Charles Sumner

Early life, education, and law career

Charles Sumner was born at 58 Irving Street in Boston on January 6, 1811. His father, Charles Pinckney Sumner, was a Harvard-educated lawyer, abolitionist, and early proponent of racial integration of schools, who shocked 19th-century Boston by opposing anti-miscegenation laws. His mother, Relief Jacob, worked as a seamstress before marrying Charles.

Both of Sumner's parents were born in poverty and were described as exceedingly formal and undemonstrative. His father served as Clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1806 to 1807 and from 1810 to 1811, and he had a moderately successful legal practice. Throughout Sumner's childhood, his family teetered on the edge of the middle class while living in a majority Black part of the Beacon Hill neighborhood. Growing up around Black Bostonians, who often shared stories of injustice they faced, would shape Sumner's future politics, helping spur his fight for racial equality.

Charles Pinckney Sumner hated slavery and told his son that freeing the slaves would "do us no good" unless society treated them equally. He was a close associate of Unitarian leader William Ellery Channing. Expanding on Channing's argument that human beings had infinite potential to improve themselves, Sumner concluded that environment had "an important, if not controlling influence" in shaping people. Thus, if society gave precedence to "knowledge, virtue and religion", then "the most forlorn shall grow into forms of unimagined strength and beauty." Moral law, he believed, was as important for governments as it was for individuals, and legal institutions that inhibited personal progress—like slavery or segregation—were evil.

The family's fortunes improved in 1825, when Charles Pinckney Sumner became Sheriff of Suffolk County; he held the position until his death in 1838. The family attended Trinity Church, but after 1825, they occupied a pew in King's Chapel. Sumner's father was also able to provide higher education for his children; the young Charles attended Boston Latin School, where he befriended Robert Charles Winthrop, James Freeman Clarke, Samuel Francis Smith, and Wendell Phillips. In 1830, he graduated from Harvard College, where he lived in Hollis Hall and was a member of the Porcellian Club. He then attended Harvard Law School, where he became a protégé of Unitarian Joseph Story and an enthusiastic student of jurisprudence.

Travels in Europe

In 1837, Sumner visited Europe with financial support from benefactors, including Story and Congressman Richard Fletcher. He landed at Le Havre and found the cathedral at Rouen striking: "The great lion of the north of France ... transcending all that my imagination had pictured." He reached Paris in December, studied French, and visited the Louvre. He mastered French within six months and attended lectures at the Sorbonne on subjects ranging from geology to Greek history to criminal law.

In his journal for January 20, 1838, Sumner noted that one lecturer "had quite a large audience among whom I noticed two or three blacks, or rather mulattos—two-thirds black perhaps—dressed quite à la mode and having the easy, jaunty air of young men of fashion." They were "well received" by the other students after the lecture. He continued:

They were standing in the midst of a knot of young men and their color seemed to be no objection to them. I was glad to see this, though with American impressions, it seemed very strange. It must be then that the distance between free blacks and whites among us is derived from education, and does not exist in the nature of things.

Sumner decided that Americans' predisposition to see blacks as inferior was a learned viewpoint, and he determined to become an abolitionist upon returning to America.

Over the next three years, Sumner became fluent in Spanish, German, and Italian, and met with many leading European statesmen. In 1838, he visited Britain, where Lord Brougham declared that he "had never met with any man of Sumner's age of such extensive legal knowledge and natural legal intellect". Though he often praised British society as more refined than American, Sumner published a fierce defense of the American position in the dispute over the Maine-Canada boundary, circulated by Minister to France Lewis Cass.

In 1840, at age 29, Sumner returned to Boston to practice law but devoted more time to lecturing at Harvard Law, editing court reports, and contributing to law journals, especially on historical and biographical themes.

Sumner developed friendships with several prominent Bostonians, particularly Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose house he visited regularly starting in the 1840s. Longfellow's daughters found his stateliness amusing; he would ceremoniously open doors for the children while saying "In presequas" ("after you") in a sonorous tone.

Early political activism

Sumner embarked on a public political career in 1845, when he emerged as one of the most prominent critics of slavery in the city of Boston and the state of Massachusetts, a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment.

