Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation by Zaakir Tameez published by Henry Holt 640 pages (2025)
Many years ago, I read Harvard historian David Donald’s two volume biography on the groundbreaking Senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner. Donald’s biography, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War about the Senator’s advocacy for ending slavery, and Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man covering the last decade and a half of his life during the war and Reconstruction, were very well-regarded when they came out. The 1960 publication of the first volume earned Donald the Pulitzer Prize. When I read them, I did not have the same enthusiasm as the Pulitzer board did. Donald did extensive research but he seemed to have missed what made Sumner a great human rights advocate who was a paladin for equal justice in both the South and the North. Professor Donald was influenced by the Lost Cause which painted Abolitionists as trouble makers without real moral commitment.
Zaakir Tameez has authored a new biography of the Massachusetts senator that I found much more satisfying than Donald’s books. Tameez is a recent graduate of the Yale Law School and a practicing lawyer. While he was still in school, he began researching Charles Sumner.
Most Americans know of Sumner that he was victim of a violent attack while he was in the Senate. South Carolina Congressional Representative Preston Brooks assaulted Sumner with a cane as a form of revenge for Sumner’s criticism of a relative of the Congressman. I am sure you recall that abuse and have seen the famous drawing of Sumner being attacked. That incident made the senator into the hero of anti-slavery folks and secured his place in most standard histories of the United States. As Tameez demonstrates, there was so much more to Sumner’s life than a single life-threatening attack.
Sumner was born in 1811, when slavery was under attack throughout the North. The future senator grew up in Boston, but he did not grow up amid the elite of Beacon Hill. He grew up in a mostly Black neighborhood. Unlike Abraham Lincoln and other Northern politicians of that era, Sumner grew up knowing many Black people. When he matured, he lived in the Free Black community in Boston. By 1849, Sumner joined a Black lawyer suing Boston for its actions that discriminated against African Americans.
Sumner generally did not use the phrase Negro to demark African Americans. Instead he referred to them as “People of Color.” He offered this advice to his fellow Abolitionists; “The best thing the abolitionists can do for the people of color, is to make their freedom a blessing to them in the states where they are free.” Abolitionists should not just demand an end to slavery, they had a responsibility to those Blacks already living in freedom in their own states.
Sumner also denounced the unholy conspiracy between the slaveholders of the South and some Northern capitalists. He wanted to break the tie “between the cotton-planters and flesh-mongers of Louisiana and Mississippi, and the cotton-spinners and traffickers of New England,—between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.”
In 1851 he took a seat in the Senate, succeeding Daniel Webster, who was a frequent target of Sumner’s criticism for being soft on slavery. When Sumner assumed his senate seat, he became a target for Southern senators. Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina devoted a speech to humiliate Sumner for not being married or having children. Listeners saw it as an attack on Sumner as impotent or homosexual. As Tameez observed, Butler depicted Sumner as “one of the perverts” of American society.
In May of 1855, Sumner responded to the attacks on him with his address in the Senate called “The Crime Against Kansas.” Sumner said that no Southern senator could be regarded as a gentleman because they enslaved humans and raped Black women. Senator Brooks had “chosen a mistress,” said Sumner, who was “polluted in the sight of the world,” but “is chaste in his sight.” The harlot, Sumner told the Senate, was slavery. At the end of May, Congressman Preston Brooks assaulted Sumner. Brooks was from South Carolina and he was the cousin of Sen. Butler. Tameez looks at the tensions between Butler and Sumner, Brooks’ decision to beat Sumner without warning, the ideological differences between Sumner and Butler, and the lionization of the crippled Sumner by opponents of slavery. The attack pushed forward the move against slavery.
Slavery was not the only cause of tensions in the United States during the 1850s. Many Whigs who were acquittances of Sumner secretly joined the American Party. The party was against immigration and Catholicism, and it was particularly opposed to Irish and Germans coming into the United States. While these immigrant groups helped the Union win the Civil War, a large number of future Republicans wanted to shut the door to them. As the Know Nothing party rallied thousands of adherents to its anti-immigrant banner, Sumner wrote “I am ignorant enough; but I am not a Know Nothing.” Sumner saw the Whigs desperate move to anti-immigrantism as a diversion from taking on slavery.
When Sumner had sufficiently healed, and the Know Nothing threat had receded, the Massachusetts senator became a leading figure in the Senate immediately before the outbreak of the Civil War. When the war broke out, Sumner pressured Lincoln to use the war powers vested in him by the Constitution to end slavery in the break away states. Lincoln would do this, but not until January 1, 1863 when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. However, as parts of the South came under Union control, Sumner used these territories to experiment with creating a free society in the heart of the South. Tameez looks at the Carolina Sea Islands where one such experiment took place. There, former slaves could be paid for their work picking cotton while being educated by teachers from the North and taught to govern themselves.
In Congress, Sumner said he wanted to free the slaves, but he also called for Congress to unite around “upholding human rights.” Defense of human rights was a directive for the United States government. It went beyond upholding civil rights like the right to be tried by a jury, and involved much more intimate concerns of every resident of the United States. This meant that people could go to school together, attend theater without regard to race, and intermarry. During the rest of the course of Charles Sumner’s life, he used the term “human rights” over 300 times.
During the war, Sumner was an advisor to Lincoln. Because the senator had extensive travel time in Europe, both Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward turned to him when setting diplomatic strategy. In spite of his close relationship with Lincoln, in 1864 he joined a secret meeting with other members of Congress on the Left where there was discussion of running a more progressive Republican candidate than Lincoln. Sumner ultimately decided to brake with this group because he felt it would disunite the Republicans, leading to a Democratic victory.
While Charles Sumner was helping rewrite racial policy throughout the United States, he was also using his influence to help individual African Americans assume their place in the new society. In February of 1865 he accompanied a Black lawyer seeking admission to the Bar of the United States Supreme Court. Chief Justice Roger Taney, the man who had written the Dred Scott decision, blocked his admission. However, when Taney died, Sumner was able to convince the court to unanimously vote to admit Blacks.
While Sumner had many admirers among the general public, he had few close friends in Congress. As he got older after the war, the Senator did not have close allies to rely on. His distance from the centers of Republican power after 1870s left him more and more isolated. Modern day readers can look at the civil rights bills he pressed during the last years of his life as brilliant, but he could not develop a Republican consensus to pass them. When he died in 1874, his death was sanctified throughout the United States, but the last half decade of his life must have been unsatisfying. His last major piece of legislation to protect Black human rights, was essentially overturned after his death by a Republican Supreme Court.
This new volume has really accomplished a complete turnaround in how scholars will look at its subject. It gives a much more complete look at the senator than Donald’s sixty year old treatise and should e=replace it in history courses.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
