.

In September, 1846, at the Whig State Convention held in Faneuil Hall, Sumner spoke upon the “Anti-Slavery Duties of the Whig Party,” concluding with an impassioned appeal to Mr. Webster to lead the Whigs as an anti-slavery party. He sent the speech to Mr. Webster, who, in replying coolly, politely regretted that they differed in regard to political duty. In October, Sumner wrote a public letter to Robert C. Winthrop, representative in Congress from Boston, censuring him severely for his vote in support of the Mexican War. He wrote as a Whig constituent of Mr. Winthrop's, and during his absence from Boston he was nominated for Congress, against Mr. Winthrop, by a meeting of Whigs, including Charles Francis Adams and John A. Andrew. But he immediately and peremptorily declined, and he warmly supported Dr. Samuel G. Howe, who was nominated in his place. During this period, when “Conscience Whigs” were separating from “Cotton Whigs,” Sumner was untiring in his public activity. He spoke often, and he argued before the supreme court of the state the invalidity of enlistments for the Mexican War, and delivered a lecture upon “White Slavery in the Barbary States,” which was elaborated into a pamphlet, and was a valuable historical study of the subject. In June, 1847, a speech upon prison-discipline showed his interest in the question to be unabated. On 29 September, 1847, he spoke for the last time as a Whig, in the State Convention at Springfield, in support of a resolution that Massachusetts Whigs would support only an anti-slavery man for the presidency. The resolution was lost, and upon the Whig nomination of General Zachary Taylor, 1 June, 1848, a convention of anti-slavery men of both parties was called at Worcester on 28 June, at which Sumner, Charles Francis Adams, Samuel Hoar (who presided), and his son, E. Rockwood Hoar, with many other well-known Whigs, withdrew from the Whig Party and organized the Free-soil Party. “If two evils are presented to me,” said Sumner in his speech, alluding to Cass and Taylor, “I will take neither.” Sumner was chairman of the Free-Soil State Committee, which conducted the campaign in Massachusetts for Van Buren and Adams, nominated at the Buffalo Convention. In October, 1848, he was nominated for Congress in the Boston District, receiving 2,336 votes against 1,460 for the Democratic candidate. But Mr. Winthrop received 7,726, and was elected. In May, 1849, he renewed his plea for peace in an exhaustive address before the American peace Society on “The War System of the Commonwealth of Nations,” and on 5 November, 1850, his speech, after the passage of the Fugitive-Slave Law, was like a war-cry for the Free-Soil Party, and was said to have made him senator. In the election of members of the legislature the Free-Soilers and Democrats united, and at a caucus of members of the Free-Soil Party Sumner was unanimously selected as their candidate for U. S. Senator. He was more acceptable to the Democrats because he had never been an extreme Whig, and the Democratic caucus, with almost equal unanimity, made him its candidate. The legislature then chose George S. Boutwell governor, Henry W. Cushman lieutenant-governor, and Robert Rantoul, Jr., senator for the short term. These were all Democrats. The House of Representatives voted, on 14 January, 1851, for senator, casting 381 votes, with 191 necessary to a choice. Sumner received 186, Robert C. Winthrop 167, scattering 28, blanks 3. On 22 January, of 38 votes in the Senate, Sumner received 23, Winthrop 14, and H. W. Bishop 1, and Sumner was chosen by the Senate. The contest in the house continued for three months. Sumner was entreated to modify some expressions in his last speech; but he refused, saying that he did not desire the office, and on 22 February he asked Henry Wilson, President of the Senate, and the Free-Soil members, to abandon him whenever they could elect another candidate. On 24 April, Sumner was elected senator by 193 votes, precisely the necessary number of the votes cast.

When he took his seat in the Senate he was as distinctively the uncompromising representative of freedom and the north as Calhoun had been of slavery and the south. But it was not until 26 August, 1852, just after the Democratic and Whig national Conventions had acquiesced in the compromises of 1850, that Sumner delivered his first important speech, “Freedom National, Slavery Sectional.” It treated the relations of the national government to slavery, and the true nature of the constitutional provision in regard to fugitives. The speech made a profound impression. The general view was accepted at once by the anti-slavery party as sound. The argument seemed to the anti-slavery sentiment to be unanswerable. Seward and Chase both described it as “great,” and it was evident that another warrior thoroughly equipped was now to be encountered by the slave power. On 23 January, 1854, Stephen A. Douglas introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, by which the Missouri Compromise was repealed, and on 21 February, 1854, Sumner opposed it in a speech characteristically comprehensive and exhaustive, reviewing the history of the restriction of slavery. On the eve of the passage of the bill he made a solemn and impressive protest, and his reply to assailants, 28 June, 1854, stung his opponents to madness. He was now the most unsparing, the most feared, and the most hated opponent of slavery in Congress. On 17 March, 1856, Mr. Douglas introduced a bill for the admission of Kansas as a state. On 19 and 20 May, Sumner delivered a speech on the “Crime against Kansas,” which again aroused the country, and in which he spoke, in reference to the slave and free-soil factions in Kansas, of “the fury of the propagandists and the calm determination of their opponents,” who through the whole country were “marshalling hostile divisions, and foreshadowing a conflict which, unless happily averted by freedom, will become war—fratricidal, parricidal war.” It provoked the bitterest rejoinders in the Senate, to which Sumner replied contemptuously. In his speech he had sharply censured Senator Butler, of South Carolina, and Senator Douglas, and two days after the delivery of the speech, as Sumner was sitting after the adjournment writing at his desk alone in the Senate-chamber, Preston Smith Brooks, a relative of Butler's and a representative from South Carolina, entered the chamber, and, after speaking a few words to Sumner, struck him violently upon the head with a bludgeon, and while Sumner was trying in vain to extricate himself from the desk and seize his assailant, the blows continued until he sank bloody and senseless to the floor. This event startled the country as a presage of civil war. The excitement was universal and profound. The House of Representatives refused to give the two-third vote necessary to expel Brooks, but he resigned and appealed to his constituents, and was unanimously re-elected. Sumner was long incapacitated for public service. On 3 November, 1856, he returned to Boston to vote, and was received with acclamation by the people and with the highest honor by the state and city authorities. On 13 January, 1857, he was re-elected senator, receiving all but ten votes, and on 7 March, 1857, he sailed for Europe, where he submitted to the severest medical treatment. With characteristic energy and industry, in the intervals of suffering, he devoted himself to a thorough study of the art and history of engraving.