On July 4, Sumner delivered the Boston Independence Day oration, The True Grandeur of Nations. His speech was critical of the move toward war with Mexico and an impassioned appeal for freedom and peace. Sumner considered the conflict a war of aggression but was primarily concerned that captured territories would expand slavery westward. He soon became a sought-after orator for formal occasions throughout Boston. His lofty themes and stately eloquence made a profound impression. His platform presence was imposing. He stood 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) tall, with a massive frame. His voice was clear and powerful. His gestures were unconventional, but vigorous and impressive. His literary style was florid, with much detail, allusion, and quotation, often from the Bible as well as the Greeks and Romans. Longfellow wrote that he delivered speeches "like a cannoneer ramming down cartridges", while Sumner himself said that "you might as well look for a joke in the Book of Revelation."

Following the annexation of Texas as a slave state in December, Sumner took an active role in the anti-slavery movement. In 1847, he denounced the declaration of war against Mexico with such vigor that he was recognized as a leader of the "Conscience" faction of the Massachusetts Whig Party. He declined the Whig nomination for the United States House of Representatives in 1848, instead helping organize the Free Soil Party and becoming chairman of the state party's executive committee, a position he used to advocate for abolition and build a coalition that included anti-slavery Whigs and Democrats.

Sumner also took an active role in other social causes. He worked with Horace Mann to improve public education in Massachusetts, advocated for prison reform, and represented the plaintiffs in Roberts v. City of Boston, which challenged the legality of racial segregation in public schools. Sumner joined Black attorney Robert Morris in presenting that case, making it the first argued by an interracial legal team in American history.

Arguing before the Massachusetts Supreme Court, Sumner noted that schools for blacks were physically inferior and that segregation bred harmful psychological and sociological effects—arguments made in Brown v. Board of Education over a century later. Sumner lost the case, but the Massachusetts General Court abolished school segregation in 1855.

United States Senate (1851–1874)

In 1851, a coalition of Democratic and Free Soil legislators gained control of the Massachusetts General Court. In exchange for Free Soil support for Democratic governor George Boutwell, the Free Soil Party named Sumner its choice for U.S. Senate. Despite the private agreement, conservative Democrats opposed his candidacy and called for a less radical candidate. The impasse was broken after three months and Sumner was elected on a parliamentary technicality by a one-vote majority on April 24, 1851, in part thanks to the support of Senate President Henry Wilson. His election marked a sharp break in Massachusetts politics, as his abolitionist politics contrasted sharply those of his best-known predecessor in the seat, Daniel Webster, one of the foremost supporters of the Compromise of 1850 and its Fugitive Slave Act.

For the first few sessions, Sumner did not promote any of his controversial causes. On August 26, 1852, he delivered his maiden speech, despite strenuous efforts to dissuade him. This oratorical effort was published as a pamphlet with the popular abolitionist motto, "Freedom National; Slavery Sectional," as its title. In it, Sumner attacked the Fugitive Slave Act. Though both major party platforms affirmed every provision of the Compromise of 1850 as final, including the Fugitive Slave Act, Sumner called for its repeal. For more than three hours, he denounced it as a violation of the Constitution, an affront to the public conscience, and an offence against divine law. After his speech, a senator from Alabama urged that there be no reply: "The ravings of a maniac may sometimes be dangerous, but the barking of a puppy never did any harm." Sumner's outspoken opposition to slavery made him few friends in the Senate.

"Crime against Kansas" and beating by Preston Brooks

On May 19 and 20, 1856, during the civil unrest known as "Bleeding Kansas," Sumner denounced the Kansas–Nebraska Act in his "Crime against Kansas" speech. The long speech argued for Kansas's immediate admission as a free state and denounced "Slave Power"—the political power of the slave owners. Their motivation, he alleged, was to spread slavery even to free territories:

Not in any common lust for power did this uncommon tragedy have its origin. It is the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved desire for a new Slave State, hideous offspring of such a crime, in the hope of adding to the power of slavery in the National Government.

Sumner verbally attacked authors of the Act, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Butler of South Carolina:

The senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, slavery. For her his tongue is always profuse in words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this senator.

Sumner's reference to slavery as Butler's "mistress" sought to highlight the sexual depravity of the institution—and possibly of Butler himself. An interview with a man who'd been enslaved by Butler, uncovered decades later by the historian Zaakir Tameez, suggests Butler fathered two children with a mistress he kept in his house, likely a slave.

