The Greater Journey – Americans in Paris
by David McCulloch

 Charles Sumner [page #131]

 On Saturday, January 20th 1838, as he recorded in his journal, Charles Sumner attended a lecture at the Sorbonne on Philosophical theory delivered of Heraclites by Adolphe-Marie duCaurroy, a distinguished grey haired scholar that spoke extremely slow. Sumner began looking around the hall. He had quite a large audience, Sumner wrote, “among whom I noticed two or three blacks, or rather mulattoes – the-thirds black perhaps- dressed quite a la mode and having the easy, jaunty air of young men of fashion…”… He watched closely. The black students were well received by the other students, he noted. It was for Sumner a stunning revelation. Until this point he was not known to have shown any particular interest in the lives of black people, nether free blacks nor slaves.  On a trip to Washington a few years earlier, traveling by rail through Maryland, he had seen slaves for the first time. They were working in the fields, and as he made clear in his journal, he felt only disdain for them. “They appear to be nothing more than moving masses of flesh, unendowed with anything of intelligence above that of brutes.” He was to think that way no longer.  It would be a while before Sumner’s revelation – that attitudes about race in America were taught, not part of “the nature of things”-would take effect in his career, but when it did, the consequence would be profound.

                             Senator Stephan Douglas        Senator Andrew Butler           Rep. Preston Brooks               Senator Charles Sumner

On May 22, 1856, the "world's greatest deliberative body" became a combat zone.  In one of the most dramatic and deeply ominous moments in the Senate's entire history, a member of the House of Representatives entered the Senate chamber and savagely beat a senator into unconsciousness.

The inspiration for this clash came three days earlier when Senator Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts antislavery Republican , addressed the Senate on the explosive issue of whether Kansas should be admitted to the Union as a slave state or a free state.

 In his "Crime Against Kansas" speech, Sumner identified two Democratic senators as the principal culprits in this crime—Stephen Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Butler of South Carolina.  He characterized Douglas to his face as a "noise-some, squat, and nameless animal . . . not a proper model for an American senator."  Andrew Butler, who was not present, received more elaborate treatment.  Mocking the South Carolina senator's stance as a man of chivalry, the Massachusetts senator charged him with taking "a mistress . . . who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean," added Sumner, "the harlot, Slavery."  

May 22, 1856