Introduction
In recent years, scholars across the humanities have turned back to nineteenth-century American abolitionism, persuasively arguing that this moral, political, and rhetorical tradition articulated important theoretical lessons about democracy in the United States.Footnote 1 This article contributes to this literature by offering a new interpretation of the political thought of Charles Sumner (1811–74). Regnant scholarly treatments of Sumner, both critical and sympathetic, have tended to be narrowly biographical, concerned more with the man's life and psychology than with the complex content of his political ideas.Footnote 2 This is an understandable instinct. Sumner lived a fascinating life, one which frequently saw him at the center of American politics and culture during extraordinary times. He was, among other things, a very well-connected figure in Boston (mentee of Justice Joseph Story and William Ellery Channing, close friend of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, interlocutor of Garrisonians and Transcendentalists); an accomplished, erudite, and sought-after orator; a senator from Massachusetts for over twenty years; an early member and defender of the Republican Party; a key player in Reconstruction; and an influential member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the years after the Civil War. In the popular imagination, however, Sumner is perhaps best known as the victim of a shockingly violent assault by the South Carolinian congressman Preston Smith Brooks, who claimed to have been personally dishonored by Sumner's 1856 antislavery speech, “The Crime against Kansas.”Footnote 3
Though it possesses some important merits, the biographical bent in Sumner scholarship has deemphasized the ideas that spurred, justified, arose from, or otherwise accompanied the Bostonian's actions. This has resulted in notable gaps. For example, it is clear that Sumner read widely—including the classics of republican political philosophy and reports of political developments well beyond the United States—but the literature remains silent on how he synthesized and contextualized such information in light of ongoing events at home. It is equally apparent that Sumner loudly condemned the institution of slavery, yet we know relatively little about how he understood the sociological mechanisms that would reproduce racial subordination after formal emancipation. Finally, though Sumner is understandably remembered as a statesman first and foremost, there has been no clear articulation of the conceptual innovations that we can attribute to him and would in turn help us better understand the contributions of abolitionism to democratic theory.
This article aims to address these gaps through a sustained focus on Sumner's use of the word “caste” as an analytic and political term. Sumner, I argue, intentionally invoked the language of caste in virtue of his reflection on the Indian context.Footnote 4 And while his knowledge about other elements of this context (for instance, the incursions of the East India Company and the Rebellion of 1857) came from diverse sources, he became acquainted with the specificities of caste through a lengthy pamphlet authored and edited by Christian missionaries in south India—one example of a larger genre that flourished in the nineteenth century.Footnote 5 Accordingly, in the next section I reconstruct the organization and key arguments of this missionary text and delineate the historical path, populated by white and black abolitionist thinkers, that would have led to Sumner's encounters with both the pamphlet and the possibilities inherent in the caste–race analogy.Footnote 6
Sumner's ultimate aims, however, were quite distinct from those of the missionaries themselves—who sought to condemn Hinduism and gain Christian converts—as well as many other Americans, for whom missionary accounts merely served to bolster the image of an atavistic, static, and “heathen” subcontinent in contrast to which they could feel a sense of self-satisfaction. Indeed, Sumner used concepts mined from missionary texts in the interest of self-criticism, arguing that the oppressive instincts of caste in India had a direct analogue at home—namely racial caste. The third section of the article elucidates the particulars of this strand in Sumner's political thought. I argue that Sumner's conception of racial caste comprised three main claims: first, that it was a direct “offshoot” of slavery; second, that it was defined by the dual characteristics of hierarchical separation and hereditary perpetuation; and third, that it was not just immoral but antirepublican.
Racial caste, however, was not something Sumner was content to simply identify; he also aimed to condemn and destroy it. I therefore suggest in the fourth and final section that Sumner's conception of abolition—typically understood by scholars as limited to his opposition to slavery—ought to be expanded to include the abolition of racial caste. This project was pegged to the achievement of certain affirmative goals, the most important of which were the cultivation of new associational norms between black and white Americans in civil society (particularly between children in schools), the recognition of the agentic capacity of black Americans in politics, and the establishment of institutions and practices that would enable that political agency to flourish. The essay concludes by briefly commenting on how the Sumnerian perspective excavated here, concerned as it was with racial caste, would have an important twentieth-century afterlife in Brown v. Board of Education.
Sources
As scholars have previously observed, Sumner's use of the language of caste took place within a broader nineteenth-century American abolitionist context in which the term “caste” and its connection with India were frequently deployed. For example, Scott Grinsell and Susan Ryan cite articles from the 1820s through the 1870s—appearing in such outlets as the Religious Intelligencer, Friends’ Review, Boston Recorder, Philadelphia Recorder, Dwight's American Magazine, the Independent, and (importantly) the Colored American—that explicitly invoked “Hindoo” caste as the paradigmatic form of societal conservatism.Footnote 7 For a range of reform-minded abolitionists, it was imperative that America avoid the society-wide stagnation that the caste system embodied. Though caste language was fairly common, it is nonetheless possible to trace the sources of Sumner's thinking on the subject, and to mark the textual and historical path that led to this particular American figure becoming acquainted with caste in India.Footnote 8 Completing this task is the work of this section, which sets the stage for the next section's reconstruction of Sumner's unique conception of racial caste.
Based on the citations that Sumner included in his writings and speeches, it is clear that the main textual source from which the Bostonian learned about Hindu caste was Caste, in Its Religious and Civil Character, Opposed to Christianity (1847; hereafter Caste Opposed to Christianity), a series of documents compiled and edited into a pamphlet by the Reverend Joseph Roberts.Footnote 9 Given that Caste Opposed to Christianity featured documents whose original composition and publication dates ranged from 1828 to 1846, the volume appeared several decades before the first major wave of conversions to Christianity by the groups now known as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.Footnote 10 British Christian voices in the volume accordingly strike a note of distinct frustration at the stubborn obstacle caste seemed to pose to the missionary endeavor. As the general secretary of the Wesleyan Missionary Society, Elijah Hoole, writes in the Preface to Caste Opposed to Christianity, it “becomes those who watch over the churches in Heathen lands to be careful that no part of Paganism be fostered or tolerated within them. This duty has become the more difficult in India, because [of] the insidious evil of Caste.”Footnote 11
In light of the degree to which Sumner would rely upon and return to it, some key structural and substantive elements of the pamphlet are worth highlighting. Caste Opposed to Christianity is composed of seven parts. The most sizable and philosophically rich chapters are an address on caste that Roberts himself delivered at the Wesleyan Mission Chapel in Madras (Chapter 2); the findings of a report, commissioned by the Anglican Lord Bishop of Madras, on “what sense and to what extent caste is held by the native agents of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, in the Vepery District” (Chapter 3); and English-language addresses by six young Tamil Christian men (Chapter 4). The organization of the text is worth noting because Sumner appears to have read the entire pamphlet and taken particularly seriously those portions that foregrounded the testimonies of “native Christians”; that is, Indians who were either born into Christian families or chose to convert to Christianity.
