An American naval officer paid Charles Sumner a visit. Disturbed by the actions at Fort Sumter, he wanted to seek the senator’s advice on what he should do. South Carolinian by birth and education, the officer couldn’t make up his mind about which side to serve. He was loyal to the American flag, which he had sworn to protect, but his friends and family were in South Carolina, which he called home. “What shall I do, if my ship is ordered to the South to coerce my own people?” the officer sheepishly asked Sumner.
“Read your commission, sir,” Sumner replied. He was referring to the official U.S. government certificate that the officer had received when becoming a soldier. “But suppose my ship is ordered to Charleston?” The officer pushed back. “Read your commission, sir,” Sumner repeated. The officer kept offering hypotheticals: “But suppose she ranges her broadsides against the city of my birth? But Senator, what if I am ordered to fire on my father’s plantation?” Sumner didn’t think any of it mattered. Frustrated by the officer’s uncertainty, he barked at him, “Read your commission, sir.” In Sumner’s mind, loyalty to the American flag had no ifs, buts, or maybes. Reluctant as he was, the officer heeded Sumner’s advice and kept his post in the Union Navy.
Tens of thousands of white Americans faced similar dilemmas in a war that ripped apart brothers, friends, and even fathers and sons. In both North and South, white men enlisted at rapid speed, far quicker than anyone expected in Washington or Richmond, which became the Confederate capital. Northerners and southerners alike believed it was a battle for the soul of America, or of their own home state and for what it stood for. Few Americans in either North or South realized how heart-wrenching and bloody the war would become. Nearly everyone expected their region to achieve a quick victory. They were sorely wrong.
*
On the way home to Massachusetts in late April 1861, Sumner passed through Maryland. The border state had been rife with turmoil as secessionists street brawled with unionists about whose side Maryland should join. In Baltimore, Sumner was spotted by proslavery men on the street. A mob then formed outside his hotel, demanding that Sumner come out and face them. Hiding in a nondescript room, he spent the night nervously watching from the window as the rioters shouted his name.
Sneaking out in the early morning, Sumner passed by one of Governor Andrew’s regiments on his way toward New York. He briefly spoke to the soldiers who were traveling southward. When they reached Baltimore, a mob attacked them. The rookie troops panicked and opened fire on the rioters. Twelve civilians and five soldiers were killed, and more than a hundred people were wounded. It was the first civilian bloodshed of the Civil War. If Sumner had taken a later train, he may have been among them. Speaking to another traveling Massachusetts regiment upon his arrival in New York, he compared the fallen soldiers to those who had died at Lexington, the first battle of the American Revolution, where Massachusetts men were also first to die. This war was “a continuation of the other,” he declared. This was a war to fulfill the vision enshrined in the Declaration: a country where all men are created equal.
Soon after Sumner’s arrival in Boston, tragedy struck his own family. Caught up in the same patriotic war fever as everyone else, his brother George had volunteered to help supervise the loading of soldiers onto the trains. In a freak accident, he was hit by a train car and injured in the leg. Although the injury did not seem serious at first, it gradually resulted in paralysis of his entire right leg. Over the next two years, he would slowly decline. Charles spent some days with George and the rest of his family. “I cannot think of any invalid without turning to my brother George, whose case is the worst of all,” he wrote to Samuel Howe sometime later, after meeting someone else who had been badly injured. “I am sad enough.”
When Sumner wasn’t home with George, he was busy entertaining the First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln. Along with her cousin, she had come to Boston to visit her son Robert Lincoln, who was a student at Harvard.
“Everything [was] arranged for a charming reception at the Revere House [by Senator Charles Sumner], dining and drives, and we met many of the most distinguished men of Boston and Harvard,” Mary’s cousin fondly recalled. By being so hospitable, Sumner sparked a friendship with the First Lady that would blossom in the years to come. Yet his time in Boston with George, Mrs. Lincoln, and others did not very last long.
