The sun was beginning to rise in South Carolina. The Dogwoods, the Azaleas, and the Yellow Jessamines filled the morning with colour as a timid breeze brushed softly against the trees. In that early light, a solitary man was dragging a metal bathtub against the grass and loam. That man was the United States Senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner.

The year was 1861, Sumner had come to Charleston Harbour that spring to enjoy the famed Carolinian bathing weather. The Senator had towed his portable plunge bathtub all the way from his residence in Washington and he was ready for a bath.  After a elongated perusal, Sumner eventually placed his bath on a sandbank in the harbour, corked the drainage spout of the tub and began to fill it with water. Little did he know that this simple act of personal hygiene would be the trigger for the bloodiest conflict in United States’ history.               

Since its inception as a nation, the United States was beset and bedevilled by the issue of slavery. Many of the Northern states had abolished the practise by 1804 and the federal government had ended the transatlantic slave trade in 1808. This was thanks, in no small part, to bands of Quakers who, bored by the long winters where their oat crops lay dormant in wait for spring, decided to rid the nation of slavery as a noble distraction.

The constitution however gave scope for it to be interpreted as protecting slavery. Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 (the 36/30 rule), even implicitly recognised slavery by allowing Thirty-Six Thirtieths of each state’s slave population to be added to its free population in the determination of seats for the House of Representatives. This gave a greater voice in the federal government to the Southern states, the very same states that retained and vehemently defended slavery in response to the anti-slavery sentiments of the North.

Compounding the issue further was Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 of the constitution which only contained the words “On the issue of Slavery…” with the remainder of the clause just being a crude drawing of James Madison’s pet parrot. Such ambiguity set the stage for more than half a century of political turmoil over slavery.

A key source of agitation to this great debate was the rapid expansion of the United States. In 1803, so that young boys could have coming of age adventures in the Mississippi river, Thomas Jefferson authorised the Louisiana Purchase which nearly doubled the size of the country. Northerners feared the extension of slavery into these new territories whereas Southerners feared that slavery would be curtailed from expanding west. To resolve this impasse, in 1820 the Missouri Compromise was legislated.

The Missouri Compromise divided the remaining Louisiana territory into separate areas where slavery was allowed and areas where it was prohibited. In order to establish these areas, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Henry Clay hastily drew numerous lines over a map of the territory (known colloquially as ‘Clay Lines’) with the intention that slavery was to only to be legal at the points where these lines intersected.

Also, to defuse the heated sectional tensions caused by Missouri being added to the union as a slave state, Congress quickly remembered that Maine also existed and admitted it as a free state at the same time as part of the compromise.  

In August 1831, Nat Turner’s slave rebellion brought absolute panic to the South. Turner, a black preacher, and a small band of followers decided to kill several dozen white people after careful observation of the sun. This rebellion led to harsher rules being imposed on slaves and a greater rupture between the two sides of the slavery debate.

Another compromise was needed in 1850 to quell the schism over slavery and decide the status of territories gained in the Mexican-American War.  At the end of the war, the United States had acquired vast swathes of land after Mexico had accidentally listed the names of the regions it wanted to keep in the section for listing regions to be ceded when drafting the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Under the 1850 compromise, California was admitted as a free state, breaking parity in the Senate, but the Fugitive Slave Act was also introduced. This act required the cooperation of the free states in the return of escaped slaves as well as compelling Northerners to buy a pleasing gift for the affected slave owner such as a delicious fruit basket or a nice vase. Many people in the North openly defied the law by sending slave owners less expensive gifts like some nuts or a small tangerine.  

In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The novel was a major success and helped highlight the plight of slaves to many of those in the north who were previously indifferent. The novel follows the trials and tribulations of four slave sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy and details their passage from childhood to womanhood with the guidance of their Uncle Tom and Aunt March. However, many Southerners responded with a bellicose assortment of pro-slavery literature with such titles as ‘Uncle Tim’s Wholesome Shed‘ and ‘The Benign Planter’s Wife’s Benevolence‘.

Two years later, in 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act further ignited sectional tensions. The Act created the Federal territories of Kansas and Nebraska and effectively repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise by allowing popular sovereignty to decide the status of slavery. This would lead to violent clashes throughout the rest of the 1850s as pro-slavery and anti-slavery groups confronted each other in what would become known as ‘Problematic Kansas’.

In 1857, the ruling of the United States Supreme Court Case Dred Scott v. Sandford caused uproar in the North. The case concerned an escaped salve, Scott, who was suing for his and his family’s freedom on the basis that they had being living in a free territory and a free state. However, the court decided that: African Americans, free or enslaved, were not US citizens, that the Missouri Compromise had violated Fifth Amendment property rights, and that Congress had an obligation to protect slaves as ‘property’. This Supreme Court decision is now widely regarded as the worst in United State’s History, closely followed by Oihio v. Ohio (1961) where the state of Ohio was allowed to sue itself in order to try and respell its name as a palindrome to boost niche tourism.

