Showing posts with label John G Palfrey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John G Palfrey. Show all posts

Sunday, May 5, 2024

Diary of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, April 24, 1851

A pleasant dinner, at the close of which we heard the news of Sumner's election. In the evening came Lowell and Gurowski and Palfrey, and Sumner himself to escape from the triumph and be quiet from all the noise in the streets of Boston. He is no more elated by his success than he has been depressed by the failure heretofore, and evidently does not desire the office. Не says he would resign now if any one of the same sentiments as himself could be put in his place.

SOURCE: Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, Vol. 3, p. 245

Diary of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, April 25, 1851

The papers are all ringing with Sumner, Sumner! and the guns thundering out their triumph; meanwhile the hero of the strife is sitting quietly here, more saddened than exalted. Palfrey dined with us. I went to my Don Quixote at college, leaving the two Free Soilers sitting over their nuts and wine.1
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1 Sumner's first use of a senator's frank was upon documents to promote Palfrey's re-election to Congress. With his large correspondence, he valued the privilege, and parted with it reluctantly when it was finally discontinued in 1870. He wrote a public letter urging Palfrey's election ("Commonwealth," May 22, 1851), but it did not avail.

SOURCE: Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, Vol. 3, p. 245-6

Saturday, May 27, 2023

Charles Sumner to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, January 24, 1850

[January 24, 1850.]
DEAR HENRY,

Whittier is here on a short visit. I go to-night with Miss Bremer to hear Wendell Phillips, and to-morrow evening dine out, or I should insist upon taking him [Whittier] to you. He is staying at the Quincy Hotel, in Brattle Street.

I regret the sentiments of John Van Buren about mobs, but rejoice that he is right on slavery. I do not know that I should differ very much from him in saying that we have more to fear from the corruption of wealth than from mobs. Edmund Dwight once gave, within my knowledge, two thousand dollars to influence a single election. Other men whom we know very well are reputed to have given much larger sums. It is in this way, in part, that the natural antislavery sentiment of Massachusetts has been kept down; it is money, money, money, that keeps Palfrey from being elected. Knowing these things, it was natural that John Van Buren should say that we had more to fear from wealth than from mobs. He is a politician,—not a philanthropist or moralist, but a politician, like Clay, Winthrop, Abbott Lawrence; and he has this advantage, that he has dedicated his rare powers to the cause of human freedom. In this I would welcome any person from any quarter.

SOURCE: Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, Vol. 3, p. 212

Sunday, October 7, 2018

Samuel Gridley Howe to Horace Mann, Wednesday Evening, April 1851 – 10 p.m.

Wednesday Eve., April, 10 o'clock, 1851.

My Dear Mann: — I am sad and sick at heart at the probable issue to-morrow. You know I have never advocated nor consented to the coalition with the Democrats; I always condemned it as unwise and useless; I always thought that the Free-soil party might have carried the day in five years without coalescing with anybody; I go with Palfrey in his circular; and yet I have come to wish and pray that Sumner may be elected to the Senate, because no man now eligible here can so well represent the anti-slavery sentiment of the North as he.

It is useless for me to go into the causes of the defeat of the Free-soilers here. They have been mainly three, any one of which was enough. Want of skilful leaders; — bad faith on the part of Democrats; — and the prodigious outside pressure of the Union, as it were, upon the waverers. The first defeat was owing to the bungling mismanagement of Earle,1 who allowed the election to be postponed; then the foolish trusting to Democrats by electing their Governor instead of laying him on the table — and so it has been. I do not believe that more than half the Democrats were honest; and there were some of them who even contemplated defeating Sumner, provided they could not seduce him to compromise himself by pledges. He has rather, I think, leaned over backward, in his attempt to stand erect and firm and be uncompromising. He uselessly froissait (as the French say) some of the Hunker2 Democrats who waited upon him at the time when it seemed certain that he would be elected. All this is over now; the Senate has elected him, and to-morrow the House will, I forebode, reject him. Boutwell and the Speaker, and a few other leading Democrats, make a bluster, swear Sumner must and shall be put through, &c. &c. — but I mistrust them. There are all the old Hunkers at work like the devil. Old M——, the slimy snake, who has all along been crawling into Sumner's office and confidence, and telling him that he conferred with no one else on politics, — he has long been denouncing Sumner, and straining every nerve to defeat him. Cushing and Hallett et id genus omne are at work; and there has been brought to work in unison with them the governmental influence at Washington. What did B. R. C[urtis]3 go there for? his friends here said he was going south, perhaps to the West Indies, for his health. Tell that to the marines! We have little or no outside influence; Downer has done more than all the rest put together. There seems a spell on them. Bird has been for trust; Alley (a good man and true) seems utterly paralyzed and discouraged; Wilson can't do much, though he has more head than the rest at the House; Keyes has been firing and fizzing, but can't keep up at red heat long; Phillips has been much miffed; Adams and Palfrey, anti-coalitionists, will not work — and so it goes. The end of the whole matter will be that Sumner will gradually fall behind — the thing will be put off and put off — and nothing done at all. The Democrats will satisfy their consciences by seeming to try for what they know they cannot do.

