5

HISTORICAL ANNOTATION 633

thrust into politics by his outspoken opposition to the U.S. war against Mexico. He
was a founder of the Free Soil party in Massachusetts, and a coalition of Free Soilers
and Democrats elected him to the U.S. Senate in 1850. Immediately embroiling himself
in the heated topic of slavery, Sumner became an outspoken advocate of emancipation
and repeatedly opposed compromises proposed by Henry Clay and others.
After one particularly scathing speech in the Senate against slavery, Sumner was
brutally beaten with a cane by southern congressman Preston Brooks, causing Sumner
to go through years of recovery before reentering the Senate. Sumner's lasting legacy
was turning popular sentiment in the North toward emancipation, and after the Civil
War Sumner continued to fight for the individual freedoms of blacks until his sudden
death in 1874. Frederick J. Blue, Charles Sumner and the Conscience of the North
(Arlington Heights, Ill., 1994); David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the
Civil War (New York, 1960); DAB, 18:208-14.
4.5-6 Emancipation of the slaves] After many drafts and revisions, President
Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863. In it Lincoln
declared all the slaves in the Confederate states to be free, thereby deliberately granting
all slaveholding Border States immunity. To address northerners' fears that the
emancipation would cause a large-scale slave rebellion, Lincoln included pleas to
ex-slaves to behave peaceably unless justifiably provoked. As an act of war, the legality
of this proclamation was questionable. especially after the war's end. Thus beginning
in 1864 the Senate debated the first draft of a constitutional amendment that
would outlaw slavery. The first attempt at passage was defeated by the Democrats in
the House of Representatives, and the issue languished until Congress reconvened in
1865. Lincoln's proactive approach to the bill's passage, coupled with the nation's
growing weariness of the war, paid off in January 1865, when the bill passed
Congress. A sufficient number of states had ratified the amendment by December of
the same year, ending all constitutional questions regarding emancipation. Michael
Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth
Amendment (Cambridge, Eng., 2001), 26-60, 89-114, 176-210.
4.16 "lost cause" at Appomattox] On 9 April 1865, Confederate General Robert
E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Union army forces commanded
by General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Virginia. Soon after the South's defeat
in the Civil War, the "Lost Cause philosophy" surfaced. The notion of the "Lost
Cause" effectively rewrote the war's purpose and outcome. As a result, the South's
intent became a noble struggle for states' rights rather than a defense of slavery, and
southerners argued that they were not defeated in the war but were simply outnumbered
by the North. Heartily endorsed in the South, this revision of history, though
inaccurate, was accepted well into the twentieth century and even influenced northern
states' interpretation of the Civil War. Thus, the war was romanticized and glorified,
while the memory of the cruelty of slavery that it abolished was diminished. Grady
McWhiney, Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat (New York, 1969), vii-xi; Blight,
Race and Reunion, 37-38, 258-60, 452-53; Dwight T. Pitcaithley, 'The American