From a substantive perspective, Chapters 2, 3, and 4 share an argument and an accompanying fear: the former, that the distinctions of caste were not merely civil but religious in character; the latter, that the habits of caste continued to pervade the minds and practices of many native Christians, undermining their salvation in such a way as to render them “pseudo-Christians.”Footnote 12 Chapter 4 most clearly articulates the claim that although caste involved civil distinctions—hierarchies of political and social status that obtain, whether in just or unjust forms, in societies of any reasonable size—it was also fundamentally a matter of religious principle.
Each of the Tamil men featured in that chapter structured their addresses as answers to five questions about caste, the last of which was: “Can Caste be compared for a moment with the European distinctions in society?” Perhaps unsurprisingly, all agreed that the two modes of social organization differed in kind, with most of the Tamilians tracing the difference to religious roots. P. Rajahgopaul's exceptionally impressive address is instructive on this score: “Caste claims the Divinity himself as its fountain; whereas the distinctions in European society arise from political causes, changes in the government, or from personal talents, and acquirements, and worth; and many of the existing distinctions among Europeans can be traced to the feudal system.”Footnote 13 From the perspective of the British missionaries and, we may infer, Sumner, the experiences of native Indians well acquainted with caste affirmed the sanctified character of this hierarchical system.
Given that caste was taken to be indissolubly linked with a “heathen” religious tradition, the continued permeation of caste thinking and practices into the lives of native Christians constituted a threat to the souls of these individuals as well as to the collective well-being of Indian congregations. Chapter 3, the findings of the report commissioned by the Lord Bishop of Madras, is the portion of the pamphlet that most rigorously documents the manifestations of caste distinctions amongst native Christians because it relies on interviews with Indian “witnesses.”Footnote 14 Roberts's 1844 speech, meanwhile, clearly articulated the philosophical implications of caste's continuance amongst Indian Christians. It was not just that caste embodied a residue of Hinduism that prevented genuine rebirth in Christ; it was that the precise mechanism of caste's opposition to Christianity was the choking off of brotherly love. By circumscribing sympathy within the bounds of what B. R. Ambedkar, nearly a century later, would call a “graded system of sovereignties,” caste offered up an impoverished morality and perversely valorized the desiccation of the soul.Footnote 15 As such, Roberts concluded, right-minded Christians had to move against caste with the same zeal with which they attacked the enslavement of African peoples:
Caste is the great curse of India, both in things sacred and profane; and never, until its blighting influence shall be destroyed, will the people be free to enjoy civil and religious privileges; and therefore those who set themselves in array against it, in all or any of its relations, are conferring a boon which looks to both worlds; they are contributing towards an emancipation, not inferior to that of the Negro, who so long in vain lifted up his chains to Britain, and inquired, “Am I not a man and a brother?”Footnote 16
These, then, were the principal structural and substantive features that Sumner encountered when he read Caste Opposed to Christianity. But how might he have initially come upon the text? The first speech in which Sumner cited Caste Opposed to Christianity was his 1849 argument before the Massachusetts Supreme Court in Sarah C. Roberts v. The City of Boston. There Sumner, working in collaboration with the black Boston attorney Robert Morris, mounted an impressive but ultimately unsuccessful argument for public-school integration.Footnote 17 On 13 May 1850, shortly after Sumner had learned of the court's decision, Sumner wrote a letter to John Jay II, the New York abolitionist and scion of the prominent Jay family.Footnote 18 Sumner's letter begins as follows:
Dear Jay—At the end of last week I forwarded to you the packet of books which you were kind enough to send me last autumn. I trust that they have come safely into yr. hands. I used them in my argt. In the coloured school case before the Sup. Ct—as you have probably seen—unsuccessfully. I am sure, however, that the court in their opinion, have not answered my argt.Footnote 19
In principle, of course, the bundle of books that Jay leant to Sumner need not have included any missionary chronicles of Hindu caste. Sumner's missive could refer to any of the staggering number of references included in his oral argument. On the other hand, however, virtually all of the touchstones and citations apart from Caste Opposed to Christianity—including Horace, Seneca, Virgil, Milton's Paradise Lost, Locke, Rousseau, the French Encyclopédie, Condorcet, Voltaire, the Lincoln–Douglas debates, and various aspects of American statutory law—can be accounted for by Sumner's classical education, legal training, well-known Francophilia, and personal involvement in American politics.
What is more, we know that in 1843 Jay authored his own pamphlet, entitled Caste and Slavery in the American Church. The first few pages of that text included the excoriating claim that there was “a system of CASTE in the [Episcopal] Church—not among its lower members only—not among the laity alone, but among the very clergy who approach us as ambassadors of God, and minister at his alters—Caste as palpable as that which separates, in heathen India, the Brahmin from the Soodra.”Footnote 20 Immediately after its publication, Jay sent Caste and Slavery in the American Church to Sumner, choosing to anonymously mark it “from the Author.” The Bostonian read it with great interest and actually learned later from his friend Longfellow that Jay was its author.Footnote 21 As early as 1843, then, Jay was sending Sumner abolitionist source material that explicitly drew the comparison between racial subordination in America and Hindu caste. Taking together the nature of Sumner's other references in Roberts v. The City of Boston, as well as the contents of his 1850 letter to Jay, it is thus likely (though, of course, not perfectly conclusive) that Sumner received Caste Opposed to Christianity from the New York abolitionist, in anticipation of the oral argument before the Massachusetts Supreme Court.
