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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2021
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.
1 Important contributions to this literature include: Anderson, Elizabeth, The Imperative of Integration (Princeton, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bromell, Nicholas, The Time Is Always Now: Black Political Thought and the Transformation of US Democracy (Oxford, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the commentaries by John Stauffer, Manisha Sinha, and Darryl Pinckney to Andrew Delbanco, The Abolitionist Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Gooding-Williams, Robert, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-modern Political Thought in America (Cambridge, MA, 2009)Google Scholar, Chs. 5–6; Gregory Laski, Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery (Oxford, 2017); McDaniel, W. Caleb, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge, 2013)Google Scholar; Olson, Joel, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis, 2004); Neil Roberts, ed., A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass (Lexington, 2018)Google Scholar; Rogers, Melvin, “David Walker and the Political Power of the Appeal,” Political Theory 43/2 (2015), 208–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sinha, Manisha, The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, 2016)Google Scholar; Turner, Jack, “Emerson, Slavery, and Citizenship,” Raritan 28/2 (2008), 127–46Google Scholar; Volk, Kyle G., Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (Oxford, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; For a perspective that subtly elucidates the potential dangers of drawing from abolitionist thinking see Delbanco's contribution to The Abolitionist Imagination.
2 Blue, Frederick J., Charles Sumner and the Conscience of the North (Arlington Heights, IL, 1994)Google Scholar; David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of Civil War (New York, 1960); Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (New York, 1970). A notable exception to the biographical bent (and a salutary historiographical corrective to Donald's accounts) is Anne-Marie Taylor, Young Charles Sumner and the Legacy of the American Enlightenment, 1811–1851 (Amherst, 2001).
3 For a thorough account of this episode see Sinha, Manisha, “The Caning of Charles Sumner: Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War,” Journal of the Early Republic 23/2 (2003), 233–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 This aspect of Sumner's thought has been mentioned previously, but never before explored in detail. See Immerwahr, Daniel, “Caste or Colony? Indianizing Race in the United States,” Modern Intellectual History 4/2 (2007), 275–301CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 277; Grinsell, Scott, “‘The Prejudice of Caste’: The Misreading of Justice Harlan and the Ascendency of Anticlassification,” Michigan Journal of Race & Law 15 (2010), 317–67Google Scholar; and Nico Slate, Lord Cornwallis Is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA, 2019), 105–6.
5 Two places where Sumner discusses the 1857 Rebellion are “Prudence in Our Foreign Relations” (1863) in The Works of Charles Sumner, vol. 7 (Gale Cengage Learning, 2019; first published Boston, 1870–83), 7: 257–62; and “National Affairs at Home and Abroad” (1869) in The Works of Charles Sumner, 13: 98–131. Scholarship that has documented the broader nineteenth-century American abolitionist reception of information about India (especially the 1857 Rebellion) includes Gray, Elizabeth Kelly, “‘Whisper to Him the Word “India”’: Trans-Atlantic Critics and American Slavery, 1830–1860,” Journal of the Early Republic 28/3 (2008), 379–406CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bilwakesh, Nikhil, “‘Their faces Were Like So Many of the Same Sort at Home’: American Responses to the Indian Rebellion of 1857,” American Periodicals 21/1 (2011), 1–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Florio, Christopher M., “From Poverty to Slavery: Abolitionists, Overseers, and the Global Struggle for Labor in India,” Journal of American History 102/2 (2016), 1005–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For accounts of missionary writing on caste in India see Bernard Cohn, “Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and Culture,” in Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi, 1987), 143–8; and Susan M. Ryan, “India and U.S. Cultures of Reform: Caste as Keyword,” in Anupama Arora and Rajender Kaur, eds., India in the American Imaginary: 1780s–1880s (Cambridge, 2017), 199–229.
6 One of the further contributions of the article, then, is to add historical context to contemporary applications of the caste–race analogy. The most prominent of these applications is Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (New York, 2020). Though Wilkerson mentions nineteenth- and twentieth-century conceptualizations of race in terms of caste, the bulk of her book aims to explain, through nonfiction narrative, why present-day racial hierarchy in America should be understood as a caste system and combated on those terms. My hope is that this article helps clarify the intellectual historical origins of a project like Wilkerson's.
7 Grinsell, “‘The Prejudice of Caste’,”; Ryan, “Caste as Keyword.”
8 Ryan, “Caste as Keyword,” 200, notes that “a keyword search of the American Periodicals database from 1813—when the first American Christian missionaries went to India—through the end of the century yields over 30,000 hits.”
9 Joseph Roberts, ed., Caste, In Its Religious and Civil Character, Opposed to Christianity (London, 1847).
10 Beaglehold, J. H., “The Indian Christians: A Study of a Minority,” Modern Asian Studies 1/1 (1967), 59–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 60.
