India, Racial Caste, and Abolition in Charles Sumner's Political Thought

In recent years, scholars across the humanities have argued that the nineteenth-century American abolitionists articulated important conceptual lessons about democracy. This essay contributes to this literature by newly interpreting the political thought of Charles Sumner. Regnant scholarly treatments of Sumner have been narrowly biographical. I shift focus by examining his use of the word “caste” as an analytic and political term. The article demonstrates that Sumner adopted the language of caste from missionary accounts of caste hierarchy in India; that he used this information to argue that there was an oppressive analogue at home: racial caste; and that, accordingly, Sumner's conception of abolition included the dismantling of racial caste and the cultivation of interracial republican association.

The Conservatism of Northern Radicals

In this lecture Woodward reviews the weaknesses of the current historiography on Reconstruction as well as examines the internal political debates within the Republican Party during Congressional Reconstruction. He highlights three looming issues: what would the process of Reconstruction look like, who should govern the country, and what rights would be extended to the freedpeople. The third issue proved to be the most vexing because the party relied on northern voters who believed in white supremacy. Woodward found little evidence to support the claim that the Republican Party was united in purpose. In fact, he highlights the ways in which the bulk of the party failed to fully commit to the Civil Rights Act (1866) and the Fourteenth Amendment. He admires the vision of Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens but regrets they were ignored by the moderate Republicans.

Did The North Really Mean It?

This lecture details southern interest in northern elections. Woodward argues that white southerners viewed this as the litmus test to judge Northern commitment to racial equality. The bulk of northern states voted against black suffrage thus prompting charges of hypocrisy. After Ulysses S. Grant assumed the office of the presidency in 1869, Republicans began debating whether to pass a constitutional amendment supporting black suffrage. Moderates and conservatives, however, ultimately shaped the Fifteenth Amendment’s wording leading some to conclude that the North’s commitment to racial equality was tepid at best. Northern apathy encouraged white southern defiance which manifested itself in terrorism and violence. Woodward concludes that white northerners never fully committed to Reconstruction, Charles Sumner notwithstanding, and thus cautions scholars and activists not to look to it as inspiration for the modern Civil Rights Movement or what he called the Second Reconstruction.

Arguing until Doomsday

As the sectional crisis gripped the United States, the rancor increasingly spread to the halls of Congress. Preston Brooks's frenzied assault on Charles Sumner was perhaps the most notorious evidence of the dangerous divide between proslavery Democrats and the new antislavery Republican Party. But as disunion loomed, rifts within the majority Democratic Party were every bit as consequential. And nowhere was the fracture more apparent than in the raging debates between Illinois's Stephen Douglas and Mississippi's Jefferson Davis. As leaders of the Democrats' northern and southern factions before the Civil War, their passionate conflict of words and ideas has been overshadowed by their opposition to Abraham Lincoln. But here, weaving together biography and political history, Michael E. Woods restores Davis and Douglas's fatefully entwined lives and careers to the center of the Civil War era. Operating on personal, partisan, and national levels, Woods traces the deep roots of Democrats' internal strife, with fault lines drawn around fundamental questions of property rights and majority rule. Neither belief in white supremacy nor expansionist zeal could reconcile Douglas and Davis's factions as their constituents formed their own lines in the proverbial soil of westward expansion. The first major reinterpretation of the Democratic Party's internal schism in more than a generation, Arguing until Doomsday shows how two leading antebellum politicians ultimately shattered their party and hastened the coming of the Civil War.

The Little Italian Slaves

This chapter examines Celso Cesare Moreno's crusade in defense of those he referred to as “the Italian slave children,” albeit with an ulterior motive. It first considers child labor in Italy and the plight of very young Italian street musicians, focusing on initiatives to ameliorate their conditions by individuals such as Ferdinando De Luca, the Consul General of Italy in New York, author Giuseppe Guerzoni, and Moreno himself. It then analyzes Moreno's criticism of De Luca and his publicity and lobbying campaign against Italian child slavery, using the New York Times as his primary tool and enlisting the support of two people best identified with the abolitionist cause: Senator Charles Sumner and Frederick Douglas. The chapter also discusses the so-called “Moreno bill,” introduced by Sumner in the Senate in January 1874, and its impact on the campaign to eliminate the presence of the wandering child musicians in Italy.

From the President: Entitled to the Facts: A Fact-Checking Role for Librarians

Just three weeks after our new president took office in 2017, New York Times columnist David Brooks reflected on the new administration and referred to a “rising tide of conflict and incivility.”1 While many agree that the levels of incivility have risen like a swollen river in 2017, with no one sure where the river will crest, Americans struggle with an inability to discuss political differences, even among friends and relatives. Feeling like we have backpedaled to a new low in our history, perhaps we forget incivilities from our past such as the famous canning of Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor in 1856. Those historical events seem unfathomable in our purportedly more sophisticated day and age.

Kansas

This chapter discusses the internecine warfare that erupts in Kansas after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act known as Bleeding Kansas. It focuses David Rice Atchison’s leadership of proslavery forces on the ground in Kansas while the remaining members of the Mess lead the senate fight for passage of Kansas’ proslavery constitution. The chapter concludes with the caning of Charles Sumner and the northern democracy’s devastating loses in the 1856 elections.