I think all our friends who have taken office should resign as soon as it is certain Sumner cannot be elected. How to re-unite our broken ranks I know not. We must be honest; eschew coalitions, and get a reputation by living well in future.

Ever yours,
S. G. H.
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1 John Milton Earle of Worcester.
2The "Hunkers" were conservative Democrats, generally supposed to have a leaning toward slavery; the same class as the “Copperheads” of the Civil War.
3 Benjamin R. Curtis.

SOURCE: Laura E. Richards, Editor, Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe, Volume 2, p. 343-5

Sunday, August 26, 2018

Gerrit Smith to Stephen C. Phillips, October 13, 1846

Peterboro, October 23,1846.
Hon. Stephen C. Phillips, of Salem, Mass.:

Dear Sir — This day's mail brings me the speech which you delivered at the meeting recently assembled at Faneuil Hall to consider the outrage of kidnapping a man in the streets of Boston.
I am not insensible to the ability, eloquence, beauty, of this speech: — and yet it fails of pleasing me. The meeting, after I saw its proceedings, was no longer an object of my pleasant contemplations. Indeed, Massachusetts herself has ceased to be such an object. There was a time, when, among all commonwealths, she was my beau ideal. Her wisdom, integrity, bravery — in short, her whole history, from her bud in the Mayflower to the blossoms and fruits with which a ripe civilization has adorned and enriched her — made her the object of my warm and unmeasured admiration. But, a change has come over her. Alas, how great and sad a one! She has sunk her ancient worth and glory in her base devotion to Mammon and Party.

When, in the year 1835, one of her sons — that son to whom she, not to say this whole nation, owes more than to any other person, was, for his honest, just, and fearless assaults on slavery, driven by infuriate thousands through the streets of her metropolis with a halter round his neck, Massachusetts looked on, applauding. So far was she from disclaiming the mob that she boasted, that her “gentlemen of property and standing” composed it. Indeed, one of her first acts after the mob, was to choose for her governor the man who promptly rewarded her for this choice by his official recommendation to treat abolitionists as criminals.

Massachusetts was not, however, lost to shame. It was not in vain that the finger of scorn was pointed at her for this mob and for other demonstrations of her pro-slavery. For very decency's sake, she began to adjust her dress, and put on better appearances. Indeed, anti-slavery sentiment became the order of the day with her: and, from her chief statesman down to her lowest demagogue, all tried their skill in uttering big words against slavery. But, the hollowest sentiment and the merest prating constituted the whole warp and woof of this pretended and unsubstantial opposition to slavery. Massachusetts still remained the slave of Party and Mammon. She would still vote for slaveholders, rather than break up the national parties to which she was wedded. She would still make every concession to the slave power to induce it to spare her manufactures.

A fine occasion was afforded Massachusetts, a few years ago, to talk her anti-slavery words, and display her anti-slavery sentiment, and right well did she improve it. I refer to the casting of the fugitive slave George Latimer into one of her jails. Instantly did she show anti-slavery colors. She was anti-slavery all over, and to the very core also, as a stranger to her ways would have thought. But beneath all her manifestations of generous regard for the oppressed, she continued to be none the less bound up in avarice— none the less servile to the South. The first opportunity she had to do so, she again voted for slaveholders.