Moving further along this chain of intellectual historical connections enables us to see that white abolitionists were not the only actors in Sumner's immediate sphere who sought to understand and articulate the relationship between caste and race. The event that catalyzed Jay's polemic in Caste and Slavery in the American Church was the fraught rejection of the prospective student Alexander Crummell from New York's General Theological Seminary. In Jay's words, “The true cause which led the Trustees to nullify the constitution and deny the right of the candidate, and which they were ashamed to acknowledge, was, that he was a coloured man; and this was the only cause.”Footnote 22 Rejection on the basis of race would have been condemnable regardless of the candidate involved, but the decision appeared even more ignominious in light of Crummell's remarkable background and subsequent accomplishments.Footnote 23
Crummell had written at length about his frustrating exchanges with the Episcopal Bishop Benjamin Onderdonk in an 1839 article that appeared in the Colored American, the newspaper that Manisha Sinha characterizes as “the national voice of black abolitionism” in the late 1830s and early 1840s.Footnote 24 For Crummell, who had felt the joys of an inclusive education at the Oneida Institute and imbibed the egalitarian strains of Christianity, the experience of discrimination at the hands of clergy within his own denomination was a disconcerting one. As he would write towards the end of his Colored American article,
The other mistake [committed by the Episcopal Church] is, that colored men, were not to know themselves, nor be known as men, or in other words that in the church, there were two casts [sic], the white and the black, I find nothing of the kind in the Scriptures … The burden of the writings of our modern divines in the Church of England in our own American Church—of our Periodicals and Reviews—has it not been: “THE CHURCH IS ONE.”Footnote 25
Though the word seems to have been printed in the Colored American as “cast,” there is good reason to think that in this instance Crummell was invoking the category of “caste” in a manner that prefigured Jay's use of the term in Caste and Slavery in the American Church. By highlighting an exclusion that denied black Episcopalians the status of “men,” Crummell was striking at the same corruption with which Jay would later take umbrage. It was not the last time that Crummell would use caste language to mount such an argument. In the early 1840s, he delivered a sermon entitled “Caste in the Church” and in August of 1843 he wrote a letter to Jay in which he asserted that the “artificial state in which we live in society, the systems of Caste which we are kept, deprive us of the soul for bold and energetic actions.”Footnote 26
Still more interestingly, in November 1837 the Colored American reprinted two short articles, from the Sabbath School Visitor and the Herald of Freedom, under the single title “Hindoo Caste.”Footnote 27 The first article reads as a primer for the black abolitionist newspaper's readership. It reviews the names, traditional duties, and relationships between the four varna groups (Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Sudra) as well as status of the “Parayas,” the latter tellingly defined as “a race of most degraded and universally insulted beings.”Footnote 28 The article then goes on to summarize the philosophical and practical antagonism between missionary activity and the caste system. One of the sources quoted in connection with this topic is the Bishop of Calcutta for the Church of England—at the time, Daniel Wilson—whose anti-caste writings also featured in the first chapter of Caste Opposed to Christianity. The second article consists of brief “Remarks” aimed at prompting reflection on the similarities between American racial hierarchy and the seemingly strange, unfamiliar practices of caste in India. Counterintuitive as it may seem, the author insisted, one had to recognize that “[t]here are Brahmins and Sooders in the United States—distinctions of caste which enter into the political, social and religious constitution of American Christians as deeply and intimately as into that of the Hindoos.”Footnote 29
As I shall demonstrate below, this was a move that Sumner made at several key moments, and while he would conceive of racial caste in original ways that merit separate analysis, we have seen here that there is good reason to think that the Bostonian's conceptual and political interventions were rooted in the missionary, white abolitionist, and black abolitionist sources present in his immediate sphere. The circulation of caste language via Caste Opposed to Christianity, John Jay II, and influential periodicals like the Colored American laid the groundwork for a complex diagnosis of racial subordination and a robust reconstructive response.
Racial caste in America
How, then, did Sumner press the category of caste in the service of capturing the conditions of racial subjugation he witnessed in the United States? In this section, I argue that Sumner's diagnosis of racial caste possessed three principal claims: first, that the American system of racial caste was a direct “offshoot” of slavery; second, that it was defined, like Hindu caste, by the dual characteristics of hierarchical separation and hereditary perpetuation; and third—in a politically minded reversal of Caste Opposed to Christianity—that it was not just immoral but antirepublican.
For Sumner, the system of racial caste that relegated black Americans to “degrading and disabling” conditions was not synonymous with slavery; instead, it was better understood as slavery's historical outgrowth. At one level, this interpretation can be substantiated by a simple chronological accounting. Sumner's use of the term “caste,” with or without explicit reference to Caste Opposed to Christianity, is notably scarce in the years before the American Civil War (1861–5). Where the term is heavily employed, such as in his 1849 argument before the Massachusetts Supreme Court in Sarah C. Roberts v. The City of Boston, Sumner's focus is on local circumstances in which legal emancipation either had taken place or was to be counted upon. More than a century before the decision was handed down in Brown v. Board of Education, Sumner beseeched the Boston judges to see the importance of public-school integration, as one important solution to racial caste, in the following terms: “Already you have banished slavery from this Commonwealth. I call upon you now to obliterate the last of its footprints, and to banish the last of the hateful spirits in its train.”Footnote 30
Sumner's speeches of the 1860s—delivered in the Senate as well as in various other public forums—offer further, more substantive evidence that he viewed racial caste as a problem distinct from slavery itself but part of slavery's historical aftermath. In 1863 and 1864, in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, Sumner spoke on a number of subjects that properly fell within the purview of racial caste. Two of these were the exclusion of individuals from trains in Washington, DC on the basis of race and the “exclusion of colored testimony in the courts of the United States.”Footnote 31 Sumner condemned the former in moral terms, arguing that both the capital city and the United States dishonored themselves if they did not positively prohibit such discrimination in the charter that was to be granted to the Alexandria and Washington Railroad Company: “It is a disgrace to this city, and a disgrace also to the National Government, which permits it under its eyes. It is a mere offshoot of the Slavery which, happily, we have banished from Washington.”Footnote 32 Later, as debate on the issue continued, Sumner explicitly indicated that the “disgrace” in question emanated from the failure to prohibit the injustices of racial caste: “any other conclusion [than prohibiting discrimination] authorizes a corporation to establish a caste offensive to religion and humanity, injurious to a whole race now dwelling among us, and bringing shame upon our country.”Footnote 33
Of the wholesale proscription or limitation of testimony by black Americans in courts of law, Sumner declared that, “Even as applied to free colored persons, it must be considered as a relic of Slavery not yet removed from sight.”Footnote 34 He bolstered his claim by appealing to caste in the Indian subcontinent and signaling its peculiar aptness to the phenomenon at hand: “But it is in the irreligious system of Caste, as established in India, that we find the most perfect parallel.” Shortly thereafter, Sumner elaborates by citing the sanctified separation of varna groups:
Caste of India, by which the Brahmins and Sudras have been kept apart, is already repudiated by Christian civilization as “part and parcel of idolatry” … But the language with which this accomplished bishop [Bishop Heber] condemns the heathen Caste of India is not inapplicable to that other Caste in our country, which, in one of its incidents, despoils the colored person of his right to testify.Footnote 35
As I shall demonstrate shortly, it was the hierarchical and hereditary segregation of groups that Sumner took to be the key moral “parallel” between caste in India and racial caste in the United States. Yet his analysis here goes deeper by acknowledging the variant roots of these phenomena, a move which brought Sumner back to the relationship between American slavery and racial caste. Though the restricted capacity of black Americans, enslaved and free alike, to testify in court “may be properly traced to Slavery, of which it is an important ally,” it was also the case that this instance of racial caste was “founded on a reason broader than Slavery, suggested, however, by Slavery.”Footnote 36 This reason was, simply, “an incapacity attached by law to persons of color.”Footnote 37 Though a distinct phenomenon, racial caste was thus related to slavery insofar as it continued slavery's hard-edged codification of the black American's innate inferiority.