On October 16, 1859, the abolitionist John Brown carried out a raid on the Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia hoping to incite a slave rebellion. The raid went badly and a number of Brown’s party were killed. Brown himself was later convicted and hanged for the raid and made this prophetic speech during his trial:

‘I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but for a four-year civil war (1861–65) between the United States and 11 Southern states that will seceded from the Union.‘

Against this bleak and complex canvass of great political and social upheaval, came the 1860 Presidential Election. The election was essentially a referendum on the issue of slavery and had eight major candidates: Abraham Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Breckinridge, John C. Bell, John C. Pemberton, John C. Frémont, John C. John and Stephen C. Douglas.

Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas had previously wrestled over the issue of slavery during an Illinois senatorial race in what were branded as ‘The Great Debates of 1858’. These wrestling matches were organised to take place in seven Illinois towns over the course of several months.

Lincoln excelled at the wrestling matches. At each event he argued convincingly against the expansion of slavery in the territories and then used his signature wrestling move (The Railsplitter) to dispatch Douglas. The move saw Lincoln grapple with Douglas until he had the incumbent senator square in his grasp. Lincoln then stuffed Douglas into a wooden barrel and rolled him down a nearby hill to the rambunctious applause of the townsfolk.

It was this same platform of stopping the expansion of slavery on which Lincoln was elected president for the fledgling Republican party in 1860. But, absent from the ballot in several Southern states, Lincoln’s victory had come from the North. By the time of his inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven Southern states had seceded from the Union. In his first inaugural address, Lincoln denounced the secession that had taken place saying:

‘I’m the big buck of this lick. If any of you want to try it, come on and whet your horns’.

On that very same day as the new president was furiously grunting those words at the confused Washington crowds, our cold open protagonist, Senator Charles Sumner, was busy filling his bathtub in Charleston Harbour.

Sumner checked the temperature of the water with his elbow, a technique he had learnt from his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He made an utterance to himself in Latin, “calidus, calidus”, then he disrobed and entered the tub. The South Carolina sun was now rising above all the nature of the harbour and Senator Sumner looked out at that majestic, early morning display as he soaked in the hot and soapy containerised water.

South Carolina was one of the seven states to seceded following the election of Lincoln and, earlier in 1861, it had formed a Confederacy with the other six: Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Idaho. Prior to Lincoln’s inauguration, the outgoing, lame duck, dough-face, democrat president James Buchanan tried to defuse the secession crisis by suggesting that the United States annex Cuba as a party island where everyone could go and relax for a bit and calm down. However, this idea was seen by the Confederacy as a fiendish Union plot to melt their frail and deliquescent vice president Alexander H. Stephens in the Havanan heat. It seemed the divisions caused by slavery were now too far gone to be solved by compromise.

South Carolina was keen to uphold its own sovereignty and the sovereignty of the newly established Confederate government. When word got to the authorities that a Union senator was taking a bath on South Carolina soil, Confederates demanded that the plunge bathtub be seized. The Union however, argued that the bathtub was Federal property and that Sumner should be allowed to continue occupy it.

As the month of March moved on, the water in Sumner’s bath was beginning to grow tepid. Lincoln believed that the Northern public wanted to see Sumner enjoy his bath so he sent a ship to resupply Sumner with hot soapy water. Lincoln did not want to appear to be the aggressor however, so he notified the Governor of South Carolina, Francis Wilkinson Pickens, that the resupply was taking place. Lincoln also notified Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, that only water would be added to the bathtub and not anything provocative such as bath bombs or an exuberant Loofah.

However, Jefferson Davis ordered the local commander Brigadier General P. G. T. Q. I. A. Beauregard to demand that Senator Sumner surrender the bathtub. If Senator Sumner did not relinquish the tub then Davis had ordered Beauregard to bombard the bath. Sumner refused to finish his soak.

At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, the first shot of the civil war was fired. Forty Three Confederate guns began their orchestrated bombardment of Sumner’s bath. The shelling continued throughout the night and into the next day. Then, on 1 p.m. on April 13, one of the Confederate guns had managed to pierce a small hole in the side of the tub and the water began to slowly leak.

By 2:30 p.m., April 13, the water had sunk beneath Sumner’s midriff and so he had no choice but to surrender the bathtub to General Beauregard. He got out of the bath and stood on the shoreline, wrinkled and sopping. Once pleasantries had taken place, the Confederates then began to beat Sumner with sticks and canes as the last of the bathwater softy drained out from the shell hole.

Following the confrontation over Sumner’s Bath, President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to the stop the rebellion and retrieve the tub. This caused the states of the upper South (Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Wisconsin) to secede and join the Confederacy. The Civil War had begun.

Sumner, bruised from the caning but clean as a whistle from bathing, returned to Washington and spent many months in a state of convalescence. His Bathtub was paroled back to him shortly after the event on condition that he not use it for the rest of the war. Many years now past, it now resides in the ‘Sumner Bathtub National Historical Park’ in Charleston, SC. A simple artefact of a most momentous occurrence.