For nearly four years he was absent from his seat in the Senate, which he resumed on 5 December, 1859, at the opening of the session. He was still feeble, and took no part in debate until the middle of March, and on 4 June, 1860, on the question of admitting Kansas as a free state, he delivered a speech upon “The Barbarism of Slavery,” which showed his powers untouched and his ardor unquenched. Mr. Lincoln had been nominated for the presidency, and Sumner's speech was the last comprehensive word in the parliamentary debate of freedom and slavery. The controversy could now be settled only by arms. This conviction was undoubtedly the explanation of the angry silence with which the speech was heard in the Senate by the friends of slavery. During the winter of secession that followed the election Sumner devoted himself to the prevention of any form of compromise, believing that it would be only a base and fatal surrender of constitutional principles. He made no speeches during the session. By the withdrawal of southern senators the Senate was left with a Republican majority, and in the reconstruction of committees on 8 March, 1861, Sumner was made chairman of the committee on foreign affairs. For this place he was peculiarly fitted. His knowledge of international law, of the history of other states, and of their current politics, was comprehensive and exact, and during the intense excitement arising from the seizure of the “Trent” he rendered the country a signal service in placing the surrender of Slidell and Mason upon the true ground. (See MASON, JAMES MURRAY.) While there was universal acquiescence in the decision of the government to surrender the commissioners, there was not universal satisfaction and pride until on 9 January, 1862, Sumner, in one of his ablest speeches, showed incontestably that our own principles, constantly maintained by us, required the surrender. One of the chief dangers throughout the Civil War was the possible action of foreign powers, and especially of England, where iron-clad rams were being built for the Confederacy, and on 10 September, 1863, Sumner delivered in New York a speech upon “Our Foreign Relations,” which left nothing unsaid. Happily, on 8 September, Lord Russell had informed the American minister, Charles Francis Adams, that the rams would not be permitted to leave English ports.

Throughout the war, both in Congress and upon the platform, Sumner was very urgent for emancipation, and when the war ended he was equally anxious to secure entire equality of rights for the new citizens. But while firm upon this point, and favoring the temporary exclusion of recent Confederates from political power, he opposed the proposition to change the jury law for the trial of Jefferson Davis, and disclaimed every feeling of vengeance. He was strong in his opposition to President Andrew Johnson and his policy. But the great measure of the Johnson administration, the acquisition of Alaska by treaty, was supported by Sumner in a speech on 9 April, 1867, which is an exhaustive history of Russian America. He voted affirmatively upon all the articles of impeachment of President Johnson, which in a long opinion he declared to be one of the last great battles with slavery.

Early in the administration of President Grant, 10 April, 1869, Sumner opposed the Johnson-Clarendon Treaty with England, as affording no means of adequate settlement of our British claims. In this speech he asserted the claim for indirect or consequential damages, which afterward was proposed as part of the American case at the Geneva arbitration, but was discarded. In his message of 5 December, 1870, President Grant, regretting the failure of the treaty to acquire Santo Domingo, strongly urged its acquisition. Sumner strenuously opposed the project on the ground that it was not the wish of the “black republic,” and that Baez, with whom, as president of the Dominican Republic, the negotiation had been irregularly conducted, was an adventurer, held in his place by an unconstitutional use of the navy of the United States. Sumner's opposition led to a personal rupture with the president and the Secretary of State, and to alienation from the Republican senators, in consequence of which, on 10 March, 1871, he was removed, by the Republican majority of the Senate, from the chairmanship of the Committee on Foreign Affairs. He was assigned the chairmanship of the Committee on Privileges and Elections; but, upon his own motion, his name was stricken out. On 24 March he introduced resolutions, which he advocated in a powerful speech, severely arraigning the president for his course in regard to Santo Domingo. In December, 1871, he refused again to serve as chairman of the Committee on Privileges and Elections. Early in 1872 he introduced a supplementary civil-rights bill, which, since January, 1870, he had vainly sought to bring before the Senate. It was intended to secure complete equality for colored citizens in every relation that law could effect; but it was thought to be unwise and impracticable by other Republican senators, and as drawn by Sumner it was not supported by them. He introduced, 12 February, 1872, resolutions of inquiry, aimed at the administration, into the sale of arms to France during the German War. An acrimonious debate arose, during which Sumner's course was sharply criticised by some of his party colleagues, and he and Senators Trumbull, Schurz, and Fenton were known as anti-Grant Republicans.

Sumner was urged to attend the Liberal or anti-Grant Republican Convention, to be held at Cincinnati, 1 May, which nominated Horace Greeley for the presidency, and the chairmanship, and authority to write the platform were offered to him as inducements. But he declined, and in the Senate, 31 May, declaring himself a Republican of the straitest sect, he denounced Grantism as not Republicanism in a speech implying that he could not support Grant as the presidential candidate of the party. The Republican Convention, 5 June, unanimously renominated Grant, and the Democratic Convention, 9 June, adopted the Cincinnati platform and candidates. In reply to a request for advice from the colored citizens of Washington, 29 July, Sumner, in a long letter, advised the support of Greeley, on the general ground that principles must be preferred to party. In a sharp letter to Speaker Blaine, 5 August, he set forth the reasons of the course he had taken.