In 1869, Sumner gave a speech in the Senate entitled “Powers of Congress to Prohibit Inequality, Caste, and Oligarchy of the Skin.”Footnote 38 The point of the address was to defend a longer, more robust version of what would become the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing that race could not be an obstacle to suffrage. Arguing against those opposed to such an amendment on the basis that it would violate “State Rights,” Sumner again characterized racial caste as the “offspring” of slavery and suggested, accordingly, that defenses of the new oppression foundered on similar shoals: “Once it was Slavery; now it is Caste; and the same excuse is assigned now as then. In the name of State Rights, Slavery, with all its brood of wrong, was upheld; and now, in the name of State Rights, Caste, fruitful also in wrong, is upheld.”Footnote 39 Though they were importantly different in kind, the continuities between slavery and racial caste assured that their justifications were similarly corrupt and that their intertwined defeat was a national responsibility.
Sumner was not alone in thinking of racial caste as slavery's “offspring”; however, the insistence with which he articulated and repeated this historical claim did mark him off from other prominent voices of the time. For example, in an 1858 address entitled “Citizenship and the Spirit of Caste,” Frederick Douglass begins with an issue substantively similar to one which Sumner addressed but takes the analysis of caste in a different direction. Douglass saw, “in the exclusion of the colored man from the Sixth Avenue rail cars [in New York City], the cruel and malignant spirit of caste, which is at the foundation, and is the cause, as well as the effect of our American slave system.”Footnote 40 For the Douglass of this speech, the relationship between slavery and the “spirit of caste” was more entangled and less linear than Sumner had made out. Caste is both cause and effect. Douglass's suggestion on this score resembles that of James McCune Smith, the noted physician and abolitionist who penned the Introduction to the 1855 edition of My Bondage and My Freedom. In 1859 McCune Smith defines caste as “the general term for that feature in human institutions which isolates man from his fellow man,” and then goes on to spell out the implications of that definition for the American context: “The only drawback in our [America's] prosperity is the caste which slavery has thrown in our midst, and which is chief minister to the continuance of slavery.”Footnote 41 Here, as in the quotation from Douglass above, racial caste is closely imbricated with slavery; so much so, in fact, that it is identified as a causal factor in slavery's continuance. Sumner's argument, which clearly situates caste as following from slavery, must be understood as distinct from the more complicated accounts that thinkers like Douglass and McCune Smith ventured.
Given, then, that in Sumner's view, racial caste was a system distinct from (though continuous with) slavery, what were the defining characteristics of that system? It is in the course of articulating an answer to this question—particularly in his argument on behalf of Sarah Roberts and his 1869 address at the Boston Music Hall, entitled “The Question of Caste”—that Sumner displays a deep engagement with the content of Caste Opposed to Christianity. In these orations Sumner used the pamphlet in order to sustain the claim that any caste system possessed two main characteristics.Footnote 42 The first of these was the hierarchical separation of groups of people, marked by the extremes of “rank and privilege” at the top and “degradation and disability” at the bottom. The second was the purely hereditary nature of one's place in the order, maintained by social pressures that jealously monitored this birth status.Footnote 43 The ultimate effect of the two jointly operating mechanisms, as seen in both India and the United States, was “perpetual separation from generation to generation.”Footnote 44
Sumner was clearly struck by the sheer inequality that seemed to mark Brahmin–Sudra and Brahmin–“Pariah” (Dalit) relations. In “The Question of Caste” Sumner drew upon the basic scriptural knowledge of Hinduism that he derived from Caste Opposed to Christianity in order to explain the origins of caste to his Boston audience. He references the commentary on the purusha sukta hymn from the Rig Veda (c.1000 BCE) contained in Manu's Manava Dharmashastra (or Laws of Manu; c.100 CE), wherein the origins of the fourfold distinctions of varna are traced to the Primeval Being's bodily sacrifice: “it is recorded that the Creator caused the Brahmin, the Cshatriya, the Vaisya and the Sudra, so named from scripture, protection, wealth and labor, to proceed from his mouth, his arm, his thigh and his foot, appointing separate duties for each class.”Footnote 45 Sumner went on to ask his audience to look closely at the “two extremes” represented by the priests and the laborers. The former is venerated as “chief of the whole creation” and “engrosses the favor of the Deity,” so is accorded a divine respect: “Not for the most insufferable crime can he be touched in person or property.”Footnote 46 The latter, meanwhile, is “an object of constant contempt,” treated only instrumentally, as “he was created by the Self-existent especially to serve the Brahmin.”Footnote 47 The privileges of the Brahmin found their perverse mirrors in the codified debilitations that Sudras faced—for example, “He [the Sudra] can hold no property which a Brahmin cannot seize.”Footnote 48 This was to say nothing of the Pariah, who was without caste, illegible to the fourfold hierarchy, and thus relegated to subhuman treatment. The Pariah's very presence, Sumner therefore claims, “is contaminating. Milk, and even water, is defiled by his passing shadow and cannot be used until purified. The Brahmin sometimes puts him to death at sight. In the well-known language of our country, once applied to another people, he has no rights which a Brahmin is bound to respect.”Footnote 49
Sumner lingered too on the birth-based nature of caste status and the disciplinary measures within Indian society that kept each individual in their place. So fixed, Sumner thought, were individuals in their inherited varna categories that “[a]scent from an inferior class was absolutely impossible. As well might a vegetable become a man.”Footnote 50 This fixedness was maintained over the course of an individual's lifetime by punitive measures both hard and soft. As an example of the former, Sumner noted, “If a Sudra presumed to sit upon a Brahmin's carpet, his punishment was banishment.”Footnote 51 Of course, given Caste Opposed to Christianity's reliance on the Manava Dharmashastra, there were much more violent punishments which Sumner could, and did, cite.Footnote 52 The softer side of caste discipline, meanwhile, came in the form of restrictions on suitable marriages. Differences between groups were “perpetuated by the injunction that each should marry only in his own class, with sanguinary penalties inflicted upon any attempted amalgamation.”Footnote 53 Fully five pages of Sumner's forty-nine-page oral argument in Roberts v. City of Boston are dedicated to the reproduction of block quotations from Caste Opposed to Christianity. Each of these, in its own way, is aimed at demonstrating the pervasiveness of a moral imagination sufficiently impoverished that individuals could only view their group members as genuine equals. As one of the Tamil men, quoted by Sumner, remarked, “Caste makes a man think that he is holier than another, and that he has some inherent virtue which another has not. It makes him despise all those that are lower than himself in regard to Caste, which is not the design of God.”Footnote 54
It would be a mistake, of course, to uncritically accept—as Sumner seems to have done—Caste Opposed to Christianity as theologically, historically, and ethnographically definitive in its claims about the workings of caste in India. An extraordinarily rich literature testifies to the complicated evolution of a social phenomenon that has, in many ways, only grown more complicated in the present day.Footnote 55 Yet what is most interesting about Sumner's engagement with caste in India, and indeed what rescues this engagement from the philosophical banality of orientalism, is that Sumner took from Caste Opposed to Christianity some tools to apply sociological scrutiny to his own country. The task was neither to exoticize caste Hinduism nor to hastily construct a straw man that could be used to shame American citizens. Rather, as I have been trying to demonstrate, Sumner looked to the Indian case in order to tease out the sociological conditions that characterized any caste system, with an eye toward diagnosing and confronting the phenomenon of racial caste in the United States.
