This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [1]
The point at issue was, at bottom, simple enough: how to legislate so that Kansas might someday become a state. But Kansas was a symbol rather than a territory. Men saw what they feared and hated, concentrated on its wide empty plains, and as they stared they were losing the ability to see virtue in compromise and conciliation. The man on the other side, whatever one’s vantage point, was beginning to look ominously alien. He could not easily be dealt with, and perhaps it was best simply to lash out at him. In the charged atmosphere thus created the lightest act could be fateful. All of the things that were slipping beyond hope of easy solution — sectional enmities, economic antagonisms, varying interpretations of the American dream, the tragic unendurable race problem itself — all of these, somehow, might hinge on what was done about Kansas, so that the wrong phrase in an enacting clause could mean earth’s best hope lost forever.
In Senator Sumner’s view the wrong phrase was on the verge of adoption. The bill which the Senate was about to pass would, as he saw it, mean that Kansas must eventually become a slave state. In addition, it would give a great deal of aid and comfort to slavery’s advocates, wherever they were. It was not to be thought of calmly; it was not merely wrong, it was an actual crime. Furthermore, it was no common crime; it was (he solemnly assured the Senate) a fearful thing, “the crime against nature, from which the soul recoils, and which language refuses to describe.” Yet if language could not describe it the senator could, and he would do so.
He was a man of breeding and education, given to much study of the classics; and he stood now in the Senate chamber, looking imperiously about him as one who has glimpsed the tables of the law on the mountaintop, and he dwelt extensively on “the rape of a virgin territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of slavery.” The South, he said, was guilty of a “depraved longing for a new slave state, the hideous offspring of such a crime.” Force had been used, he declared, “in compelling Kansas to this pollution.”1
The desk in front of Senator Sumner was empty. It belonged to Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, and when Sumner first became a senator, white-haired Butler had been pleasant and cordial — so much so that Sumner wrote to a friend that he had learned, from the old gentleman’s kindness, “to shun harsh and personal criticism of those from whom I differ.” But that had been years ago, when men from Massachusetts and South Carolina could still exchange courtesies in the Senate chamber; and in any case Sumner was always ready to denounce even a close friend, and in the most unmeasured terms, if he suspected that the friend had fallen into error. Butler was a spokesman for slavery, he had had his part in the crime against nature, and the fascinating exercise of discussing political opposition in terms of sexual depravity could be carried on — by this bookish man, still unmarried at forty-five — with Butler as the target. Sumner addressed himself to the absent Butler.
The South Carolina senator considered himself a chivalrous knight, but Sumner had seen the truth: “He has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight — I mean the harlot slavery. For her his tongue is always profuse with words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this senator.”
There was quite a bit more of this, ranging all the way from Senator Butler to the ancient Egyptians, “who worshipped divinities in brutish forms,” with due