On May 13, Queen Victoria issued a proclamation of neutrality in the U.S. Civil War. She infuriated the North by declining to support the Union. Meanwhile, the Confederacy rejoiced and started to cobble together a plan to gradually earn British support for their revolution. A panicked Secretary Seward decided that the North needed to take drastic action to retaliate against Britain. Discovering that Seward was crafting plans, Sumner grew anxious: Seward might rashly steer the North into a major foreign policy blunder. “He cannot talk five minutes without bringing in Mr. Seward, and always in bitter terms of denunciation,” one Bostonian complained of Sumner. The senator went back to Washington.
*
Arriving in late May 1861, Sumner went straight to the White House. President Lincoln informed him that Seward had drafted a dispatch for Ambassador Charles Francis Adams Sr. to share with Great Britain. The dispatch threatened war if Britain had any dealings with Confederate ships. Sumner probably stated the obvious to Lincoln: England, a country he loved, was “the greatest and most powerful oligarchy in the history of the world.” It would be a deadly mistake to provoke the empire on which the sun never set. Per Sumner’s request, Lincoln toned down the letter and asked Seward to keep his dispatch to Adams absolutely confidential. Sumner had successfully averted a potential crisis. “I can positively assure you that only for Sumner…Seward would have sent a dispatch of such a character that a breach of relations would have been inevitable,” leading British journalist William Howard Russell wrote in a private note.
Soon afterward, Sumner stormed into Seward’s office. He lectured his friend-now-foe about the stupidity of his diplomacy. Believing Seward to “understand foreign nations as little as he understood our crisis,” Sumner pilloried Seward’s belligerence and demanded that he treat Great Britain with caution and deference. “God damn them, I’ll give them hell,” Seward shouted back, kicking his desk. “I’m no more afraid of them than I am of Robert Toombs [the Confederate secretary of state].” Sumner rushed back to Lincoln to warn the president that the stress of war was turning Seward into an unhinged man. “You must watch him and overrule him,” Sumner explained. From here on, Lincoln sought Sumner’s advice before approving any major foreign policy decisions by Seward. Seward, for his part, resented Sumner’s influence on the president. “There are too many secretaries of State in Washington,” he grumbled.
Having earned the president’s trust in foreign policy, Sumner deftly used every opportunity to pressure Lincoln on domestic policy, too. During a one-on-one evening carriage ride, he told Lincoln that he agreed with the president’s current silence on the slavery question. But he predicted that a moment would come when it would be opportune for Lincoln to invoke the war power and emancipate the slaves of rebel states. When the time came, he advised, Lincoln must be ready to strike. In the meantime, he assured the president that he would avoid criticizing the administration for its silence regarding slavery.
For the next two months, the Union Army practiced dutifully under Gen. Winfield Scott’s direction. But public pressure demanded action, not more preparation. In late July, Scott ordered an advance on Confederate troops stationed at Manassas Junction, Virginia. The first Battle of Bull Run started well but ended in disaster when Union troops panicked and started scrambling back toward Washington. The ferocity of the under-resourced Confederate soldiers stunned the North. Nearly three thousand Union soldiers died.
Sumner went to Lincoln after the battle. “I told the Presdt that our defeat was the worst event & the best event in our history,” he excitedly told Wendell Phillips. “The best, as it made the extinction of Slavery inevitable.” The moment had come, he believed. Urging Lincoln to now issue an executive order for emancipating the slaves, Sumner was firmly rebuffed. Lincoln was adamant that it would be foolish to outrage the border states by adopting a radical policy that lacked support from most of the public. Nevertheless, in a sign that he was warming up to the idea, Lincoln argued about it with Sumner until midnight. “I have spoken to the Presdt & a majority of the Cabinet on the new power to be invoked,” Sumner continued in his letter to Phillips. “I assure you there are men who do not hesitate. Be hopeful. I am.”