The Brahmin–Sudra and Brahmin–Pariah hierarchies were notable, then, not because they exemplified some essential savagery in the Indian character but because they helped to throw light on racial subordination in America. Sumner would thus point out that defenses of racial caste sprang from “the practical assumption, that the white man is a superior Caste not unlike the Brahmin, while the black man is an inferior Caste not unlike the Sudra, sometimes even the Pariah.”Footnote 56 Bringing to bear his argument from several years earlier in order to underline the racial inequality at stake, Sumner exclaimed, “When I consider how for a long time the African was shut out from testifying in court, even when seeking redress for the grossest outrage … [he] seems to have been little better than the Pariah.”Footnote 57 In moments such as these, Sumner used the language of caste in order to capture the starkly hierarchical separation that characterized the post-slavery relationship between white and black Americans.
Sumner offered a similar treatment of the customary practices that served to maintain the system of racial caste. Indeed, immediately after presenting his example of Sudra banishment for the “crime” of sitting upon a Brahmin's carpet, Sumner turns to the American case in the following terms: “With similar inhumanity here, the black child who goes to sit on the same benches with the white is banished, not indeed from the country, but from the school. In both cases it is the triumph of Caste. But the offence is greater with us, because, unlike the Hindoos, we acknowledge that men are born equal.”Footnote 58 There is undoubtedly a rhetorical edge at the end of Sumner's analysis here; he aims to demonstrate the hypocrisy of republican self-aggrandizement in America, given the realities of racial caste. That said, it is the shared phenomenon of policing social hierarchy, through practices like segregation in schools, that yields Sumner's conclusion that caste “triumphs” in both India and the United States. Again, then, the Indian case was a point of entry into the general phenomenon of caste, of which American racial caste was a specific manifestation.
This argumentative structure gave Sumner some flexibility. Because his analysis of Hindu caste came in the service of conceptualizing caste as a general phenomenon, it was not the case that every feature of racial caste in America had to have an Indian analogue. One further danger that Sumner perceived in the United States (vis-à-vis the disciplining features of society that perpetuated caste) but did not explore in the Indian case was caste's codification in the law—the considered incorporation of racial caste into political institutions with significant powers of enforcement. It was for this reason that Sumner focused his defense of Sarah Roberts on the concept of “equality before the law,” which he traced to French thinkers such as Diderot and d'Alembert (editors of the Encyclopédie), Condorcet, and the authors of the June 1793 Constitution.Footnote 59 Individuals may be distinct in “color and form”; they “may not readily intermingle” for indeed they “may be uninteresting or offensive to the other, precisely as individuals of the same race and color may be uninteresting or offensive to each other.” But these were wholly insufficient to justify racial caste's institutionalization. Such “discrimination can furnish no ground for any discrimination before the law.”Footnote 60 Given his background as a lawyer and subsequent political position as a Senator, it is unsurprising that Sumner was particularly insistent on this point.
If, for Sumner, the historical status of racial caste was that of an “offshoot” of slavery, and if its animating features were hierarchical separation and hereditary perpetuation, then its most pernicious effects were the violations of morality and republicanism. Though he often echoed the familiar arguments from Caste Opposed to Christianity, which deemed racial caste a violation of Christian ethics, Sumner made inventive use of other resources in order to mount the moral case from a different angle. In “The Question of Caste,” for example, he turns to the findings of social science—specifically that of ethnology,” “a science of recent origin, exhibiting the different races or varieties of man in their relations with each other, as that other science, anthropology, exhibits man in his relation to the animal world.”Footnote 61 Though Sumner takes worryingly seriously the pseudoscientific methods and claims of phrenology as a means to document human diversity, he was more convinced than not, on the basis of the evidence at hand, of the fact of an underlying, original unity.Footnote 62 Recognizing, however, that some would not be as persuaded as he was, Sumner drew upon Alexander von Humboldt's Cosmos (1845–59) in order to argue that, wherever one fell on the question of origin, “we can anchor to that other Unity, found in a common organization, a common nature, and a common destiny, being at once physical, moral and prophetic. This is the true Unity of the Human Family.”Footnote 63 Observation by simple common sense (“Look at Man on the dissecting table, and he is always the same, no matter in what color he is clad”) and confirmed by “[a]natomy, physiology, psychology, history” made eminently clear the “cosmopolitan” unity of humankind.Footnote 64 Thus the American system of racial caste was just as gross a moral violation of this empirically observable unity as it was of Christianity's ethical injunctions.
I conclude this section by turning to Sumner's argument that racial caste was anathema to republican government. Though he condemned the antirepublican character of racial caste subjugation in a number of settings, Sumner's arguments took on particular clarity and force in a lengthy 1866 speech before the Senate, entitled “The Equal Rights of All: The Great Guaranty and Present Necessity, for the Sake of Security, and to Maintain a Republican Government” (hereafter “Equal Rights of All”).Footnote 65 As with his 1869 speech on the “Powers of Congress,” Sumner's concern was with the importance of black American suffrage in particular and their political and civil equality in general, as well as the “duty and powers” of Congress to legislate against impingements upon this equality. Most relevant for present purposes, however, is Sumner's theoretical discussion of the “republican form of government” and the relationship of racial caste to such a government.
Sumner began the second section of “Equal Rights of All” by framing his argument within the terms of Article 4, Section 4 of the Constitution: “[W]e must declare that a State, which, in the foundation of its government, sets aside ‘the consent of the governed,’ which imposes taxation without representation, which discards the principle of Equal Rights, and lodges power exclusively with an Oligarchy, Aristocracy, Caste, or Monopoly, cannot be recognized as a ‘republican form of government,’ according to the requirement of American institutions.”Footnote 66 As is indicated by his invocation of the Constitution and the necessities specific to “American institutions,” Sumner explicitly tied his conception of republicanism to the republic—and to the ideas and actions of the Founders in particular.Footnote 67 On the basis of extended exegesis of the Founders’ exchanges during the American Revolution, their formal writings, their public opinions, and their political acts, Sumner arrived at the following, two-pronged, “American definition of a Republican form of government”: “first, that all men are equal in rights, and, secondly, that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.”Footnote 68 Eschewing any real skepticism of the sanctity of the founding ideals, Sumner adopted what we might call an inclusive, perfectible conception of American republicanism. This was premised, first of all, on the dual requirements of equal rights and consent. In addition, Sumner's vision of American republicanism was linked to a deep conviction that for this founding ideal to be made good, it needed to be expanded in order to include the freed slaves.