But the strain of the situation was too severe. His physicians ordered him to seek recreation in Europe, and he sailed early in September, leaving the manuscript of a speech he had proposed to deliver in Faneuil Hall at a meeting of Liberal Republicans. He opposed the election of Grant upon the ground that he was unfaithful to the constitution and to Republican principles, and otherwise unfitted for the presidency; and he supported Greeley as an original and unswerving Republican, nominated by Republicans, whose adoption as a candidate by the Democratic Party proved the honest acquiescence of that party in the great results of the Civil War. He returned from Europe in time for the opening of the session, 2 December, 1872. The Republican majority omitted him altogether in the arrangement of the committees, leaving him to be placed by the Democratic minority. But Sumner declined to serve upon any committee, and did not attend the Republican caucus. On the first day of the session he introduced a bill forbidding the names of battles with fellow-citizens to be continued in the army register or placed on the regimental colors of the United States. From this time he took no party part and made no political speech, pleading only for equality of civil rights for colored citizens. At the next session, 1 December, 1873, he was placed on several committees, not as chairman, but as one of the minority, and he did not refuse to serve, but attended no meetings. During this session the cordial relations between Sumner and the Republicans were almost wholly restored, and in Massachusetts the Republican feeling for him was very friendly. Again, promptly but vainly, 2 December, 1873, he asked consideration of the civil-rights bill. On 27 January, 1874, he made for the bill a last brief appeal, and on 11 March, 1874, after a short illness, he died. The bill that was his last effort to serve the race to whose welfare his public life had been devoted was reported, 14 April, 1874, substantially as originally drawn, and passed the Senate, 22 May. But it failed in the house, and the civil-rights bill, approved 1 March, 1875, was a law of less scope than his, and has been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Sumner's death was universally lamented. One of the warmest and most striking eulogies was that of Lucius Q. C. Lamar, then a representative in Congress from Mississippi, who had been a sincere disciple of Calhoun and a Confederate officer, but who recognized in Sumner a kindred earnestness and fidelity. The later differences with his party were forgotten when Sumner died, and only his great service to the country in the most perilous hour, and his uncompromising devotion to the enslaved race, were proudly and enthusiastically remembered. Among American statesmen his life especially illustrates the truth he early expressed, that politics is but the application of moral principles to public affairs. Throughout his public career he was the distinctive representative of the moral conviction and political purpose of New England. His ample learning and various accomplishments were rivalled among American public men only by those of John Quincy Adams, and during all the fury of political passion in which he lived there was never a whisper or suspicion of his political honesty or his personal integrity. He was fortunate in the peculiar adaptation of his qualities to his time. His profound conviction, supreme conscientiousness, indomitable will, affluent resources, and inability to compromise, his legal training, serious temper, and untiring energy, were indispensable in the final stages of the slavery controversy, and he had them all in the highest degree. “There is no other side,” he said to a friend with fervor, and Cromwell's Ironsides did not ride into the fight more absolutely persuaded that they were doing the will of God than Charles Sumner. For ordinary political contests he had no taste, and at another time and under other circumstances he would probably have been an all-accomplished scholar or learned judge, unknown in political life. Of few men could it be said more truly than of him that he never lost a day. He knew most of the famous men and women of his time, and he was familiar with the contemporaneous political, literary, and artistic movement in every country. In public life he was often accounted a man of one idea; but his speeches upon the “Trent” case, the Russian treaty, and our foreign relations showed the fulness of his knowledge and the variety of his interest. He was dogmatic, often irritable with resolute opposition to his views, and of generous self-esteem, but he was of such child-like simplicity and kindliness that the poisonous sting of vanity and malice was wanting. During the difference between Sumner and his fellow-Republicans in the Senate, one of them said that he had no enemy but himself, and Sumner refused to speak to him for the rest of the session. But the next autumn his friend stepped into an omnibus in New York in which Sumner was sitting, and, entirely forgetting the breach, greeted him with the old warmth. Sumner responded as warmly, and at once the old intimacy was completely restored. From envy or any form of ill-nature he was wholly free. No man was more constant and unsparing in the warfare with slavery and in the demand of equality for the colored race; but no soldier ever fought with less personal animosity. He was absolutely fearless. During the heat of the controversy in Congress his life was undoubtedly in danger, and he was urged to carry a pistol for his defence. He laughed, and said that he had never fired a pistol in his life, and, in case of extremity, before he could possibly get it out of his pocket he would be shot. But the danger was so real that, unknown to himself, he was for a long time under the constant protection of armed friends in Washington. The savage assault of Brooks undoubtedly shortened Sumner's life, but to a friend who asked him how he felt toward his assailant, he answered: “As to a brick that should fall upon my head from a chimney. He was the unconscious agent of a malign power.” Personally, in his later years, Sumner was of commanding presence, very tall, and of a stalwart frame. His voice was full, deep, and resonant, his elocution declamatory, stately, and earnest. His later speeches in the Senate he read from printed slips, but his speech upon Alaska, which occupied three hours in the delivery, was spoken from notes written upon a single sheet of paper, and it was subsequently written out. Few of the bills drawn by him became laws, but he influenced profoundly legislation upon subjects in which he was most interested. He was four times successively elected to the Senate, and when he died he was the senior senator of the United States in consecutive service. In October, 1866, when he was fifty-five years old, Sumner married Mrs. Alice Mason Hooper, of Boston, daughter-in-law of his friend, Samuel Hooper, representative in Congress. The union was very brief, and in September, 1867, Mr. and Mrs. Sumner, for reasons that were never divulged, were separated, and they were ultimately divorced. Of the “Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner,” written by his friend and literary executor, Edward L. Pierce, two volumes, covering the period to 1845, have been published (Boston, 1877). His complete works in fifteen volumes are also published (Boston, 1870-'83). The notes by himself and his executors supply a chronology of his public career. There are several portraits of Sumner. A crayon drawing by Eastman Johnson (1846) hung in Longfellow's study, and is engraved in Pierce's memoir. A large daguerreotype (1853) is also engraved in the memoir. A crayon by William W. Story (1854) for Lord Morpeth is now at Castle Howard, Yorkshire. An oil portrait by Moses Wight (1856) is in the Boston public library, another by Morrison (1856) in the library of Harvard College. A portrait by Edgar Parker was painted several years before his death. There is a photograph in the “Memorial History of Boston”; a photograph (1869) engraved in his works; another (1871) engraved in the city memorial volume of Sumner; a full-length portrait by Henry Ulke (1873) for the Haytian government—copy presented to the state of Massachusetts by James Wormely (1884), now in the State library; a photograph (1873), the last likeness ever taken, engraved in the state memorial volume; Thomas Crawford's bust (1839) in the Boston art museum; Martin Milmore's bust (1874) in the state-house, a copy of which is in the Metropolitan art museum, New York; a bronze statue by Thomas Ball (1878) in the Public garden, Boston; and a statuette in plaster by Miss Whitney (1877), an admirable likeness. The illustration on page 747 represents Mr. Sumner's tomb in Mt. Auburn cemetery, near Boston. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, pp. 744-750.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, p. 214;

SUMNER, CHARLES (January 6, 1811-March 11, 1874), United States senator, notable advocate of the emancipation of the slave and the outlawry of war, son of Charles Pinckney Sumner and Relief (Jacob) Sumner, was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His father-a descendant of William Sumner, who had come to Dorchester from England about 1635-was graduated from Harvard College in 1796 and read law in the office of Josiah Quincy. For many years he served as sheriff of Suffolk County. He was a man of sound learning, independent in thought and action, outspoken in condemnation of slavery, and so earnest an advocate of "equal rights" that he opposed the exclusion of negro children from the schools and the law prohibiting intermarriage of blacks and whites. At the Boston Latin School (1821-26), the intimates of Charles Sumner were Robert C. Winthrop, James Freeman Clarke, Samuel F. Smith, and Wendell Phillips. Disappointed in his ambition to secure an appointment to West Point, at the age of fifteen he entered Harvard College where he showed (1826-30) great aptitude for history, literature, and forensics.