Then came the project to annex Texas. The slaveholders demanded more territory to soak with the sweat and tears and blood of the poor African. This was another occasion for Massachusetts to make another anti-slavery bluster. She made it: — and then voted for Clay — for the very man who had done unspeakably more than any other man to extend and perpetuate the dominion of American slavery. As a specimen of her heartlessness, in this instance of her anti-slavery parade, her present Whig Governor, who was among the foremost and loudest to condemn this scheme of annexation, is now calling, in the name of patriotism, on his fellow-citizens to consummate it by murdering the unoffending Mexicans.

Next came the expulsion of her commissioners from Charleston and New Orleans. Again she blustered for a moment. She denounced slavery and the South. She boasted of herself, as if she still were what she had been; as if “modern degeneracy had not reached” her. But, the sequel proved her hypocrisy and baseness. After a little time, she quietly pocketed the insult, and was as ready as ever to vote for slaveholders.

I will refer to but one more of the many opportunities which Massachusetts has had to prove herself worthy of her former history. It is that which called out your present speech. This was emphatically an opportunity for Massachusetts to show herself to be an anti-slavery State. But she had not a heart to improve it. Her own citizens in the very streets of her own gloried-in city, had chased down a man, and bound him, and plunged him into the pit of perpetual slavery. The voice of such a deed, sufficient to rend her rocks, and move her mountains, could not startle the dead soul of her people. They are the fast bound slaves of Mammon and Party. True, a very great meeting was gathered in Faneuil Hall. Eloquent speeches were made; and a committee of vigilance was appointed. But nothing was done to redeem herself from her degeneracy: nothing to recall to her loathsome carcass the great and glorious spirit which had departed from it; nothing was done for the slave. When the year 1848 shall come round, Massachusetts, if still impenitent, will be as ready to vote for the slaveholders whom the South shall then bid her vote for, as she was to do so in 1844.

Your great meeting was a farce; — and will you pardon me, if I cite your own speech to prove it? That speech, which denounces your fellow-citizen for stealing one man, was delivered by a gentleman, who (risum teneatis?) contends, that a person who steals hundreds of men is fit to be President of the United States! It is ludicrous, beyond all parallel, that he, who would crown with the highest honors the very prince of kidnappers, should, with a grave face, hold up to the public abhorrence the poor man, who has only just begun to try his hand at kidnapping. Then, your contemptuous bearing towards Captain Hannum and his employers! — how affected! If you shall not be utterly insensible to the claims of consistency, who, when you shall have Henry Clay to dine with you, will you allow to be better entitled than this same Captain Hannum and his employers to seats at your table? Cease, my dear sir, from your outrages on consistency. You glory in Mr. Clay. How can you then despise and reproach those who, with however much of the awkwardness of beginners, are, nevertheless, doing their best to step forward in the tracks of their “illustrious predecessor?”

It would be very absurd — would it not? — for you to denounce the stealing of a single sheep, at the same time that you are counting as worthy of all honor the man who steals a whole flock of sheep. But, I put it to your candor, whether it would be a whit more absurd than is your deep loathing and unutterable contempt of Captain Hannum and his employers for a crime, which, though incessantly repeated and infinitely aggravated in the case of Mr. Clay, does not disqualify him, in your esteem, to be the chief ruler of this nation— to be, what the civil ruler is required to be — “the minister of God.”

You intimate, that the State Prison is the proper place for Captain Hannum and his employers. And do you not think it the proper place for Henry Clay also? Out upon partiality, if, because he is your candidate for the presidency, you would not have this old and practical man-thief punished, as well as those who are but in their first lessons of his horrid piracy!

To be serious, Mr. Phillips — you are not the man to have to do with Captain Hannum and his employers, unless it is to set them an example of repentance. It becomes you not to look down upon them —but to take your seat by their side, and to bow your head as low as shame and sorrow should bow theirs. No—if Captain Hannum and his employers should steal a man every remaining day of their lives, they could not do as much to sanction and perpetuate the crime of man-stealing, as the honored and influential Stephen C. Phillips has done by laboring to elect to the highest civil office the very man stealer, who has contributed far more than any other living person to make man-stealing reputable, and to widen the theatre of its horrors.