Here again, we may contrast the linearity of Sumner's account with the more complex picture that Douglass laid out. In a remarkable speech that was delivered in multiple cities during the exact same year as Sumner's “Equal Rights of All,” Douglass argued that while he could “speak respectfully of the Constitution” and the Founding Fathers, he was also obliged to recognize their very human failings.Footnote 69 This obligation came, Douglass said, from his bone-deep commitment to republicanism and his recognition that the Constitution possessed obviously antirepublican elements:
[Your fathers] gave us a Constitution made in the shadow of slavery and of monarchy, and in its character it partakes in some of its features of both those unfavorable influences. Now, as I have said, I concede nothing to those who hold to the inherent weakness of our government or a republican form of government. The point of weakness or the features that weaken our government are exotic. They have been incorporated and interposited from other forms of government, and it is the business of this day and this generation to purge them from the Constitution.Footnote 70
By way of specifying what that “purging” process should entail, Douglass went on to introduce and defend several constitutional changes that went well beyond anything Sumner ever advocated. These were primarily focused on the dramatic reduction of presidential power—unsurprising, given Douglass's estimation of Andrew Johnson—and included the wholesale abolition of the following: patronage, the veto, the “two-term principle,” the power to pardon, and the office of the vice president. For Douglass, the point of such radical propositions, tongue-in-cheek though some of them may have been, was to rid the Constitution of its deeply entrenched autocratic and antiblack elements. Merely expanding present-day American republicanism, without foundationally amending it, would be insufficient to secure the true emancipation of the freedmen.
With Douglass, then, one may justifiably take issue with the rather ingenuous political vision that Sumner propounded. That said, if we grant Sumner's conception of American republicanism and its capacity for change, it is difficult to question his subsequent logical train, for the system of racial caste (as he conceived it) stood in obvious opposition to such a form of government. This is why Sumner would assert in “Equal Rights of All” that “caste exists only in defiance of the first principles of Christianity and the first principles of a republic. It is heathenism in religion and tyranny in government.”Footnote 71 How precisely did he sustain the latter, political, claim? In short, by relating racial caste to the two pillars of American republicanism. The inequality of rights instantiated by denying suffrage to black Americans meant the denial of that “right by which the citizen is assured in all other rights.”Footnote 72 Alternatively stated: a polity in which black Americans enjoyed fewer political rights than other citizens was one in which a particular group went unrepresented; the government therefore failed to gather the full consent of its citizens, and the esteemed label of “republic” therefore could not be justifiably applied.Footnote 73 What obtained instead was, as Sumner would often put it, a false aristocracy: an “oligarchy of the skin.”
Abolition
Sumner's advocacy for the abolition of slavery was extensive and well documented. Though “The Crime against Kansas,” Sumner's scathing 1856 polemic that purportedly provoked his “caning,” remains his most famous oration on this score, a speech from four years later—Sumner's first after recovering from the attack—stands out in its systematicity. In the latter, delivered before the Young Men's Republican Union of New York, Sumner listed “five essential elements of Slavery” and asserted that it was the necessary duty of the Republican Party, in light of the condemnable elements of slavery, to outlaw the entire system or “overthrow the Slave Oligarchy.”Footnote 74 I shall argue here, however, that this sort of argument was not exhaustive of Sumner's abolitionism. As he declared in his eulogy for Lincoln, “The same national authority that destroyed Slavery must see that this other pretension is not permitted to survive…”Footnote 75 There is good reason to think that Sumner's conception of abolition is better understood more expansively—in particular, as including the abolition of racial caste. As I hope to show, the benefits of emphasizing Sumner's intent to abolish racial caste include both a more accurate sense of what sort of political change Sumner was after (particularly during Reconstruction) and a new angle on the contributions of this nineteenth-century abolitionist to the history and theory of American democracy.
What did it mean to abolish the American system of racial caste? Contrary to the ostensibly negative thrust of the word “abolition,” Sumner's project is better understood as the attempt to realize certain affirmative goals. These goals had specifically to do with the relationships between black and white Americans in civil society and the political agency of black Americans. As such they roughly correspond with the second and third dimensions of racial caste elaborated in the previous section (hierarchical separation and hereditary perpetuation, violation of republicanism) and, in different ways, point to the intimate connection in Sumner's thought between the abolition of racial caste and the cultivation of democracy.Footnote 76
Elizabeth Anderson's reading of Sumner in The Imperative of Integration provides a helpful point of entry into the first goal. Anderson argues that Sumner “linked social rights of interracial association in civil society to republican government” by insisting that such a form of government “requires that citizens from all walks of life discuss matters of public interest together , as equals.”Footnote 77 Sumner, in short, must be understood as emphasizing the associational character of political life and decision making in a representative democracy. He was, to use contemporary terminology, no aggregative democrat; no believer in the sufficiency of bare-bones decisional processes such as majority rule. While Anderson's reconstruction of Sumner on this point is undoubtedly correct, I think it is possible to add historical and interpretive detail by keeping in mind his assessment of the social pathologies of caste.
As was demonstrated in the previous section, Sumner roundly condemned the perpetuation of norms in civil society that treated black Americans like Sudras and Dalits insofar as they were regarded as innately inferior, polluted, and thus deserving of “banishment.” To abolish racial caste, along this dimension, meant the cultivation of radically different associational norms. Sumner was often clearest and most persuasive when depicting the nature of relations that ought to obtain in “common”—that is to say, racially integrated—schools. In 1849 he argued for the necessity of such schools in the following terms:
The law contemplates not only that all shall be taught, but that all shall be taught together. They are not only to receive equal quantities of knowledge, but all are to receive it in the same way. All are to approach the same common fountain together; nor can there be any exclusive source for individual or class. The school is the little world where the child is trained for the larger world of life. It is the microcosm preparatory to the macrocosm, and therefore it must cherish and develop the virtues and the sympathies needed in the larger world. And since, according to our institutions, all classes, without distinction of color, meet in the performance of civil duties, so should they all, without distinction of color, meet in the school …Footnote 78
Several elements are at play in this passage. First, Sumner makes the case for strict pedagogical equality, the idea that children of different races should meet as equals in the activities of learning and inquiring about their shared world. That Sumner took education extremely seriously is evident from both his biography and his work. As such it is not unreasonable to think that, in his view, there would be something nearly sacred about black and white children approaching “the same common fountain together.” Recalling Sumner's discussion of “the black child who goes to sit on the same benches with the white,” we can characterize his argument for pedagogical equality as a poignant reversal of the sanctified barriers of racial caste.
