Sumner on Exhibit:
MCKITRICK, ERIC L.
Sumner on Exhibit Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War. By David Donald. Knopf. 392 pp. $6.75. Reviewed by Eric L. McKitrick Associate Professor of History,...
...We see Charles Sumner as he must have appeared to one who knew him very well and who never gave in to the impulse to quarrel with him...
...He does something more humane and more relevant-he exhibits him...
...it was just that no adequate body of theory then existed for dealing with it...
...Nor is this simply a triumph of scholarship...
...I do not imply that Donald has "unmasked" Sumner...
...Donald tells us, truthfully, that he has indeed known Charles Sumner now for a very long time...
...Donald's management of this entire sequence-so heavily significant in the way it polarized the pro-slavery and antislavery passions of a dividing Union -is fine dramatic strategy...
...To the South, he was a pompous hypocrite who, having been given a proper caning, subsequently posed as an invalid in order to hide his shame and to claim a widespread sympathy which he could never have had on any other terms...
...Donald has collected the evidence, correlated it, submitted it to neurological specialists and established beyond any doubt that Sumner was most certainly not shamming...
...He came into his true calling almost immaculately...
...He did not especially relish going to the Senate in 1851, but he had been sent there by the combined anti-slavery forces of the Commonwealth, whose zeal was just then achieving its first great blaze of purity and power...
...The climax of the book is the climax to this phase of the man's career: the murderous beating Sumner received from the cane of Preston Brooks of South Carolina after his "Crime Against Kansas" philippic in 1856...
...There, he endured without complaint Brown-Séquard's preposterous "moxa" treatment (his spine was subjected to repeated burnings), a torture that would be inflicted on Sumner's political enemy, Governor Oliver P. Morton of Indiana, by the same charlatan a number of years later...
...When the great anti-slavery statesman of Massachusetts died in 1874, the eulogy in the Senate was pronounced by Lucius Q. C. Lamar...
...This you would never achieve simply by praising him, and certainly not by "exposing" him-not Charles Sumner...
...As his friends one by one married, he became lonely...
...in the end he gave himself to Universal Humanity...
...There is also a very lucid justice, a justice which may not always flatter the man's vanity but which does leave his dignity superbly whole...
...To the North, Sumner became a holy martyr, cravenly assaulted while seated, shattered in health by a minion of the Slave Power...
...He was consumed by a single idea and a single duty, that of destroying slavery forever...
...Donald's book brings Sumner down to the eve of the Civil War...
...His classical learning was so stupendous that it virtually incapacitated him for the practice of law...
...There was septicemia and profound psychic shock (Sumner could never quite comprehend that the attack had been personal), producing infirmities for which he sought a cure as far away as Paris...
...Since then, Charles Sumner has had a number of biographies, but the finest one of all has just been written by another Mississippian...
...These injuries, which to a great degree defied contemporary diagnosis, became the subject of endless myths and slanders...
...I was struck to realize that I had never quite believed any of this before, as I do now...
...Sumner's injuries, and his mysteriously slow recovery from them (he was not well again for more than three years) are described and considered with meticulous precision...
...This volume is complete in itself and has its own unity, though there is to be another, we hope, for the years of war and Reconstruction...
...Reviewed by Eric L. McKitrick Associate Professor of History, Columbia University That justice to Charles Sumner, in the most ample and unexceptionable sense, should come from the state of Mississippi seems almost perverse...
...Yet this has happened on two notable occasions...
...The only public office Charles Sumner ever held, or could have held, was that of Senator from Massachusetts...
...Charles Sumner actually did at one time inhabit the earth in human form...
...there are no such alternatives in this biography...
...Charles Sumner, in face and figure, was godlike, yet none of the admiring girls of Boston ever penetrated the circle of his being...
...But there is the indispensable thing, respect...
...To Sumner, an existence unilluminated by eternal truths meant nothing...
...It is indeed that-Donald has examined everything of any importance of or about Sumner-but it is much more, it is biographic art couched in prose of clarity and grace...
...Actually there was a considerable body of medical data on Sumner's case...
...Sumner's fellow Senator from Mississippi...
...His dearest wish would have been to become a professor at the Harvard Law School, but his early benefactor there, Justice Story, lost interest in him on account of his obsession with dangerous abstractions...
...And there were not many, during the man's lifetime, who had either that much tact or that much understanding...
...It is thus no wonder that "favorable" or "unfavorable" should have no direct relevance in such a field of vision...
...David Donald, closeted for 10 years with an all-but-impossible subject, has emerged with Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, which is a work of art...
...he took nourishment occasionally, and once in a while he would even light a cigar...
...He had no humor, only principles...
Vol. 44 • February 1961 • No. 8