In the Harvard Law School (1831-33) Sumner became the devoted pupil and friend of its most eminent professor, Joseph Story, and at the end of his studies was urged to join the staff as an instructor, but he preferred to try his powers in active practice. Before entering upon its routine he took an orientation journey to Washington, especially to attend sessions of the Supreme Court, upon which Story was then sitting. For weeks young Sumner enjoyed the privilege of sitting at table in friendly intercourse with Chief Justice Marshall and his colleagues. He hear d Webster and Francis Scott Key clash as opposing counsel before the Supreme Court, and in the Senate listened to the "splendid and thrilling" · eloquence of Clay. Nevertheless, he left Washington declaring that nothing he had seen had made him look upon politics "with any feeling other than loathing" (Memoir, I, 142). Upon return to his office the drab routine of practice proved little to his liking. He became a lecturer in the Harvard Law School, a frequent contributor to the American Jurist, and devoted much time to reviewing and revising legal textbooks. He came into close intimacy with Francis Lieber and with William Ellery Channing, who exercised a profound influence upon him, and he formed a deep and lifelong affection for Whittier, Longfellow, and Emerson.

At twenty-six, though he had made no assured start in his profession, to the dismay of his friends he borrowed money and broke away from the law office for an indefinite sojourn in Europe. He remained abroad more than two years. It was no holiday trip. In every land which he visited he was an eager student and close observer. This experience gave him facile com- mand of French, German, and Italian, an understanding of European governments and jurisprudence, and an intimate acquaintance with many of the leaders in public life and in letters in England, France, and Germany. Upon his return to Boston he had the entree to the city's most cultivated social and intellectual circles. But he found the work of the law office weary, stale, and unprofitable. "Though I earn my daily bread, I lay up none of the bread of life" (Memoir, II, 167). The one position which would then have satisfied his ambition was that of reporter of the Supreme Court. That appointment went to another, and Sumner brought himself to the verge of collapse by undergoing the heartbreaking drudgery of annotating Francis Vesey's Reports of Cases ... in the High Court of Chancery (20 vols,, 1844-45).

In 1845 Sumner was chosen as the orator for Boston's Independence Day celebration. The delivery of that oration proved a turning-point in his career. For the first time he faced a great assembly gathered to hear him. He now stood six feet four inches in height, and his strong face kindled with animation as he spoke. His voice was of great power, and he used it with skill. Of that brilliant audience not less than one hundred were in full military or naval dress uniform. With terse introduction, Sumner announced the theme of his oration: "What is the true grandeur of nations?" He then proceeded to lay down his thesis, putting it interrogatively: "Can there be in our age any peace that is not honorable, any war that is not dishonorable?" (Works, I, 9). The city's military and naval guests felt themselves "officially assailed by the speaker as well as personally insulted" (Memoir, II, 346) and were with difficulty restrained from leaving the hall while he was still speaking. Ex-Mayor Eliot, whom Webster called "the impersonation of Boston," commented: "The young man has cut his throat!" (Quoted by Wendell Phillips, in Boston Daily Advertiser, March 13, 1877). That oration revealed to Sumner not less than to his friends that he could thrill and sway great audiences. It brought him into closer cooperation with leaders like Theodore Parker and John A. Andrew. For years thereafter no lecturer on the Lyceum platform was more welcome than Sumner.

In the annual address before the American Peace Society (1849) he made a strong plea for "a Congress of Nations, with a High Court of Judicature," or for arbitration established by treaties between nations (Works, pp. 262-67). When his boyhood friend, Congressman Robert C. Winthrop, voted for the Mexican War bill, Sumner wrote a succession of letters publicly accusing him of sanctioning "the most wicked [act] in our history" (Works, I, 322). Such imputations brought upon Sumner a storm of criticism. Winthrop declined further social relations with him, and Boston's social autocrat, Ticknor, declared that Sumner was "outside the pale of society" (Haynes, post, p. 4).

From Sumner's office was issued the call for a convention of all citizens of the Commonwealth opposed to the nomination of Cass and of Taylor. In that convention, at Worcester on June 28, 1848, Sumner made the principal speech, and his denunciation of the conspiracy "between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom" (Works, II, 81) increased the antipathy of the rich and conservative Whigs of Boston for him. He was put forward as a candidate for the United States Senate by a coalition of Free Soilers and Democrats, but his election was blocked for more than three months by the impossibility of securing a two-thirds majority in the House. Finally the deadlock was broken when in several towns the voters met in special meetings, legally called for that one purpose, and by formal vote instructed their representatives to support Sumner.

He entered the Senate on December 1, 1851. By the great majority the compromise measures of 1850 were accepted as a finality. Only five days before the end of the nine months' session, Sumner gained the floor as a matter of right, to speak to an amendment which he had moved, that no allowance under the pending appropriation bill should be authorized for expenses incurred in executing the law "for the surrender of fugitives from service or labor; which said Act is hereby repealed" (Works, III, 94). For more than three hours he presented a tremendous arraignment of the Fugitive-slave Law. The galleries filled. For an hour Webster himself was an attentive listener, this being his last visit to the Senate chamber. Near Webster, while Sumner was s peaking, sat Horace Mann, who wrote in his journal: "the 26th of August, 1852, redeemed the 7th of March, 1850" (Mary T. P. Mann, Life of Horace Mann, 1865, p. 381). In the debate Southern senators heaped angry derision upon Sumner's amendment. Only Chase and Hale took the floor in its support, and but four votes were given in its favor. Nevertheless, Chase declared that in American history Sumner's speech would mark the day when the advocates of the restriction of slavery "no longer content to stand on the defensive in the contest with slavery, boldly attacked the very citadel of its power in that doctrine of finality" which both political parties were endeavoring "to establish as the impregnable defense of its usurpations" (Congressional Globe, 32 Congress, I Session, App., p. 1121).

