The Greater Journey – Americans in Paris
by David McCulloch
Charles Sumner [page #131]
On Saturday, January 20th 1838, as he recorded in his journal, Charles Sumner attended a lecture at the Sorbonne on Philosophical theory delivered of Heraclites by Adolphe-Marie duCaurroy, a distinguished grey haired scholar that spoke extremely slow. Sumner began looking around the hall. He had quite a large audience, “Sumner wrote, “among whom I noticed two or three blacks, or rather mulattoes – the-thirds black perhaps- dressed quite a la mode and having the easy, jaunty air of young men of fashion…”… He watched closely. The black students were well received by the other students, he noted.
It was for Sumner a stunning revelation. Until this point he was not known to have shown any particular interest in the lives of black people, nether free blacks nor slaves. On a trip to Washington a few years earlier, traveling by rail through Maryland, he had seen slaves for the first time. They were working in the fields, and as he made clear in his journal, he felt only disdain for them. “They appear to be nothing more than moving masses of flesh, unendowed with anything of intelligence above that of brutes.” He was to think that way no longer.
It would be a while before Sumner’s revelation – that attitudes about race in America were taught, not part of “the nature of things”-would take effect in his career, but when it did, the consequence would be profound.