Alas, what a pity to lose such an occasion for good as was afforded by this instance of kidnapping. That was the occasion for you and other distinguished voters for slaveholders to employ the power of your own repentance in bringing other pro-slavery voters to repentance. That was the occasion for your eyes to stream with contrite sorrow, and your lips to exclaim: “We have sinned: — we have sinned against God and the slave: — we have not sought to have Civil Government look after the poor, and weak, and oppressed, and crushed: — but we have perverted and degraded it from this high, and holy, and heaven-intended use, to the low purposes of money-making and to the furtherance of the selfish schemes of ambition: we have not chosen for rulers men who, in their civil office, as Josiah in his, “judged the cause of the poor and needy'—men who, in their civil office, could say, as did Job in his, ‘I was a father to the poor’ — ‘I brake the jaws of the wicked and plucked the spoil out of his teeth’ — but we have chosen our Clays and our Polks — pirates, who rob, and buy and sell, the poor — monsters, who, with their sharks' teeth devour the poor.” Deny, doubt, evade it, as you will — you may, nevertheless, my dear sir, depend upon it, that it is for your repentance and the repentance of all the voters for slaveholders, that God calls. He calls, also, for the repentance of the American ministry, that so wickedly and basely refuses to preach Bible politics, and to insist on the true and heaven-impressed character of Civil Government. Depend upon it, my dear sir, that your disease and theirs is one which can be cured by no medicine short of the medicine of repentance. I am not unaware that this is a most offensive and humbling medicine — especially to persons in the higher walks of life; — nevertheless, you and they must take it or remain uncured. No clamor against Captain Hannum and his employers — no attempt to make scape-goats of them — will avail to cure you.

Alas, what a pity that a mere farce should have taken the place of the great and solemn measure which was due from your meeting! Had your meeting felt, that the time for trifling on the subject of slavery is gone by; and had it passed, honestly and heartily, the Resolution: “No voting for slaveholders, nor for those who are in political fellowship with slaveholders, it would have had the honor of giving the death-blow to American slavery. This resolution, passed by such a meeting, would have electrified the whole nation. Within all its limits every true heart would have responded to it, and every false one been filled with shame.

When the glorious Missionary, William Knibb, had seen the slaveholders tear down and burn a large share of the chapels in Jamaica, he set sail for Great Britain. Scarcely had he landed, ere he began the cry, “Slavery is incompatible with Christianity. He went over his native land, uttering this cry. A mighty cry it was. The walls of British slavery felt its power as certainly as did the walls of Jericho the shout by which it was prostrated.

The power of the cry: “No voting for slaveholders, nor for those who are in political fellowship with slaveholders, would, were it to proceed from the right lips, be as effective against the walls of American slavery, as was the cry of William Knibb against the walls of British slavery. You, and Charles Sumner, (I know and love him,) and Charles Francis Adams, and John G. Palfrey, are the men to utter this cry. Go, without delay, over the whole length and breadth of your State, pouring these talismanic words into the ears of the thousands and tens of thousands who shall flock to hear you; and Massachusetts will, even at the approaching election, reject all her pro-slavery candidates. Such is the power of truth, when proceeding from honored and welcome lips!

Be in earnest, ye Phillipses and Sumners and Adamses and Palfreys — be entirely in earnest, in your endeavors to overthrow slavery. You desire its overthrow, and are doing something to promote it. But you lack the deep and indispensable earnestness; and, therefore, do you shrink from employing the bold and revolutionary means which the case demands. No inferior means however, will accomplish the object. As well set your babies to catch Leviathans with pin-hooks, as attempt to overthrow American slavery by means which fall below the stern and steadfast purpose: “Not to vote for slaveholders, nor for those who are in political fellowship with slaveholders. But, only press the hearts of your fellow-men with this, the solemn and immovable purpose of your own hearts—and fallen Massachusetts rises again — and American slavery dies—and your names are written in everduring letters among the names of the saviors of your country.

Very respectfully yours,
Gerrit Smith.

SOURCES: Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Gerrit Smith: A Biography, p. 196-200