11 Elijah Hoole, “Preface,” in Roberts, Caste Opposed to Christianity, iii.
12 Joseph Roberts, “Caste,” in Roberts, Caste Opposed to Christianity, 10–32, at 21.
13 P. Rajahgopaul, “A Discussion on Caste in the Free Church of Scotland's Institution, Madras, on Tuesday, November 25th, and Following Days,” in Roberts, Caste Opposed to Christianity, 63–132, at 88.
14 Roberts, Caste Opposed to Christianity, 32–62. Several practices came in for particularly detailed documentation and severe critique. These included the poor treatment of “young Christian widows,” which the report's authors attributed to caste; the reluctance of even Christians who had nominally renounced caste to eat, drink, or associate with “Pariahs” or allow them to enter their homes; the continuation of matrimonial practices that the authors associated with Hinduism; and the segregation of caste groups, sometimes authorized by reverends, while worshipping in chapels.
15 B. R. Ambedkar, “Annihilation of Caste with a Reply to Mahatma Gandhi,” in Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, vol. 1, ed. Vasant Moon (Bombay, 1979), 72.
16 Roberts, “Caste,” in Caste Opposed to Christianity, 22.
17 For a helpful discussion of Morris's activism see Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York, 2012), Chs. 4–5.
18 John's father, William Jay, was a New York judge and president of the New York Anti-Slavery Society. His grandfather, the original John Jay, was one of the authors of the Federalist Papers, the second governor of New York, and the first chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.
19 Charles Sumner, “To John Jay,” in The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, vol. 1, 1830–1859, ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer (Boston, 1990), 294.
20 John Jay, Caste and Slavery in the American Church (New York, 1843), 8.
21 These facts, too, we learn from a letter that Sumner sent to Jay—this one in 1843. The letter's first paragraph reads as follows: “It was only this morning that I learned from Longfellow that I was indebted to you for the most interesting pamphlet on ‘Caste & Slavery in the Church,’ which I had the honor of receiving some days ago, marked ‘from the Author.’ I lose no time in expressing to you my sincere pleasure in being remembered by you in this way &, allow me to say, my higher gratification that the slave has in you so able & earnest an advocate.” Sumner, “To John Jay,” in The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, vol. 1, 1830–1859, 129.
22 Jay, Caste and Slavery in the American Church, 8.
23 For an excellent analysis of Crummell's intellectual background and original political thought, see Peter Wirzbicki, “Alexander Crummell on Coleridge and the Politics of Abolitionist Selfhood,” Modern Intellectual History (FirstView 2019), at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244319000349.
24 Sinha, The Slave's Cause, 304. It was not Crummell's first engagement with the Colored American. About a month and a half before the newspaper published Crummell's article about his rejection from the General Theological Seminary, it announced that Crummell “has been appointed Travelling Agent for this paper in the Eastern States.” “Mr. Alexander Crummell,” Colored American, 9 Nov. 1839, 3.
25 Alexander Crummell, “Case of Bishop Onderdonk and Mr. Crummell,” Colored American, 21 Dec. 1839.
26 Wirzbicki, “Crummell on Coleridge and the Politics of Abolitionist Selfhood,” 11, 20.
27 “Hindoo Caste,” Colored American, 11 Nov. 1837.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Charles Sumner, “Equality before the Law: Unconstitutionality of Separate Colored Schools in Massachusetts” (1849), in The Works of Charles Sumner, 2: 327–76, at 373.
31 Charles Sumner, “Exclusion of Witnesses on Account of Color” (1864), in The Works of Charles Sumner, 8: 176–7.
32 Charles Sumner, “Opening of the Street Cars to Colored Persons” (1864) in The Works of Charles Sumner, 8: 103–17, at 105.
33 Ibid., 110.
34 Sumner, “Exclusion of Witnesses,” 201.
35 Ibid., 203–4. Here Sumner refers not just to Caste Opposed to Christianity but also to an earlier text penned by Bishop Heber, entitled Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India (1829).
36 Sumner, “Exclusion of Witnesses,” 212.
37 Ibid., emphasis in original.
38 Another address of the 1860s in which Sumner repeats his argument regarding the relationship between slavery and racial caste is an 1865 eulogy to Abraham Lincoln, delivered in Boston. For reasons of space, I have forgone an extended exegesis of this text.
39 Charles Sumner, “Powers of Congress to Prohibit Inequality, Caste, and Oligarchy of the Skin” (1869), in The Works of Charles Sumner, 13: 36–7.
40 Frederick Douglass, “Citizenship and the Spirit of Caste,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 3, 1855–63, ed. John W. Blassingame (New Haven, 1985), 208–13, at 209.
41 James McCune Smith, “Civilization: Its Dependence on Physical Circumstances,” in The Works of James McCune Smith: Black Intellectual and Abolitionist, ed. John Stauffer (New York, 2006), 261–2.