Sumner was outspoken, both in the Senate and in the Massachusetts convention, in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. This brought him into greater disfavor with the Boston press and society, both dominated by conservative Whigs, whom he still further offended by presenting in the Senate "with pleasure and pride" petitions from New England clergymen protesting against the passage of that bill. In the debate upon the right of petition Southern senators who had hitherto been on friendly terms with Sumner poured contempt upon his "vapid rhetoric," charged him with repudiating his oath of office and with declaring his intention to disobey the Constitution, and denounced him as a "miscreant," a "sneaking, sinuous, snake-like poltroon." They urged his expulsion, but an informal poll showed that the requisite two-thirds vote could not be secured. Sumner declared that he had sworn to support the Constitution as he understood it. "Does he recognize the obligation to return a fugitive slave?" demanded Toucey, Sumner's reply was: "To that I answer distinctly, 'No.'" (June 28, 1854, Congressional Globe, 33 Congress, 3 Sess., p. 1559). Sumner's vindication of Massachusetts against attack and his courage in maintaining his own opinion won admirers in quarters where he had been held in slight regard.

Sumner had a large part in the organization of the Republican party. Resistance of influential Whigs to the formation of a new party with the main object of opposing the extension of slavery gave opportunity for the rapid growth of the Know-Nothing party, by the votes of whose oath-bound members some Massachusetts politicians, notably Henry Wilson and Nathaniel P. Banks, were enabled to climb to high office. Sumner scorned such association, and boldly denounced "a party which, beginning in secrecy, interferes with religious belief, and founds a discrimination on the accident of birth" (Works, IV, 80). Such defiant language led to some futile intriguing to prevent his reelection.

At the opening of the new Congress, December 5, 1855, hot debate began at once with the Senate's demand for documents relating to the struggle in Kansas. With sure prescience Sumner declared: "This session will not pass without the Senate Chamber's becoming the scene of some unparalleled outrage" (T. W. Higginson, Contemporaries, p. 283). Two days before he was to speak, he wrote to Theodore Parker: "I shall pronounce the most thorough philippic ever uttered in a legislative body" (Memoir, III, 439). When he began his speech, "The Crime against Kansas" (Works, IV, 137-256), the air was tense in the Senate chamber, for none of his hearers could doubt that blood would soon be shed in the territory. Sumner denounced the Kansas-Nebraska Act as "in every respect a swindle ... no other word will adequately express the mingled meanness and wickedness of the cheat'' (Works, IV, 155). Turning his attention to the senators who "had raised themselves to eminence on this floor by the championship of human wrongs," he characterized Butler as Don Quixote, paying his vows to a mistress who, "though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight. I mean the harlot, Slavery." Douglas he described as "the squire of Slavery, its very Sancho Panza, ready to do its humiliating offices" (May 20, 1856, Congressional Globe, 34 Congress, 1 Session, App. pp. 530- 31). Of Mason, the author of the Fugitive-slave Law, he said: "He holds the commission of Virginia ... of that other Virginia from which Washington and Jefferson avert their faces, where human beings are bred as cattle for the shambles" (Ibid., p. 543). Writhing under Sumner's denunciation of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill as a "swindle," Douglas shouted: "Is it his object to provoke some of us to kick him as we would a dog in the street, that he may get sympathy upon the just chastisement?" (Ibid., p. 545). Mason deplored the political necessity of tolerating in the Senate a man whose very presence elsewhere would be "dishonor," and "the touch of whose hand would be a disgrace" (Ibid., p. 546). Sumner branded some of Douglas' statements as false, and rejoined: "No person with the upright form of man can be allowed, without violation of all decency, to switch out from his tongue the perpetual stench of personality .... The noisome, squat and nameless animal, to which I refer, is not the proper model for an American Senator" (Ibid., p. 547). Sumner's brutal frankness may find some palliation in the fact that heretofore he and other anti-slavery leaders had been subjected to the most galling epithets. His speech gave great satisfaction to anti-slavery men throughout the North. Within a few weeks a million copies of it had been distributed.

Two days after his speech was delivered, at the end of the day's session Sumner, who had remained at his desk, heard his name called. Looking up he saw a tall stranger who said : "I have read your speech twice over carefully; it is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine" (Sumner's testimony, Works, IV, 261)-and down upon the head of the defenseless man crashed a blow from a heavy walking stick. Pinioned by his desk, Sumner could not rise till he had wrenched it from its fastenings. Blow followed blow, till he fell bleeding and unconscious to the floor. The man guilty of this brutal assault was Representative Preston S. Brooks [q.v.] of South Carolina. From the North came an outburst of universal condemnation of the attack and expressions of deepest sympathy for its victim. Sumner's injury was far more serious than at first appeared. Twice he tried to resume his duties, only to find that he could not undertake even the lightest tasks. Haunted by "the ghost of two years already dead," he went to Europe in quest of health a second time, and subjected himself many times without anesthetic to the moxa, which his physician described as "the greatest suffering that can be inflicted on mortal man" (Dr. Brown-Sequard, quoted in Memoir, III, 564- 65). Three and a half years had passed before he was sufficiently recovered to return to the Senate. Meantime he had been reelected by the almost unanimous vote of the Massachusetts legislature.

Sumner found a new Senate in which Southern leaders were taking more aggressive ground than ever before. Jefferson Davis' resolutions, affirming the sanctity of slave property in the territories, were passed by a vote of two to one. Under these circumstances Sumner determined to attempt an "assault on American slavery all along the line" (Memoir, III, 606). In the debate on the bill for the admission of Kansas as a free state, in an impassioned speech, "The Barbarism of Slavery" (Works, V, 1-174), he proceeded to set forth his indictment of slavery in its social, moral, and economic as well as political aspects. Many of his friends doubted the wisdom and timeliness of such an utterance on the eve of a presidential election; but it proved of immense influence and was distributed broadcast by the Republican national committee.

In the months following the Republican victory in 1860, alone among the Massachusetts delegation in Congress Sumner opposed the state'~ being represented in the peace conference (February 1861) and he was unyielding to petitions signed by tens of thousands of Massachusetts citizens urging his support of the Crittenden Compromise. In October 1861, at the Massachusetts Republican convention, he was the first statesman of prominence to urge emancipation, insisting that the overthrow of slavery would make an end of the war. Throughout the following year in the Senate, in public addresses, and in conferences with the President he never ceased to press for emancipation. When the Proclamation was finally issued, no man had done more than Sumner to prepare public sentiment for its approval.