Beyond criticizing Douglas and Butler, Sumner denounced his former Senate colleague David Atchison, who had violently seized polling locations to manipulate the territorial elections in Kansas, comparing him to Catiline, the soldier and politician who led a failed coup attempt against the Roman state. Maintaining the analogy, Sumner presented himself as a modern Cicero, saving the American republic from anti-democratic conspirators.

Civil War

After the Civil War began, Sumner was among the Radical Republicans who advocated immediate abolition of slavery and the destruction of the Southern planter class. Although like-minded on slavery, the Radicals were loosely organized and disagreed on issues such as the tariff and currency. Other Radicals in the Senate included Zachariah Chandler and Benjamin Wade. After the fall of Fort Sumter in April 1861, Sumner, Chandler and Wade repeatedly visited President Abraham Lincoln at the White House to discuss slavery and the rebellion. Gilbert Osofsky argues that Sumner saw the war as a "death struggle" between "two mutually contradictory civilizations," and his solution was "to 'civilize' and 'Americanize' the South" by conquest, then forcibly mold it into a society defined in Northern terms, as an idealized version of New England.

Throughout the war, Sumner had been the special champion of black Americans, being the most vigorous advocate of emancipation, of enlisting blacks in the Union Army, and of the establishment of the Freedmen's Bureau.

The Radicals desired the immediate emancipation of slaves and persistently lobbied for it as wartime policy, but Lincoln resisted, because it might prompt the border slave states to join the Confederacy. Lincoln instead proposed a plan for gradual emancipation and compensation to slave owners, but consulted Sumner frequently. Despite their disagreements, Lincoln called Sumner "my idea of a bishop" and an embodiment of the American people's conscience.

In May 1861, Sumner counseled Lincoln to make emancipation the war's primary objective. He believed that military necessity would eventually force Lincoln's hand and that emancipation would give the Union higher moral standing, which would keep Britain from entering the Civil War on the Confederacy's side. In October 1861, at the Massachusetts Republican Convention in Worcester, Sumner openly expressed his belief that slavery was the war's sole cause and that the Union government's primary objective was to end it. Sumner argued that Lincoln could command the Union Army to emancipate slaves under color of martial law. In the conservative press, Sumner's speech was denounced as incendiary. Conservative Massachusetts newspapers editorialized that he was mentally ill and a "candidate for the insane asylum," but the Radicals fully endorsed Sumner's speech, and he continued to advance his argument publicly. As an intermediate measure, the Radicals passed Confiscation Acts in 1861 and 1862 that allowed the military to emancipate slaves whom the Confederate military had impressed into service.

Reconstruction and Civil rights

As one of the Radical Republican leaders in the post-war Senate, Sumner fought to provide equal civil and voting rights for freedmen on the grounds that "consent of the governed" was a basic principle of American republicanism.

Sumner's radical legal theory of Reconstruction proposed that nothing beyond the confines of the Constitution, read in light of the Declaration of Independence, restricted Congress's treatment of the rebelling states. Though not as radical as Thaddeus Stevens, who considered the Confederate states "conquered provinces," Sumner argued that by declaring secession, the state governments had committed felo de se (state suicide) and could be regulated as territories that should be prepared for statehood, under conditions set by the national government.

Sumner emerged as an idealist and a champion for civil rights through this turbulent and controversial period. He joined fellow Republicans in overriding President Andrew Johnson's vetoes, though his most radical ideas were not implemented. Sumner favored partial male suffrage with a literacy requirement for all Southerners in order to vote. Instead, Congress imposed a loyalty requirement the following year; Sumner was strongly supportive.