At the same time, Sumner invokes the consequences of integrated education by naming the school as that “little world” where children come to acquire the social habits befitting American institutions. Notably, he links the idea of sympathy to that of civic duty, suggesting that particular sorts of sympathy are in fact necessary to the functioning of American republicanism. These we may take to involve an active, if not wholly perfectible, understanding of the interests of those unlike oneself—the kind of understanding that obtains between individuals because of the knowledge that they are part of the same democratic collective. As with pedagogical equality, the act of understanding the lives and plights of others, in Sumner's context, meant radically reconfiguring the lines of racial caste. Those who were previously unsympathetic, or perhaps only pitiable, were now equals, with the attendant capacity to elicit complex emotions in the previously superior. It is not surprising, given this vein in Sumner, that he was an admirer and even self-professed emulator of Edmund Burke, another statesman who pled for “justice to strangers.”Footnote 79
I have dwelt at some length on the substance of Sumner's oral argument in Roberts v. The City of Boston. Attending additionally to the wider historical context in which Sumner intervened enables us to see that his understanding of interracial association-as-abolition was importantly entangled with black abolitionist thought and activity in Boston. The decade preceding the Sarah Roberts “test case” featured not only the concerted attempt to desegregate exclusively white schools but a heated controversy over the Smith School, an institution founded for the education of black children. In the mid-1830s, the Beacon Hill-located school was placed in the charge of a new headmaster, Abner Forbes. Though white, Forbes's appointment seems to have been, in the words of Donald M. Jacobs, “an obvious attempt to please and perhaps even appease Boston's black population since Forbes was an active and ardent abolitionist.”Footnote 80 By the early 1840s, however, conditions had changed. A group of black parents filed a formal complaint against Forbes, charging him with physical abuse, dereliction of professional duty, disrespect towards his students’ parents, and harboring and expressing skepticism about the intellectual abilities of black children.Footnote 81 The political result of the Smith School controversy was not just a sustained (and successful) campaign to boycott that particular school, but a movement to abolish separate schools altogether. It was as an ally to this movement that Sumner stepped forward in Roberts v. The City of Boston.
Within black abolitionist circles in Boston, the key leader in these school-related events was William Cooper Nell, a figure whom Stephen Kantrowitz describes as “as close to an integrationist ideologue as Boston's black community produced.”Footnote 82 Unsurprisingly, Nell and Sumner frequently corresponded and their letters display some of the sentiments typical of shared political struggle—for example, solidarity and gratitude. In an 1850 missive just before the Roberts decision, Nell reassured Sumner, “The People repose confidence in you and are constantly praying for a successful result of your labors.”Footnote 83 And in the same year but immediately after the disappointing juridical outcome, Nell forwarded Sumner the formal resolution, approved by the committee for the advocacy of equal school rights, which thanked both Sumner and Morris “for their faithful, generous and devoted efforts” on behalf “the colored citizens of Boston.”Footnote 84
More to the point for present purposes, Nell articulated ideas strikingly similar to those that made up Sumner's defense of interracial association. In an extraordinarily moving speech to black activists and citizens, delivered at an 1855 meeting in his honor after public-school segregation was formally abolished in Boston, Nell made a case for the quasi-religious beauty of children of all backgrounds learning and playing together: “In my daily walks I behold the companionship, in studies and healthful glee, of boys and girls of all colors and races in these temples of learning, so justly a theme of pride to every citizen; sights and sound indeed to me chief among ten thousand, and together lovely.”Footnote 85 Nell, like Sumner—possibly influenced by Sumner—perceived and fiercely articulated the intrinsic good of interracial association in the school. Nell also linked interracial education with civic republican duty, asserting in a different speech, “Every friend of law and order should be in favor of allowing all classes of citizens to participate equally, as well as generally, in the privileges of our public schools; for our republican government is founded upon the general intelligence of our citizens.”Footnote 86 The black abolitionist's invocation of “law and order,” a startling phrase for contemporary readers, was clearly bound up with his commitment to republican self-government. Interracial education would prepare citizens to engage in the collaborative crafting and evaluation of laws as well as the concomitant maintenance of social order—both tasks very much at the heart of the republican project.
In sum, Sumner's argument for the abolition of caste, understood as interracial association in civil society, was intimately bound up with black abolitionist thought and practice in Boston. Through his legal advocacy and interactions with figures like Nell, Sumner both borrowed from and contributed to vibrant debates about the attractions and benefits of an integrated civil society. At this point, however, it is worth offering a qualifying note. The arguments that Sumner propounded do not imply that he was a simple, romantic democrat who did not take heed of subjective difference and conflict. Indeed, during Roberts v. The City of Boston Sumner suggested that “the Ethiopian and the Caucasian … may be uninteresting or offensive to the other, precisely as individuals of the same race and color may be uninteresting or offensive to each other.”Footnote 87 Additionally, in his 1872 address “Equality before the Law Protected by National Statute,” Sumner elaborated his argument that interracial association in civil society was not a question of personal companionship:
Each person, whether Senator or citizen, is always free to choose who shall be his friend, his associate, his guest … But when he leaves his “castle” and goes abroad, this independence is at an end. He walks the streets, but always subject to the prevailing law of Equality; nor can he appropriate the sidewalk to his exclusive use, driving into the gutter all whose skin is less white than his own.Footnote 88
It was not, Sumner insisted, a matter of forcing one's company onto others—a position that marks him as an early philosophical corrective to Hannah Arendt's infamously skewed reading of school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas.Footnote 89 Rather, the point was to eliminate the aristocratic pretensions of racial caste and replace them with a sober-minded interracial equality in civil society. If racial caste was something of an American social theology, then Sumner aimed to strip it of its enchantments.
Eric Foner has noted, “Radicalism when Lincoln died was defined above all by an insistence upon black suffrage as the sine qua non of Reconstruction.”Footnote 90 Sumner harbored this commitment just as fervently—if not more so—than his fellow Radical Republicans, and it is here that we can discern the other horn of Sumner's conception of the abolition of racial caste. This was a defense of both the political agency of black American men and the necessity of giving this agentic capacity space to flourish.Footnote 91 Sumner, in other words, may be understood as offering rebuttals to two common questions pertaining to the relationship between freed slaves and the American republic: could these individuals be responsible political actors? And even if they could, was it not possible that their political participation could have dangerous consequences for the republic?