Trusting Lincoln and other Cabinet members, Sumner still had ongoing friction with Seward. That summer, Robert Morris—the lawyer who had been organizing Black militiamen in Boston, to no avail—asked Sumner for a favor. He wanted his son, banned from most American colleges on account of his skin color, to pursue higher education in France. Sumner asked Seward if, as secretary of state, he might issue the younger Morris a passport. “This will never do,” Seward responded at first. “It won’t do to acknowledge colored men as citizens.” The once-firm Seward was caught in a political bind. On the one hand, he felt legally obliged to obey Dred Scott—the court ruling that said Blacks were not citizens—and worried about public reaction. On the other, he was personally sympathetic to Black rights. Eventually, Seward granted Morris the passport. But to Sumner’s consternation, he did so on the condition that Morris’s physical description be omitted from the paperwork.
During the summer, Congress held an emergency session at Lincoln’s request. The legislature entertained several bills—including two from Sumner—to authorize the government to seize rebel property, including slaves. The bills were inspired by the actions of enslaved people in Virginia who had escaped from their plantations and made it to the Union-held garrison of Fort Monroe. Offering their knowledge of the area and their readiness to work for wages, these men and women convinced Gen. Benjamin Butler to hire them. A lifelong Democrat who cared little about slavery, Butler was so convinced of the fugitives’ usefulness that he invoked abolitionist legal ideas by calling them “enemy contraband” who could be lawfully confiscated by the Union Army. By the end of the session in August, Congress codified a process for Butler-like actions by army officers to assume jurisdiction over any enslaved people who liberated themselves by sneaking into Union lines.
To Sumner’s disappointment, Lincoln was displeased with the new law, now known as the First Confiscation Act. Believing that border staters and many northerners weren’t ready for the bill, he reluctantly signed it after concluding that a veto would only draw more attention. Discreetly, Sumner helped finance abolitionist petitions and lectures in the capital to shift public opinion in favor of military emancipation. He also sent Lincoln a new book, The Rejected Stone, by a Virginia-born abolitionist who laid out the argument for wartime powers. “I wish you would visit Washington at once to press upon the Presdt. the duty of Emancipation, in order to save the country. I am pained inexpressibly at the delay,” Sumner told a friend. “Our Presdt is now dictator, Imperator,” he told another. “How vain to have the power of a God if not to use it God-like.”
By late fall, Sumner, losing patience with Lincoln, rescinded his commitment to avoid the slavery issue in public. Weary of backroom deals and scheming politics, he returned to his greatest strength: galvanizing the public with charismatic, compelling oratory. At the state Republican convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, in October, Sumner made an hour-long speech about John Quincy Adams’s wartime emancipation theory. Calling on the president to emancipate slaves by executive order, he also suggested that slaves be considered automatically free under the national Constitution in the lands the North conquered. After all, Republicans had always argued that slavery was unconstitutional in national territories.
Sumner hoped to pressure Lincoln into emancipating slaves immediately, and he suggested that the president could even compensate enslavers later, if he so desired. “If you are wise, prudent, economical, conservative, practical, you will strike quick and hard,” he declared publicly. “Strike at the main-spring of the rebellion. Strike in the name of the Union,” he pleaded. Notably, Sumner avoided appeals to morality in the speech, a stratagem to appeal to conservatives. “Emancipation is to be presented strictly as a measure of military necessity, rather than on grounds of philanthropy,” he instructed an ally.
At the Cooper Union in New York in November, Sumner again lectured on Adams’s theory, while a group of Republicans and radical abolitionists sat behind his podium on the stage. This time, Sumner elevated his speech to a higher level of abstraction to propound on the historical meaning and ontology of the Civil War. Considering that it was only 1861, he spoke with stunning prescience. He described the war as “the third great epoch in the history of this Western Hemisphere; the first being its discovery by Christopher Columbus, and the second being the American Revolution.” If Lincoln ended slavery with an “act of godlike justice,” Sumner said, his name would be etched into history alongside those of Columbus and Washington. The government’s current course was approximating what he prophetically called a “Proclamation of Emancipation.” All Lincoln needed to do was deliver the final blow by issuing the proposed proclamation, Sumner believed, to end the war and earn eternal glory.
