Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (42 page)

But what is the motive? What is the pretext for this enormity? Why, gentlemen tell us the Senate has two distinct consciences—a legislative conscience and a judicial conscience. As a legislative body we have decided that the president has violated the Constitution. But gentlemen tell us that this is an impeachable offense; and, as we may be called to try it in our judicial capacity, we have no right to express the opinion. I need not show how inconsistent such a position is with the eternal, imprescriptible right of freedom of speech, and how utterly inconsistent it is with precedents drawn from the history of our British ancestors, where the same liberty of speech has for centuries been enjoyed. There is a shorter and more direct argument in reply. Gentlemen who take that position cannot, according to their own showing, vote for this resolution; for if it is unconstitutional for us to record a resolution of condemnation, because we may afterwards be called to try the case in a judicial capacity, then it is equally unconstitutional for us to record a resolution of acquittal. If it is unconstitutional for the Senate to declare before a trial that the president has violated the Constitution, it is equally unconstitutional to declare before a trial that he has not violated the Constitution. The same principle is involved in both. Yet, in the very face of this principle, gentlemen are here going to condemn their own act.

But why do I waste my breath? I know it is all utterly vain. The day is gone; night approaches, and night is suitable to the dark deed we meditate. There is a sort of destiny in this thing. The act must be performed; and it is an act which will tell on the political history of this country forever. Other preceding violations of the Constitution (and they have been many and great) filled my bosom with indignation, but this fills it only with grief. Others were done in the heat of partisanship. Power was, as it were, compelled to support itself by seizing upon new instruments of influence and patronage; and there were ambitious and able men to direct the process. Such was the removal of the deposits. which the president seized upon by a new and unprecedented act of arbitrary power—an act which gave him ample means of rewarding friends and punishing enemies. Something may, perhaps, be pardoned to him in this matter, on the old apology of tyrants—the plea of necessity. But here there can be no such apology. Here no necessity can so much as be pretended. This act
originates in pure, unmixed, personal idolatry. It is the melancholy evidence of a broken spirit, ready to bow at the feet of power. The former act was such a one as might have been perpetrated in the days of Pompey or Caesar; but an act like this could never have been consummated by a Roman Senate until the times of Caligula and Nero.

An uncompromising foe of slavery, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts took the floor of the U.S. Senate on May 20, 1856, to decry “the crime against Kansas.” Violence over the slavery issue had escalated in the Kansas territory, and the heated debate in Congress reached its peak when Senator Sumner began his denunciation of Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois and the absent Senator Andrew Pickens Butler of South Carolina.

After the first part of Sumner’s tirade, Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan showed his disgust at the vituperation: “I have listened with equal regret and surprise to the speech of the honorable senator from Massachusetts—such a speech, the most un-American and unpatriotic that ever grated on
the ears of the members of this high body, as I hope never to hear again, here or elsewhere.”

Through literary allusion and indirect name-calling, the “black Republican” Sumner heaped invective on the proslavery forces in Congress. Stephen Douglas, “the Little Giant,” responded to Sumner’s attack for the Democrats, and before it was over, Senator James Murray Mason of Virginia had also been drawn into the verbal combat.

When the violent words stopped, violent actions soon followed. Shortly after his speech, Sumner was attacked in the Senate chamber by Congressman Preston Brooks, the nephew of Senator Butler. Brooks assaulted Sumner with a cane, whipping him repeatedly, and it took Sumner more than three years to recover from the brutal attack.

***

[
SUMNER
:] Before entering upon the argument, I must say something of a general character, particularly in response to what has fallen from senators who have raised themselves to eminence on this floor in championship of human wrongs. I mean the senator from South Carolina [Mr. Butler], and the senator from Illinois [Mr. Douglas], who, though unlike as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, yet, like this couple, sally forth together in the same adventure. I regret much to miss the elder senator from his seat; but the cause, against which he has run atilt, with such activity of animosity, demands that the opportunity of exposing him should not be lost; and it is for the cause that I speak. The senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course, he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot Slavery. For her, his tongue is always profuse in words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this senator. The frenzy of Don Quixote, in behalf of his wench, Dulcinea del Toboso, is all surpassed. The asserted rights of slavery, which shock equality of all kinds, are cloaked by a fantastic claim of equality. If the slave states cannot enjoy what, in mockery of the great fathers of the Republic, he misnames equality under the Constitution—in other words, the full power in the national territories to compel fellow men to unpaid toil, to separate husband and wife, and to sell little children at the auction block—then, sir, the chivalric senator will conduct
the state of South Carolina out of the Union! Heroic knight! Exalted senator! A second Moses come for a second exodus!

But not content with this poor menace, which we have been twice told was “measured,” the senator, in the unrestrained chivalry of his nature, has undertaken to apply opprobrious words to those who differ from him on this floor. He calls them “sectional and fanatical”; and opposition to the usurpation in Kansas he denounces as “an uncalculating fanaticism.” To be sure, these charges lack all grace of originality, and all sentiment of truth; but the adventurous senator does not hesitate. He is the uncompromising, unblushing representative on this floor of a flagrant sectionalism, which now domineers over the Republic, and yet with a ludicrous ignorance of his own position—unable to see himself as others see him—or with an effrontery which even his white head ought not to protect from rebuke, he applies to those here who resist his sectionalism the very epithet which designates himself. The men who strive to bring back the government to its original policy, when freedom and not slavery was sectional, he arraigns as sectional. This will not do. It involves too great a perversion of terms. I tell that senator that it is to himself, and to the “organization” of which he is the “committed advocate,” that this epithet belongs. I now fasten it upon them….