42 It bears mentioning again that although these orations were separated by twenty years, they were both addressed to contexts in which the formal abolition of slavery had taken place and, therefore, the issue to confront (in Sumner's view) was racial caste.
43 Charles Sumner, The Question of Caste (Boston, 1869), 7–8.
44 Ibid., 7.
45 Ibid., 8. For a helpful overview of the relationship between the purusha sukta and the caste system see Sharma, Arvind, “The Purusasukta: Its Relation to the Caste System,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 21/3 (1978), 294–303CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
46 Sumner, Question of Caste, 8.
47 Ibid., 9.
48 Ibid., 9.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 8.
51 Sumner, “Equality before the Law,” 352.
52 For example, “for contumelious words to a Brahmin it is an iron style, ten fingers long, thrust red-hot into the mouth, and for offering instruction to a Brahmin, it is nothing less than hot oil poured into mouth and ears.” Sumner, Question of Caste, 9.
53 Ibid., 8.
54 Sumner, “Equality before the Law,” 356. It is worth emphasizing that Sumner's quotations included those of the young Tamil converts, who, he argues, “denounce Caste as Jefferson denounced the despotism of Slavery.” Ibid., 355. Whatever the persuasiveness of that claim, it is somewhat astonishing to read of Sumner asking the justices of Massachusetts highest court to “Listen to the voice of a Hindoo.” Ibid., 355.
55 For a flavor of this literature see Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge, 1999); Cohn, “Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and Culture”; Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, 2001); Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, trans. Mark Sainsbury, Louis Dumont, and Basia Gulati (Chicago, 1980); Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley, 2009).
56 Sumner, Question of Caste, 10.
57 Ibid., 10.
58 Sumner, “Equality before the Law,” 352.
59 Ibid., 331–40.
60 Ibid., 357.
61 Sumner, Question of Caste, 11.
62 To take a few examples of where Sumner falls on the question of origin: “The ancient Sanskrit, sometimes called the most elaborate of human dialects, has yielded its secret to philological research, and now stands forth the mother tongue of the European nations. It is difficult to measure the importance of this revelation; for … it increases our difficulty in accepting any postulate of original diversity.” Ibid., 13–14. “[W]hatever may be the difficulties from supposing a common centre of creation, there are greater still in supposing plural centres,—that it is easier to understand one creation than many.” Ibid., 14. “And thus are we brought back to the conclusion so often announced, that unity of origin must not be set aside simply because existing varieties of man cannot be sufficiently explained by known laws, operating during that brief period which we call history.” Ibid., 16.
63 Ibid., 17.
64 Ibid., 17.
65 Charles Sumner, “The Equal Rights of All: The Great Guaranty and Present Necessity, for the Sake of Security, and to Maintain a Republican Government” (1866), in The Works of Charles Sumner, 10: 115–270. This, incidentally, is a speech that Du Bois quotes at length in Black Reconstruction and introduces in the following terms: “Charles Sumner was at the time fifty-five years of age, handsome, but heavy of carriage, a scholar and gentleman, no leader of men but a leader of thought, and one of the finest examples of New England culture and American courage. His speech laid down a Magna Charta of democracy in America.” W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: The Free Press, 1992; first published 1935), 193. For an understanding of the conceptualization of caste in Black Reconstruction see Powers, Allison, “Tragedy Made Flesh: Constitutional Lawlessness in Du Bois's Black Reconstruction,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34/1 (2014), 106–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Sumner's other analyses of the relationship between racial caste subjugation and republicanism see also Charles Sumner, “The Republican Party: Its Origin, Necessity, and Permanence” (1860), in The Works of Charles Sumner, 5: 191–230; Sumner, “The National Security and the National Faith: Guaranties for the National Freedman and the National Creditor” (1865), in The Works of Charles Sumner, 9: 437–89; and Sumner, “Powers of Congress to Prohibit Inequality, Caste, and Oligarchy of the Skin” (1869), in The Works of Charles Sumner, 13: 34–53.
66 Sumner, “Equal Rights of All,” 137.
67 Indeed, he took particular care to differentiate the modern usage of the term “republic” from its theorization in ancient times as well as from “definitions of European writers and lexicographers anterior to the National Constitution” such as Montesquieu and Bodin. Ibid., 143–4, 148
68 Ibid., 196.
69 Frederick Douglass, “Sources of Danger to the Republic,” in The Speeches of Frederick Douglass: A Critical Edition, ed. John R. McKivigan, Julie Husband, and Heather L. Kaufman (New Haven, 2018), 217–46. In addition to being historically and philosophically fascinating, the speech was hilarious. The collection cited here, which has printed Douglass's 1867 rendition of the address in St Louis, includes multiple breaks for laughter and applause as well as deeply satirical lines such as the following: “Some have undertaken to prove the identity of the negro, or the relationship of the negro with the monkey from the length of his heel, forgetting what is the fact, that the monkey has no heel at all, and that in fact the longer a man's heel is the further he is from the monkey.” Ibid., 224.