As far as Sumner was concerned, the war’s origin was slavery. The South committed treason against the Constitution to protect slavery. Slavery powered its economy and gave white men the free time to fight battles. Slavery “digs trenches and builds hostile forts” and “pitches its white tents and stations its sentries.” In fact, he proclaimed that the rebellion “is Slavery itself, incarnate, living, acting, raging, robbing, murdering, according to the essential law of its being.” By striking at slavery, what he called “the ruling idea of this rebellion,” Lincoln would win, and so would the North, and so would justice. “Slavery is the very Goliath of the rebellion,” he declared. “But a stone from a simple sling will make the giant fall upon his face to the earth.”
*
Part of Sumner’s motivation for his rousing Cooper Union address was to reframe the Civil War in the eyes of the international community. He believed that a war to emancipate slaves would be politically popular overseas. He was aware from his travels how repulsive American slavery was to Europeans. While European empires still had slavery in their colonies, the institution was declining. Nearly all European countries had also abolished domestic slavery. For example, Austria had ended slavery in 1811; Great Britain and Canada, in 1834; and France, in 1848. By contrast, slavery in the United States was not only legal but expanding rapidly.
Seward firmly instructed American diplomats to insist that the war had nothing to do with slavery: it was purely a domestic rebellion that Lincoln planned to stamp out. Seward wanted the war to be framed in this manner to alleviate the concerns of border states and to leave room for a peaceful reunion with the South. But to foreign audiences, who knew little of domestic concerns, Seward’s message made Lincoln seem to be the aggressor—a terrible messaging strategy, in Sumner’s view. If the war concerned solely territorial integrity, Europeans would sympathize with the Confederacy. They would see a small band of states fighting a war for independence and national self-determination. Indeed, many Europeans found the South inspiring, analogizing their cause to the wave of anti-monarchy revolutions that swept Europe in 1848.
Capitalists, aristocrats, and monarchists in Europe were also excited by the war. It was a sight to behold: the radical, dangerous democratic experiment of America falling apart at last. In France, Napoléon III hoped to see the United States split into two weak nations, which would make his plan to invade Mexico easier. In Great Britain, the home secretary couldn’t fathom what the war was all about. “The South fight for independence,” he noted. “What do the North fight for, except to gratify passion or pride?” Pro-Confederate views were especially dominant in Great Britain. British elites had long been furious at northern tariffs that protected northern manufacturers at Britain’s expense. They preferred the South, which exported to Great Britain three-quarters of the island nation’s cotton. When Lincoln announced a blockade of southern ports at Seward’s advice (a policy Sumner opposed, favoring an embargo), British aristocrats grew even angrier. Textile production was a key industry of their empire. Hoping to curry their favor, the Confederacy emphasized to Great Britain their deep economic ties. “Cotton is the tremendous lever by which we can work our destiny,” Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens noted.
“The upper and ruling class have some satisfaction…in your troubles,” British statesman John Bright explained to Sumner. “Two nations on your northern continent…[are] more easy to deal with than one.” Bright was an English radical who had met Sumner on his most recent European trip. The two had developed a strong friendship and political affinity. “If the war was for liberating the slave, we could see something worth fighting for,” Bright explained. Another radical statesman, Richard Cobden, also wrote to Sumner. “We observe a mighty quarrel: on one side protectionists, on the other the slave owners. The protectionists say they do not seek to put down slavery. The slave-owners say they want Free Trade.” Unless the North pursued emancipation, Cobden said his countrymen would support the South. Three-fourths of the House of Commons would gladly “vote for the dismemberment of the great republic,” he warned. “I hardly know anybody, except our courageous friend Bright…that thinks you can put down the rebellion,” Cobden informed Sumner.