Sumner was a friend of Samuel Gridley Howe and a guiding force for the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission, started in 1863. He was one of the most prominent advocates for suffrage for blacks, along with free homesteads and free public schools. His uncompromising attitude did not endear him to moderates, and his arrogance and inflexibility often inhibited his effectiveness as a legislator. He was largely excluded from work on the Thirteenth Amendment, in part because he did not get along with Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull, who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee and did much of the work on it. Sumner introduced an alternative amendment that combined the Thirteenth Amendment with elements of the Fourteenth Amendment. It would have abolished slavery and declared that "all people are equal before the law." During Reconstruction, he often attacked civil rights legislation as inadequate and fought for legislation to give land to freed slaves and to mandate education for all, regardless of race, in the South. He viewed segregation and slavery as two sides of the same coin. He introduced a civil rights bill in 1872 to mandate equal accommodation in all public places and required suits brought under the bill to be argued in the federal courts. The bill failed, but Sumner revived it in the next Congress, and on his deathbed begged visitors to see that it did not fail.

Liberal Republican revolt

Sumner now turned against Grant. Like many other reformers, he decried the corruption in Grant's administration. Sumner believed that the civil rights program he championed could not be carried through by a corrupt government. In 1872, he joined the Liberal Republican Party, which had been started by reformist Republicans such as Horace Greeley. The Liberal Republicans supported black suffrage, the three Reconstruction amendments, and the basic civil rights already protected by law, but also called for amnesty for ex-Confederates and decried the Republican governments in the South elected with the help of black votes, belittled the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan, and argued that the time had come to restore "home rule" in the South, which in practical terms meant white Democratic rule. For Sumner's civil rights bill they gave no support at all, but Sumner joined them because he had become convinced that the time had come for reconciliation, and that Democrats were sincere in declaring that they would abide by the Reconstruction settlement.

Sumner never saw his support for civil rights as hostile to the South. On the contrary, he had always contended that a guarantee of equality was the one condition essential for true reconciliation. Unlike some other Radical Republicans, he had strongly opposed any hanging or imprisonment of Confederate leaders. In December 1872, he introduced a Senate resolution providing that Civil War battle names should not appear as "battle honors" on the regimental flags of the U.S. Army. The proposal was not new: Sumner had offered a similar resolution on May 8, 1862, and in 1865 he had proposed that no painting hanging in the Capitol portray scenes from the Civil War, because, as he saw it, keeping alive the memories of a war between a people was barbarous. His proposal did not affect the vast majority of battle-flags, as nearly all the regiments that fought had been state regiments, and these were not covered. But Sumner's idea was that any U.S. regiment that would in the future enlist Southerners as well as Northerners should not carry on its ensigns any insult to those who joined it. His resolution had no chance of passing, but its presentation offended Union army veterans. The Massachusetts legislature censured Sumner for giving "an insult to the loyal soldiery of the nation" and as "meeting the unqualified condemnation of the people of the Commonwealth." Poet John Greenleaf Whittier led an effort to rescind that censure the following year. He succeeded early in 1874 with the help of abolitionist Joshua Bowen Smith, who was serving in the legislature that year. Sumner was able to hear the rescinding resolution presented to the Senate on the last day he was there. He died the next afternoon.

Death

Long ailing, Charles Sumner died of a heart attack at his home in Washington, D.C., on March 11, 1874, aged 63. He lay in state at the United States Capitol rotunda, the second senator (Henry Clay being the first, in 1852) and fourth person so honored. At his March 16 burial in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the pallbearers included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Greenleaf Whittier.

In the aftermath, Mississippi Senator Lucius Lamar's eulogy for Sumner was controversial enough considering his Southern heritage that the incident resulted in Lamar's inclusion in John F. Kennedy's book Profiles in Courage.

Historical interpretations

Contemporaries and historians have explored Sumner's personality and public career at length. Sumner's reputation among historians in the first half of the 20th century was largely negative—he was particularly blamed by both the Dunning School and anti-Dunning revisionists for the excesses of Radical Reconstruction, which, in the prevailing scholarship, included letting Blacks vote and hold office. But as perceptions of Reconstruction changed in recent years, so too have perceptions of Sumner. Modern scholars have emphasized his role as a foremost champion of Black rights before, during, and after the Civil War; one historian says he was "perhaps the least racist man in America in his day."

Sumner's personality has also divided contemporaries and historians. Sumner's friend Senator Carl Schurz praised Sumner's integrity, his "moral courage," the "sincerity of his convictions," and the "disinterestedness of his motives." But none of his friends at the time doubted his courage, and abolitionist Wendell Phillips, who knew Sumner well, remembered that southerners in the 1850s in Washington wondered, every time Sumner left his house in the morning, whether he would return alive. Just before he died, Sumner turned to his friend Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar. "Judge," he said, "tell Emerson how much I love and revere him." "He said of you once," Hoar replied, "that he never knew so white a soul."