Sumner had a favored historical example when asserting the effectiveness of black Americans as political actors: Toussaint Louverture (1743–1803), the French general and leader of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). In “The Question of Caste,” he speaks of Toussaint in the following terms:
But it is in a slave of the West Indies whose parents were stolen from Africa, that we find an example of genius and wisdom, courage and character, with all the elements of a general and ruler. The name borne by this remarkable person as slave was Toussaint … More than Agamemnon or any chief before Troy,—more than Spartacus, the renowned leader of the servile insurrection which made Rome tremble,—he was a hero, endowed with a higher nature and better faculties; but he was an African, jet black in complexion.Footnote 92
Similarly, in “Equal Rights of All,” Sumner characterizes Toussaint as “a black of unmixed blood, who placed himself at the head of his race, showing the genius of war, and the genius of statesmanship also. Under his magnanimous rule the beautiful island began to smile once more.”Footnote 93 Philosophically, Sumner's invocation of Toussaint served at least two purposes. First, the Haitian general was a counterexample to “sciolistic” claims that people of African descent were innately inferior and incapable of meeting the demands of civilization. Such arguments were wrongheaded or simply made in bad faith because they used misleading empirical circumstances as their point of evaluation. That is, they concluded that the best to which people of African descent could aspire would be revealed in the degrading conditions of slavery. Toussaint, by contrast, offered a more accurate vision of the civilizational capacity of African diasporic peoples: “The height that he reached is the measure of his people … this is the true line for judgment, and not the low-water mark of Slavery, which is always adopted by the apologists for Caste. Toussaint l'Ouverture is the actual standard by which the African must be judged.”Footnote 94
Second, Toussaint demonstrated that people of African descent possessed the political virtue par excellence—namely the ability to rule—and this strongly recommended that they be awarded the right to vote. As one sees in the quotations above, Sumner scarcely mentions Toussaint without emphasizing his qualities as a “genius” in the sphere of politics, often by making favorable comparisons between the Haitian leader and the political heroes of Western antiquity. The historical point that Africa had produced an individual of demonstrable ability in the arts of rule led neatly into the suggestion that, if those of African descent could participate politically, they could swiftly acquire the knowledge and skills necessary for republican self-rule. “The ballot,” Sumner would therefore claim, “is schoolmaster … The freedman already knows his friend by the unerring instinct of the heart. Give him the ballot, and he will be educated into the principles of government. Deny him the ballot, and he will continue alien in knowledge as in rights.”Footnote 95 Sumner underlined the point that in self-governing polities, citizens must learn by doing and put this principle to work by countering the white supremacist claim that freed slaves could not learn and therefore should not vote. As exemplar of black political genius, Toussaint inaugurated the argument.
Sumner also turned the fear of black American suffrage on its head by suggesting that the more threatening course of action would be to continue denying the right to vote. In several speeches he argued that “[e]nfranchisement is not only intrinsically just, but necessary to the safety of the Republic.”Footnote 96 Sumner substantiated the latter claim by drawing on psychological considerations: the continuation of abuses resembling those of slavery—including the deferment of rights that could prevent some of these abuses—would engender violent resistance. As he put it, “the freedman, though forbearing and slow to anger, will not always submit to outrage. He will resist. Resistance will be organized. And here begins the terrible war of races foreseen by Jefferson, where God, in all His attributes, has none which can take part with the oppressor.”Footnote 97 Though clearly keen to ward off another war, given the “measureless calamity” that would be sure to ensue, Sumner adds a dose of moral sympathy to his depiction of this hypothetical violent insurrection.Footnote 98 If a race war did break out, God himself could not justifiably side with the white perpetuators of racial caste. It is also worth noting that, in characteristic fashion, Sumner's psychological data were backed by historical examples—specifically, the Haitian Revolution and the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica. For Sumner these were instances, instructive from the perspective of political decision making and useful from the perspective of rhetoric, of the righteous anger that could break out against racial caste. He thus notes that the “freedmen among us are not unlike the freedmen of San Domingo or Jamaica; they have the same ‘organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions,’ and, above all, the same sense of wrong, and the same revenge.”Footnote 99 White Americans had only to fear the consequences of continuing political oppression.
It was in light of these considerations that Sumner declared the ballot not just schoolmaster, but peacemaker and reconciler. The right to vote conduced to peace because it would create a balance of standing between former master and former slave that precluded violent coercion and its attendant consequences. Adopting a romantic register, Sumner would declare that the ballot was “god-like in transforming power alike on master and slave! The master will recognize the new citizen. The slave will stand with tranquil self-respect in presence of the master. Brute force disappears. Distrust is at an end.”Footnote 100 But peace, as mere modus vivendi, was not enough. Sumner also hoped for reconciliation, by which he meant “harmonious” conditions in which “parties long estranged” could be kind enough to each other such that they could live and work together. He thought the ballot could help deliver this more ambitious state of affairs, a position that was the moral psychological counterpart to the claim that continued denial of suffrage would result in violent uprising. His mode of expression on this score, however, was more assertion than argument: “Unquestionably the ballot promises this great boon [reconciliation], because it brings all into natural relations of justice, without which reconciliation is a vain thing.”Footnote 101 One gets the sense that Sumner was thinking along an extended timeline here, confident that the reciprocal relationship between strong legal protections and the political agency of freedmen would yield a flourishing interracial democracy.
In some important senses, however, time was not on Sumner's side. He passed away in 1874, though not before enjoining his allies to pass further legislation guaranteeing civil rights for freedmen. As Du Bois writes, Sumner
was taken ill in March, 1874; at his death-bed stood three Negroes: Frederick Douglass, George T. Downing and Sumner Wormley, together with distinguished senators and officials. Three times he said hoarsely and in a tone of earnest entreaty: “You must take care of the rights bill—my bill, the civil rights bill—don't let it fail!” This was his last public message.Footnote 102
That bill would eventually be passed, largely in deference to the legacy of the fallen abolitionist, as the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Among other things, it aimed to cultivate the civil-society relations between black and white Americans which Sumner had identified as essential to democratic health. In Anderson's words, the bill “guarantee[d] the social rights of blacks by prohibiting discrimination and segregation in public accommodations.”Footnote 103 Famously, though, in 1883 the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 as unconstitutional, claiming that it gave to Congress more interventional power than could be justified under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.
This kind of thinking, which concertedly limited the possibility of federal government action against the social and political oppression of black Americans, would not face a substantial challenge until Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Tellingly, this was when both Sumner's ideas and the use of “racial caste” as an analytic category capable of capturing important truths about the black American experience emerged anew. For example, in the summer of 1953 the Thurgood Marshall-led NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund drafted a 235-page brief in response to five questions the Supreme Court posed about the relationship between public-school segregation and the Fourteenth Amendment. Dealing in turn with the intentions of the framers of the amendment, the legitimate interpretation of the amendment, the rate at which “Negro children” should be admitted to schools, and how the Court should decree desegregation, the questions posed a formidable research task. Those tasked with meeting this challenge—an astonishing group of academics and lawyers—drew significantly from Sumner. They not only claimed that “The Fourteenth Amendment was intended to destroy all caste and color legislation in the United States, including racial segregation,” but went so far as to say that the attachment of concrete rights to the Declaration's “abstraction” that “all men are created equal” was “Sumner's outstanding contribution to American law.”Footnote 104 If, then, Sumner ran out of time in the nineteenth century, it does seem that his conceptions of racial caste and abolition-as-associational democracy gained fresh currency in the twentieth. In that respect, his “outstanding contribution” is not just to American law but to the intellectual history of the relationship between race and democracy in America.
Acknowledgments
I thank Paulo Faria, Bryan Garsten, Alisa Kessel, Emma Stone Mackinnon, Karuna Mantena, Vatsal Naresh, Susan Stokes, Larry Svabek, and Rebecca Traber, as well as participants and audiences at the 2019 American Political Science Association's Transnational Violence and Vigilance panel, the 2019 Association for Political Theory's Racial Terror, Revolt, and Abolitionism panel, and the 2019 Democracy: Genealogies, Concepts, and Practices workshop hosted at the University of the Western Cape. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers and the editors of Modern Intellectual History for comments and questions that greatly improved this essay.