Fearing potential British intervention in favor of the South, Sumner hoped his speeches would help redefine the war around emancipation. That was a hard sell without Seward and Lincoln’s support. “It is a war to prevent the foundation of a slave-holding Confederacy,” he tried to persuade British abolitionist Harriet Martineau. But Martineau wrote back to say that most British sources “insist, loudly & persistently, that the war is not for the abolition of slavery.” Leading British journalist William Howard Russell also dismissed Sumner’s claim that the war would end slavery. “The pretence that this is an anti slavery war cannot be sustained for a moment & is sedulously disavowed by the Govt. itself,” he observed. Admitting that “there would perhaps be an overwhelming sentiment of popular sympathy with the North in this conflict if they were fighting for freedom,” Russell doubted that the North even cared about abolition.
Sumner was right to think the president’s heart and mind were in the right place. Slavery’s doom was only a matter of time.In late 1861, anti-American sentiment in Britain nearly spiraled into international war. On November 8, a Union Army officer abducted two Confederate diplomats who were headed for London on board the RMS Trent, a British steamer. Lord Palmerston, the British prime minister, was furious. He decided it was time “to read a lesson to the United States which will not soon be forgotten.” Informing Queen Victoria that the American “government is not guided by reasonable men,” Palmerston predicted that “war was the probable result.” He was not overreacting: even the German socialist revolutionary Friedrich Engels expected war between Britain and the U.S. North. “Have these Yankees then gone completely crazy to carry out the mad coup with the Confederate Commissioners?” he asked Karl Marx. “To take political prisoners by force, on a foreign ship, is the clearest casus belli there can be. The fellows must be sheer fools to land themselves in for a war with England.”
Under Palmerston’s direction, the British Empire prepared to intervene in the Civil War. Palmerston sent an ultimatum to Lincoln to either give up the prisoners or expect a conflict. “We in England have ready a fleet surpassing in destructive force any naval armament the world ever saw…we have plenty of people who would be content to see this fleet turned against you,” Cobden sternly warned Sumner. Cobden may have known that Palmerston had assembled more than ten thousand redcoats to sail to the British colony of Canada (with more to come). “The cry of war rings throughout the land,” the Toronto Globe declared. A Cabinet war committee drafted plans for the Royal Navy to simultaneously blockade Maine, Boston, New Bedford, Newport, Long Island, New York, and the Delaware River. The British Cabinet hoped quick, decisive action would force the North and South to make peace and reopen the cotton trade.
The American public had no clue about the war fever sweeping Great Britain, because British ships carrying mail and newspapers took at least ten days to cross the Atlantic. In the meantime, the North was jubilant at the news of the arrests of the diplomats. “We do not believe the American heart ever thrilled with more genuine delight,” said the New York Times. The two Confederate abductees were Sumner’s old enemies: former senators James Mason of Virginia and John Slidell of Louisiana. Mason had sponsored the Fugitive Slave Act in the Senate and had previously occupied Sumner’s chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee. Slidell had jeered Sumner’s caning. The two infamous politicians were reviled in the North; their capture signified a great Union victory.
Sumner learned about the capture of his old colleagues as he was stepping off the train in Boston in early November. “They will have to be given up,” he reportedly muttered to friends that evening. While Charles Sumner declined to speak publicly about the matter, his brother George imprudently sent to the press a legal argument for keeping the men imprisoned. Sumner distanced himself from his half-paralyzed brother’s work, claiming implausibly that he hadn’t seen it before it was published. He also privately confessed to the victorious naval officer who captured the diplomats, Capt. Charles Wilkes, that he believed the arrests had been unwise. The senator grew increasingly tense as he began receiving frantic letters from British friends pleading with him to stop a potential war before it was too late. After returning to Washington in December, Sumner met with Lincoln almost daily at the White House to sort out the trouble. Fortunately, his foreign policy rival was also getting nervous. Seward’s macho attitude toward Great Britain soured into frightful anxiety when he finally registered that the British Empire was plotting a massive coastal attack against the United States.