Moorfield Storey, Sumner's private secretary for two years and subsequent biographer, wrote of him:

Charles Sumner was a great man in his absolute fidelity to principle, his clear perception of what his country needed, his unflinching courage, his perfect sincerity, his persistent devotion to duty, his indifference to selfish considerations, his high scorn of anything petty or mean. He was essentially simple to the end, brave, kind, and pure.... Originally modest and not self-confident, the result of his long contest was to make him egotistical and dogmatic. There are few successful men who escape these penalties of success, the common accompaniment of increasing years.... Sumner's naively simple nature, his confidence in his fellows, and his lack of humor combined to prevent his concealing what many feel but are better able to hide. From the time he entered public life till he died he was a strong force constantly working for righteousness.... To Sumner more than to any single man, except possibly Lincoln, the colored race owes its emancipation and such measure of equal rights as it now enjoys.

In popular culture

In the controversial 1915 film The Birth of a Nation Sumner was played by Sam De Grasse, though the role was minor and uncredited. In the 2012 film Lincoln, he was portrayed by actor John Hutton. He was played by Creed Bratton in the 2013 film Saving Lincoln.

Personal life

Sumner was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1843. He served on the society's board of councilors from 1852 to 1853, and later in life served as the society's secretary of foreign correspondence from 1867 to 1874.

Marriage and sexual orientation

Sumner was a bachelor for most of his life and might have been gay. For years, he enjoyed a romantic friendship with physician and fellow abolitionist Samuel Gridley Howe, spending extensive time with Howe as a young man and maintaining a correspondence with him throughout their lives. "There is something at the bottom of my heart & on my lips always for you," Sumner once told Howe.

Sumner was grief-stricken when Howe married a woman, Julia Ward Howe, who once complained to her husband, "Sumner ought to have been a woman and you to have married her."

Later, when Sumner was elected to the Senate, Howe burned many letters from his friend, lest they be seen "by unfriendly eyes." Throughout his life, Howe regularly burned or shredded correspondence with Sumner, and Julia discarded even more letters between the two after Howe's death.

In the years leading up to the Civil War, political opponents such as Sen. Andrew Butler of South Carolina mocked Sumner's status as a bachelor, implying he fantasized about Black women. Sumner resented these attacks, feeling shame over what he called his "cage of celibacy."

After years of bachelorhood, Sumner began courting Alice Mason Hooper, the widowed daughter-in-law of Massachusetts Representative Samuel Hooper in 1866, and they married that October. Their marriage was unhappy. Sumner could not respond to his wife's humor, and Alice had a ferocious temper. That winter, Alice began going out to public events with Prussian diplomat Friedrich von Holstein. This caused gossip in Washington, but Alice refused to stop seeing Holstein. When Holstein was recalled to Prussia in the spring of 1867, Alice accused Sumner of engineering the action, which Sumner denied. They separated the following September. Sumner's enemies used the affair to attack Sumner's manhood, calling him "The Great Impotency." The situation depressed and embarrassed Sumner. He obtained an uncontested divorce on the grounds of desertion on May 10, 1873.

Memorials

The following are named after Charles Sumner:

Sumner Street in Newton Centre, Massachusetts

Charles Sumner Elementary School, Camden, New Jersey

Charles Sumner – Junior High School 65 in New York City;

Charles Sumner Elementary School in Roslindale, Massachusetts

Sumner Avenue in Springfield, Massachusetts

Charles Sumner School and museum in Washington, D.C.

Sumner Elementary School in Topeka, Kansas, now closed, a school that played a key role in the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education and is on the National Register of Historic Places

Charles Sumner Math & Science Community Academy Elementary School in Chicago, Illinois

Sumner Academy of Arts & Science in Kansas City, Kansas

Charles Sumner House, Sumner's home in Boston

Sumner Library in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Sumner County, Kansas

Sumner, Iowa

Sumner, Nebraska

Sumner, Washington

Sumner, Oregon

Avenida Charles Sumner, Distrito Nacional, Dominican Republic