As the Senator from South Carolina is the Don Quixote, the Senator from Illinois [Mr. Douglas] is the Squire of slavery, its very Sancho Panza, ready to do all its humiliating offices….

[
DOUGLAS
:] I shall not detain the Senate by a detailed reply to the speech of the senator from Massachusetts. Indeed, I should not deem it necessary to say one word, but for the personalities in which he has indulged, evincing a depth of malignity that issued from every sentence, making it a matter of self-respect with me to repel the assaults which have been made….

The charge is made against the body of which we are members. It is not a charge made in the heat of debate. It is not made as a retort growing out of excited controversy. If it were of that nature, I could make much allowance for it. I can pay great deference to the frailties and the impulses of an honorable man, when indignant at what he considers to be a wrong. If the senator, betraying that he was susceptible of just indignation, had been goaded, provoked, and aggravated on the spur of the moment into the utterance of harsh things, and then had apologized for them in his cooler hours, I could respect him much more than if he had never made such a departure from the rules of the Senate, because it would show that he had a heart to appreciate what is due among brother senators and gentlemen. But, sir, it happens to be well known—it has
been the subject of conversation for weeks, that the senator from Massachusetts has had his speech written, printed, committed to memory, practiced every night before the glass with a Negro boy to hold the candle and watch the gestures, and has been thus annoying boarders in adjoining rooms until they were forced to quit the house. It was rumored that he read parts of it to friends and they repeated in all the saloons and places of amusement in the city what he was going to say. The libels and gross insults we have heard today have been conned over, written with cool, deliberate malignity, repeated from night to night in order to catch the appropriate grace, and then he came here to spit forth that malignity upon men who differ from him—for that is their offense!…

Why these attacks on individuals by name, and two-thirds of the Senate collectively? Is it the object to drive men here to dissolve social relations with political opponents? Is it to turn the Senate into a beer garden, where senators cannot associate on terms which ought to prevail between gentlemen? These attacks are heaped upon me by man after man. When I repel them, it is intimated that I show some feeling on the subject. Sir, God grant that when I denounce an act of infamy I shall do it with feeling, and do it under the sudden impulses of feeling, instead of sitting up at night writing out my denunciation of a man whom I hate, copying it, having it printed, punctuating the proof sheets, and repeating it before the glass, in order to give refinement to insult, which is only pardonable when it is the outburst of a just indignation….

[
SUMNER
:] Mr. President, to the senator from Illinois, I should willingly leave the privilege of the common scold—the last word; but I will not leave to him, in any discussion with me, the last argument, or the last semblance of it. He has crowned the audacity of this debate by venturing to rise here and calumniate me. He said that I came here, took an oath to support the Constitution, and yet determined not to support a particular clause in that Constitution. To that statement I give, to his face, the flattest denial….

The senator has gone on to infuse into his speech the venom which has been sweltering for months—aye, for years; and he has alleged facts that are entirely without foundation, in order to heap upon me some personal obloquy. I will not go into the details which have flowed out so naturally from his tongue. I only brand them to his face as false. I say also to that senator, and I wish him to bear it in mind, that no person with the upright form of man—[Here the speaker hesitated.]

[
DOUGLAS
:] Say it!

[
SUMNER
:] I will say it! No person with the upright form of man can be allowed without the violation of all decency to switch out from his
tongue the perpetual stench of offensive personality. Sir, this is not a proper weapon of debate, at least, on this floor! The noisome, squat, and nameless animal to which I now refer is not a proper model for an American senator. Will the senator from Illinois take notice!

[
DOUGLAS
:] I will, and therefore will not imitate you, sir.

[
SUMNER
:] I did not hear the senator.

[
DOUGLAS
:] I said, if that be the case, I would certainly never imitate you in that capacity, recognizing the force of the illustration.

[
SUMNER
: ] Mr. President, again the senator has switched his tongue, and again he fills the chamber with its offensive odor.

I pass from the senator from Illinois. There is still another, the senator from Virginia, who is now also in my eye. That senator said nothing of argument, and there is therefore nothing of that for response. I simply say to him that hard words are not argument, frowns not reasons; nor do scowls belong to the proper arsenals of parliamentary debate. The senator has not forgotten that on a former occasion I did something to exhibit on this floor the plantation manners he displayed. I will not do any more now!

[
MASON
:] Manners of which the senator is unconscious.

[
DOUGLAS
:] I am not going to pursue this subject further. I will only say that a man who has been branded by me in the Senate, and convicted by the Senate of falsehood, cannot use language requiring reply, and therefore I have nothing more to say.

Seeking reelection as senator from Illinois in 1858, Stephen Douglas—“the Little Giant,” five feet tall and barrel-chested—accepted Abraham Lincoln’s challenge to a series of debates. The intellectual and rhetorical clash that followed is unmatched in American political history for its force, length, undiminished focus of audience attention, and ultimate significance. Douglas won the gerrymandered senatorial campaign but alienated enough southern Democratic voters to undermine his presidential hopes in 1860; Lincoln, in winning a popular majority but losing the legislative vote for the Senate, made himself known nationally, positioning himself to win the Republican nomination and the presidency.

Douglas’s program was “popular sovereignty,” a phrase now expressed as “local option,” which in his Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 divided northern Democrats and helped lead to the formation of the Republican party. On the slavery issue, “pop sov” meant allowing the residents of territories to express their wishes on slavery before those territories became states of the Union. Lincoln took the contrary position, opposing the extension of slavery, which did not evolve to one in favor of its abolition until 1862.