When the Republicans got control of the Senate in 1861, for the first time Sumner received a committee assignment worthy of his abilities: he was made chairman of the committee on foreign relations, a position for which he was preeminently fitted and in which he was destined to render invaluable service. Although Captain Wilkes's seizure of Mason and Slidell was hailed with wild enthusiasm and at first seemed to have official approval, Sumner at once declared: "They will have to be given up" (G. H. Monroe, in Hartford Courant, November 22, 1873). By the President's invitation he came into conference with the cabinet, set forth the principles of international law involved in the case, and read letters which he had just received from Cobden and Bright. The next day, with suitable apologies, Seward informed the British minister that the envoys would be given up. Sumner's influence was undoubtedly potent both in effecting a peaceful solution and in reconciling the American people to the inevitable surrender. In his chairmanship of the committee on foreign relations he aided the Union cause by defeating or suppressing resolutions which would almost inevitably have involved the United States in war with France and with Great Britain.

Already in the second year of the war he began the struggle to secure for all citizens of the United States, regardless of race or color, absolute equality of civil rights. As early as February 1862, he announced his extravagant doctrine that the seceded states had abdicated all rights under the Constitution; as he later phrased it, they had committed suicide (Congressional Globe, 37 Congress, 2 Session, pp. 736-37, 2189). He was insistent that the initiation and the control of reconstruction should be by Congress, not by the President. It was Sumner's influence more than that of any other, as Lincoln declared in a cabinet meeting on the last day of his life, that blocked the recognition of Louisiana which was the most vital point for reconstruction in accordance with the Lincoln plan. Despite Sumner's opposition to policies nearest to the President's heart, he treated him with the greatest personal consideration.

During the Johnson administration Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens [q.v.] were brought into a strange cooperation as the Senate and House leaders, respectively, of the opposition to the President's reconstruction policy. Sumner was intent upon securing equality of civil rights for the freedmen, while Stevens' main concern was to prevent the defeat of the Republican party by Democratic reënforcements from the Southern states. It was Sumner's persistence which led the Senate to add to the requirements for "readmission" of the seceded states the insertion in their constitutions of a provision for equal suffrage rights for whites and blacks. In effect this act of Congress, passed over the President's veto, abolished all the Johnson governments in the South. Sumner has been justly criticized for insisting upon the immediate grant of the ballot to the freedmen. It should be remembered, however, that in his own plan federal law was to guarantee to the blacks not only the ballot but also free schools and free farmsteads. In the movement for the impeachment of Johnson, Sumner took a prominent part. His first impressions favorable to the President soon gave way to a settled conviction that he was the chief menace to the country. Sumner regarded impeachment as a political rather than a judicial proceeding; hence neither in the Senate nor elsewhere did he put any curb upon his denunciations of Johnson's "misdeeds," and his opinion, filed with those of eighteen of the thirty-five who voted for conviction; was the longest and most bitter of them all (Works, XII, 318-410). He declared he would vote, if he could, "Guilty, of all [the charges] and infinitely more" (Ibid., XII, 401). In this document Sumner is seen at his worst. Lurid and furious invective largely took the place of argument. In his view, Johnson was the "enormous criminal" of the century.

By temperament, training, and experience President Grant and Sumner were antipathetic, and they soon came into antagonism. Sumner's opposition on constitutional grounds was largely responsible for the rejection of the nomination of Stewart for secretary of the treasury. Though Motley was named minister to England upon Sumner's recommendation, he was later removed. The President seemed to take no serious exception to Sumner's influence in preventing the ratification of the Johnson-Clarendon Convention, nor to his startling assertion of the United States' "national claims," amounting to billions of dollars, against Great Britain, owing to her concession of ocean belligerency to the Confederate States. The most violent clash developed over the President's pet project, the acquisition of Santo Domingo. Sumner's committee brought in an adverse report upon the treaties that had been negotiated by Grant's personal envoy. Motley's removal at this juncture seemed like retaliation. Grant persisted in urging annexation. Finally, in a scathing speech-made more exasperating by his entitling it "Naboth's Vineyard"-Sumner denounced the whole Santo Domingo project (Works, XIV, 89-130; see also, pp. 168--249).

While these controversies were in progress there came to Sumner one of the greatest griefs of his life, his demotion from the chairmanship of the committee on foreign relations. In distinguished qualifications for this position he was without a peer in public life. But the tension had become so great that Sumner was not on speaking terms with the President and the Secretary of State. His champions asserted that this was but "a flimsy pretext" and that "the San Domingo scheme was at the bottom of the whole difficulty" (Haynes, p. 366). A more reasonable explanation of the administration's pressure may have been a fear that his extraordinary views as to "national claims" against Great Britain would prove an obstacle to the adjustment which was then under negotiation. Though thus shut out from any official relations with the joint commission, Sumner was frequently consulted by its members, and was shown great consideration by the British commissioners, whose head told Sumner that without his speech "the treaty could not have been made and that he worked by it as a chart" (Memoir, IV, 491). Despite his demotion, Sumner not only gave his vote for the Treaty of Washington but made the principal speech in exposition and support of it (Memoir, IV, 489-90). It is clear that Sumner himself did not expect that the enormous sums suggested by him would actually be paid by Great Britain. He was reasonably satisfied with the result that the new treaty, at least as construed by the United States, would secure an arbitral adjustment of all claims, whether individual or national, growing out of the cruisers' depredations. He considered this a most important advance in establishing the principle of arbitration, and predicted: "Great Britain will never, in any future wars, place herself in the predicament in which my speech demonstrated she was placed in the matter of the rebel cruisers" (Whipple, post, p. 209).

At the opening of the regular session of Congress in December 1872, Sumner introduced a bill which provided that, inasmuch as "national unity and good will among fellow-citizens can be assured only through oblivion of past difference, and it is contrary to the usage of civilized nations to perpetuate the memory of civil war," the names of battles with fellow-citizens should not be continued in the Army Register, or placed on the regimental colors of the United States (Works, XV, 255). Apparently as a penalty for his opposition to Grant in the preceding campaign a bill of precisely opposite intent was introduced in the House, passed and sent to the Senate, where both bills were temporarily laid on the table because of Sumner's illness. Meantime, in the Massachusetts legislature a report denouncing Sumner's bill as "an insult to the loyal soldiers of the nation" and as "meeting the unqualified condemnation of the people of the Commonwealth" was adopted (Journal of the Extra Session of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, 1872, 1873, p. 54). Sumner was deeply grieved by this injustice. Forthwith Whittier took the lead in a movement to rescind this resolution of censure, and two years later by large majorities in both houses of a new legislature it was annulled (Journal of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, 1874, 1874, pp. 131-35).