70 Ibid., 229.
71 Sumner, “Equal Rights of All,” 210.
72 Ibid., 205–6.
73 As Sumner put it, “A representative government is a government by the people, not less than a democracy, provided all the people are represented. Representation is a modern invention of incalculable value to embody the will of the people. A republic, like a democracy, cannot tolerate inequality.” Ibid., 207–8.
74 Charles Sumner, “The Republican Party: Its Origin, Necessity, and Permanence” (1860), in The Works of Charles Sumner, 5: 191–230, at 200. The “five essential elements” were as follows: (1) “the pretension that man can hold property in man,” (2) “the absolute nullification of the relation of husband and wife,” (3) “the utter rejection of the relation of parent and child,” (4) “the complete denial of instruction,” (5) “the wholesale robbery of the labor of another, and of all its fruits.” Ibid., 207–8.
75 Charles Sumner, “Promises of the Declaration of Independence, and Abraham Lincoln” (1865), in The Works of Charles Sumner, 9: 367–429, at 425.
76 The perspective adopted here leaves out the economic dimensions of Sumner's approach to Reconstruction, which, in any case, seem not to have occupied pride of place. For a flavor of Sumner's attitude toward and proposals regarding Reconstruction economic policy see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 2014), Ch. 6.
77 Anderson, The Imperative of Integration, 91–2, original emphasis.
78 Sumner, “Equality before the Law,” 371, original emphasis. It is worth noting that Sumner would repeat a similar sentiment (using roughly identical language) in a lengthy 1872 address, defending what would become (upon his death) the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
79 Bromwich, David, “Moral Imagination,” Raritan 27/4 (2008), 4–33Google Scholar, at 14. David Herbert Donald, Sumner and the Coming of Civil War, 192, states that, in some respects, Sumner thought of himself as “an American equivalent of Edmund Burke. Sumner even fancied he bore a physical resemblance to the great Irishman, and, later in life, insisted upon having his collected Works issued in bindings precisely like those of the standard American edition of Burke's.”
80 Jacobs, Donald M., “The Nineteenth Century Struggle over Segregated Education in the Boston Schools,” Journal of Negro Education 39/1 (1970), 76–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 77.
81 Ibid., 78. See also William Cooper Nell, “The Smith School” (1850), in William Cooper Nell: Nineteenth-Century African American Abolitionist, Historian, Integrationist, Selected Writings 1832–1874, ed. Dorothy Porter Wesley and Constance Porter Uzelac (Baltimore, 2002), 135–40.
82 Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom, 127.
83 William Cooper Nell, “To Charles Sumner [1850],” in Nell, Selected Writings 1832–1874, 253.
84 William Cooper Nell, “Equal School Rights Meeting” (1850), in Nell, Selected Writings 1832–1874, 259–60, at 259.
85 William Cooper Nell, “Meeting of Colored Citizens in Boston: Presentation to Mr. William C. Nell for His Efforts in Behalf of Equal School Rights” (1855), in Nell, Selected Writings 1832–1874, 434–47, at 439.
86 William Cooper Nell, “Equal School Rights: The Smith School” (1854), in Nell, Selected Writings 1832–1874, 380–84, at 382.
87 Sumner, “Equality before the Law,” 35.
88 Charles Sumner, “Equality before the Law Protected by National Statute” (1872), in The Works of Charles Sumner, 14: 355–473, at 380.
89 Arendt, Hannah, “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent 6/1 (1959), 45–56Google Scholar; Arendt, “A Reply to Critics,” Dissent 6/2 (1959), 179–81.
90 Foner, Reconstruction, 178.
91 The fact that Sumner was speaking of suffrage for freedmen only is worth emphasizing. Though vaguely supportive of the efforts of women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Sumner clearly equivocated on the question of women's suffrage. Foner, Reconstruction, 255–6.
92 Sumner, Question of Caste, 26.
93 Sumner, “Equal Rights of All,” 132.
94 Sumner, Question of Caste, 26.
95 Sumner, “Equal Rights of All,” 222.
96 Ibid., 130.
97 Ibid., 132.
98 Ibid., 133.
99 Ibid., 133.
100 Ibid., 221.
101 Ibid., 222.
102 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 594.
103 Anderson, The Imperative of Integration, 91.
104 “Brief for Appellants in Nos. 1, 2, and 4 and for Respondents in No. 10 on Reargument,” in Philip B. Kurland and Gerhard Casper, ed., Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court of the United States: Constitutional Law, vol. 49 (Arlington, 1975; first published 1953), 580, 583.