On Christmas morning, Lincoln hosted an emergency Cabinet meeting at the White House with Sumner as a guest. Like most Americans, most Cabinet members had not heard the news from overseas. They were exuberant about Mason and Slidell’s capture and believed their surrender would be a sign of weakness. Seward and Sumner tried to prove to the Cabinet that the British were hell-bent on war. Seward sternly advised their immediate release to Great Britain; Sumner suggested that they propose to Great Britain a third-party arbitration on the matter. Both leaders struggled to get their message across until an aide interrupted the meeting to inform Lincoln that France had just joined Great Britain in denouncing the capture as a violation of international law. With rising apprehension, the Cabinet kept deliberating for a couple of days while Sumner did his best to shut down jingoistic rhetoric in the Senate from politicians who demanded that Lincoln not be a coward in the face of Great Britain. Reluctantly, Lincoln decided that Seward was right about giving up the prisoners. Though Sumner preferred arbitration to Seward’s proposal, he was still relieved.
When he learned that the North had wised up, Palmerston called off the war plans. “The case of the Trent is settled,” Sumner triumphantly wrote to Bright. A few weeks later, he delivered a Senate address that laid out why international law had dictated Lincoln’s decision. His speech set him apart from many others, who had underestimated the British threat and were angry at another example of Lincoln’s perceived weakness. “Let the Rebels go,” Sumner said in defense of the White House. “Two wicked men, ungrateful to their country, are let loose with the brand of Cain upon their foreheads.”
The speech strengthened Sumner’s political hand as he positioned himself, rather than Seward, as the nation’s most astute foreign policy thinker. “I heard Sumner’s speech. It is the best thing for his popularity,” Richard Dana wrote to Charles Francis Adams Sr. “It was the first opportunity he has had to speak without offending half the nation.” Lincoln no doubt appreciated Sumner’s public support; Seward probably didn’t. Centrists were impressed that Sumner could act so reasonably. “I have considered Mr. Sumner a doctrinaire,” one foreign diplomat confessed. “Henceforth I recognize him as a statesman.”
*
The resolution of “the Trent Affair” opened a new period in the Civil War. The affair even played a role in Lincoln’s ongoing evolution on emancipation. In one of Sumner’s first meetings with the president on the diplomatic crisis, he took the opportunity to lecture Lincoln on the administration’s foreign policy follies. He argued that Lincoln’s public silence on emancipation was undermining the Union’s reputation with foreign nations. Lincoln was starting to agree. Early in 1862, he confessed to his minister to Germany that there was a strong foreign policy rationale to fight slavery directly. “I cannot imagine that any European power would dare to recognize and aid the Southern Confederacy if it becomes clear that the Confederacy stands for slavery and the Union for freedom,” Lincoln admitted. The problem was that he doubted “whether public opinion at home was yet sufficiently prepared for it.”
Still, Lincoln was optimistic on the issue. During one of his Trent Affair meetings with Sumner in December, he stated that he was going to eventually call for legislation to pay states to abolish slavery. It would be the first of several abolitionist steps Lincoln suggested he would take. “The only difference between you and me on this subject is a difference of a month or six weeks in time,” he assured Sumner. Elated, Sumner confidentially passed along the good news to Wendell Phillips, informing him jubilantly that “the great end approaches.” Perhaps too willing to trust Lincoln, he naïvely underestimated how long the president would take to develop an antislavery policy. Despite Sumner’s begging him “to make Congress a New Year’s present of your plan,” Lincoln would wait several more months before acting. But Sumner was right to think the president’s heart and mind were in the right place. Slavery’s doom was only a matter of time.
__________________________________
Excerpted from Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation by Zaakir Tameez. Published by Henry Holt and Company, an imprint of Macmillan. Copyright © 2025 by Zaakir Tameez. All rights reserved.