On March 10, 1874, against his physician's advice, Sumner went to the Senate, for on that clay his colleague was to report the rescinding resolution. His fellow Senators were generous in their expressions of congratulation and goodwill. That evening he was prostrated by a heart attack and the next day he died. His body lay in state in the rotunda of the Capitol, and the funeral services were held in Cambridge. On October 17, 1866, at the age of fifty-five, he had married Mrs. Alice (Mason) Hooper, a young widow; but they separated within a year and later were divorced (Shotwell, post, pp. 557-58, 584-85).

At the end of the Civil War, it has been said that the two most influential men in public life we1-e Abraham Lincoln and Charles Sumner (Rhodes, post, V, 55). Time has dealt very differently with them, for Sumner's figure has been crowded into the background. Unlike Lincoln, he outlived his best clays. His most characteristic and beneficent labors belonged to the epoch closed by the war; their fruits were merged in its triumphs. His later years brought misfortunes in full train: domestic sorrow, racking illness, the loss of friends, and ceaseless struggle over the problems of reconstruction, with some of which he was little fitted to cope. In contrast with most other American leaders of comparable political influence, Sumner entered public life "at the top": when he took his seat in the Senate he had never held public office of any kind. By no effort, he found himself thrust forward as the champion of an unpopular cause. Throughout his many years in the Senate, the goal of his constant striving was "absolute human equality, secured, assured, and invulnerable." He judged every man and every measure by reference to that goal. That any slave could be happy or that my slave-owner could be humane seemed to him impossible. As years passed, he became more intolerant not only of opposition but also of dissent. His arraignments of Johnson and of Grant were extravagant beyond all reason. When George William Curtis, discussing with him some public question, suggested: "But you forget the other side!" Sumner's voice "shook the room, as he thundered in reply: 'There is no other side !' " (C. E. Norton, eel., Orations and Addresses of George William Curtis, 1894, volume I, 256). To a senator's argument that the Constitution gave no authority for action which Sumner was urging, his reply was: "Nothing against slavery can be unconstitutional!" (Haynes, p. 279).

At the end of the war, the senator who for many years had been most vehement in denouncing all owners of slaves as "slave-mongers" was not the man to deal most tactfully and discriminatingly with the reconstruction problems. There is a measure of justice in the comment: "He would shed tears at the bare thought of refusing to freedmen rights of which they had no comprehension, but would filibuster to the end of the session to 'prevent the restoration to the southern whites of rights which were essential to their whole concept of life" (W. A. Dunning, Reconstruction, Political and Economic, p. 87). Yet in his later years Sumner displayed a kindness of sympathy toward the impoverished and suffering people of the South, and a magnanimity (as in his battle-flag resolution) which Congress did not reach till a full generation had passed.

Despite Sumner's intense devotion to the one "cause" which he championed with a crusader's zeal, he was diligent in the routine work of a senator, and commanded respect in his discussion of such topics as money and finance, the tariff, postal regulations, and copyright. He was much concerned over the abuses of patronage, through presidential favoritism or "senatorial courtesy," and introduced a well-thought-out bill for civil service reform. But his great work was not in the framing of laws. His was, rather, the role of an ancient Hebrew prophet-the kindling of moral enthusiasm, the inspiring of courage and hope, the assailing of injustice. His fearlessness in denouncing compromise, in demanding the repeal of the Fugitive-slave Law, and in insisting upon emancipation made him a major force in the struggle that put an end to slavery. It was his magnanimity and pertinacity that held in check barbarous attempts at retaliation, whether in the grant of letters of marque and reprisal, in the treatment of Confederate prisoners, or in the seizure of unoffending citizens of foreign countries in return for wrongs inflicted upon Americans abroad. Throughout the great national cns1s his service was of inestimable value in keeping the United States at peace with Great Britain and with France, when war with either of them would have meant the disruption of the Union.

[The Works of Charles Sumner (15 volumes, 1870-83), mostly edited by him, were considered by him a faithful record of his career. The references in the text are to this edition. Another edition, with introduction by G. F. Hoar, is Charles Sumner, His Complete Works (20 volumes, 1900). The Sumner collection in the library of Harvard University contains 40,000 letters received by him. E. L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles, Sumner (4 volumes, 1877-93), contains whatever seemed significant to an intimate of thirty years but lacks sense of proportion. Shorter biographies are those by A. M. Grimke (1892), a negro lawyer of Boston, which is mainly a tribute of gratitude to a champion of the author's race; by Moorfield Storey (1900), an excellent summary by an eminent lawyer who was for several years Sumner’s private secretary; by W. G. Shotwell (1910), eulogistic and discursive; and by G. H. Haynes (1909). Storey's biography may be supplemented by M.A. De W. Howe, Portrait of an Independent: Moorfield Storey, 1845-1929 (1932). Sumner's personality was set forth in eloquent orations by G. W. Curtis and Carl Schurz, published separately and in A Memorial of Charles Sumner (1874), and in essays by intimate friends: E. P. Whipple, Recollections of Eminent Men (1887); and T. W. Higginson, Contemporaries (1899). M emorial Addresses on the Life and Character of Charles Sumner ... Forty-Third Congress, First Session, April 27, 1874 (1874) include the notable tribute by L. Q. C. Lamar, which made a profound impression in both North and South, and the discriminating appraisal by G. F. Hoar. There is an obituary in Boston Evening Transcript, March 12, ·1874. J. F. Rhodes, History of the U. S. (7 vols., 1893-1906), contains many references. W. A. Dunning, in Reconstruction, Political and Economic (1907), and Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction (1898), is severely critical of Sumner. More recent writers on Reconstruction, such as H. K. Beale, The Critical Year (1930), and G. F. Milton, The Age of Hate (1930) are even more severe. For Sumner's relation to the Alabama claims, see C. F. Adams, Jr., Charles Francis Adams (1900), and "The Treaty of Washington," in Lee at Appomattox and Other Papers (1902); J. B. Moore, History and Digest of the International Arbitrations to Which the United States Has Been a Party, vol. I (1898), ch. XIV; D. H. Chamberlain, Charles Sumner and the Treaty of Washington (1902); J. C. B. Davis, Mr. Sumner, the Alabama Claims, and Their Settlement (1878). Sumner's own statement of the controversies with Grant and Fish is in his Works, IV, 254-76.]

G. H. H.


SWAN, Caleb Dr.   Anti-slavery co-founding member of the Free-Soil Party established in 1848. Underground Railroad activist, Easton, Massachusetts.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. VI, p. 4 “Coalition in Massachusetts. Election of Mr. Sumner,” by Henry Wilson, in History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, 1872.


SWISSHELM, Jane Grey Cannon, 1815-1884, abolitionist leader, women’s rights advocate, journalist, reformer.  Free Soil Party.  Liberty Party and Liberty League.  Republican Party activist.  Established Saturday Visitor, an abolition and women’s rights newspaper. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. VI, p. 13; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, p. 253; Blue, 2005, pp. 8-9, 50, 138-160, 268, 269; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 21, p. 217; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. II. New York: James T. White, 1892, p. 316; Hinks, Peter P., & John R. McKivigan, Eds., Encyclopedia of Antislavery and Abolition.  Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood, 2007, Vol. 2, pp. 668-670)

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

SWISSHELM, Jane Grey, born  near Pittsburg, Pa., 6 September, 1815;died  in Swissvale, Pa., 22 July, 1884. When she was eight years of age her father, James Cannon, died, leaving a family in straitened circumstances. The daughter worked at manual labor and teaching till she was twenty-one, when she married James Swisshelm, who several years afterward obtained a divorce on the ground of desertion. Two years later she removed with her husband to Louisville, Ky. In this city she became an outspoken opponent of slavery, and her first written attack upon the system appeared in the Louisville “Journal” in 1842. She also wrote articles favoring abolition and woman's rights in the “Spirit of Liberty,” of Pittsburg, for about four years. In 1848 she established the Pittsburg “Saturday Visitor,” a strong abolition and woman's rights paper, which, in 1856, was merged with the weekly edition of the Pittsburg “Journal.” In 1857 she went to St. Cloud, Minn., and established the St. Cloud “Visitor.” Her bold utterances caused a mob to destroy her office and its contents, and to throw her printing-press into the river. But she soon began to publish the St. Cloud “Democrat.” When Abraham Lincoln was nominated for the presidency, she spoke and wrote in his behalf and for the principles of which he was the representative. When the civil war began and nurses were wanted at the front, she was one of the first to respond. After the battle of the Wilderness she had charge of 182 badly wounded men at Fredericksburg for five days, without surgeon or assistant, and saved them all. She was a prolific writer for newspapers and magazines, and published “Letters to Country Girls” (New York, 1853), and an autobiography entitled “Half of a Century” (1881). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. VI.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, p. 253;

SWISSHELM, JANE GREY CANNON (December 6, 1815-July 22, 1884), reformer and editor, was the daughter of Thomas and Mary (Scott) Cannon, Scotch-Irish Covenanters of Pittsburgh, Pa. She spent her youth in the new settlement of Wilkinsburg, to which her parents removed soon after she was born. At the age of three she began attending school; by the time she was t en she was aiding her widowed mother in earning a living; at fourteen she became active in the anti-slavery cause; before her fifteenth birthday she took charge of the only school in the village. After six years of teaching she married, November 18, 1836, James Swisshelm, a young farmer of the neighborhood. In 1838 she accompanied him to Louisville, Kentucky, where he attempted, unsuccessfully, to establish a business, and she earned what she could as seamstress and teacher. Her hatred of slavery became an absorbing passion during this sojourn. Returning to Pennsylvania, she took charge of a seminary at Butler in 1840, and began to use her pen in defense of the rights of married women. Two years later she rejoined her husband on a farm, which she named Swissvale, near Pittsburgh. In the midst of domestic duties she continued to write, supplying stories and verses to the Dollar Newspaper and to Neal's Saturday Gazette. At the same time she contributed to the Spirit of Liberty, the Pittsburgh Gazette, and to the Daily Commercial Journal racy, vehemently written articles on abolition and the property rights of women.

In 1847 she used a legacy from her mother to establish the Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter (sic), a political and literary weekly, advocating abolition, temperance, and woman's suffrage, the first number of which appeared on December 20. She edited this paper with such spirited audacity that she became widely known for her powers of denunciation. "Beware of sister Jane," contemporary editors said to each other. Most notable among her attacks was one that she published in 1850 upon Daniel Webster's private life. This, she loved to believe, ruined his chances for becoming president. In 1853 she publish ed a volume called Letters to Country Girls, compiled from articles in the Visiter. In 1857 she sold her paper, separated permanently from her husband- who secured a divorce from her on the ground of desertion a few years late r-and, accompanied by her only child, took up her residence in Minnesota. The following year she began the St. Cloud Visiter. A libel suit ended this publication in a few months. She at once established the St. Cloud Democrat, a Republican paper, which she conducted in her usual intrepid, intensely personal manner until 1863. During this time she lectured frequently throughout the state on political subjects.

In the midst of the Civil War she went to Washington, D. C., and while doing clerical work in a government office and assisting in a war hospital contributed to the New York Tribune and to the St. Cloud Democrat. During this period she became a warm personal friend of Mrs. Lincoln. In the course of Andrew Johnson's administration she started a radical paper called the Reconstructionist. In this she attacked the President with such violence that in 1866 he dismissed her from the government service. Returning to Swissvale, she made that place her home for the rest of her life. In 1880 she published Half a Century, an entertaining account of her life to the year 1865. Her extreme individualism made her a free lance in all her undertakings. She never worked happily in reform organizations, preferring always to forge her own thunderbolts. Her firm convictions, her powers of sarcasm, her stinging yet often humorous invective, and her homely, vigorous style made her a trenchant journalist.

[In addition to Half a Century, see L. B. Shippee, "Jane Grey Swisshelm: Agitator," Miss. Valley Historical Review, December 1920; Minn. Historical Society Collections, volume XII (1908); S. J, Fisher, "Reminiscences of Jane Grey Swisshelm," Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, July 1921; B. M. Stearns, "Reform Periodicals and Female Reformers," American Historical Review, July 1932; A. J. Larsen, Crusader and Feminist: Letters of Jane Grey Swisshelm, 1858-1865 (1934); New York Times, July 23, 1884.]

B. M. S.



Source: Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.