Review: "Charles Sumner," Zaakir Tameez

By Paul Carrier

Many notable political figures made names for themselves in mid 19th-century America, but only one is best remembered for being viciously attacked on the floor of the U.S. Senate. That claim to fame understandably but unfortunately overshadows the fact that the victim played a highly significant role in fighting slavery, racism and segregation.

On May 22, 1856, Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina, a pro-slavery Democrat, used a gold-topped cane to repeatedly bash Republican Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, beating him so badly that Sumner lost consciousness and almost died. He was unable to resume his duties until late 1859, but Massachusetts refused to fill his seat during the interim, to assure that his empty chair underscored the horrific nature of the attack.

Zaakir Tameez explores that incident in a 2025 biography of Sumner entitled Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation. As that subtitle makes clear, Tameez offers a comprehensive examination of Sumner’s life, introducing a Harvard-educated attorney and Radical Republican politician who was both a dazzling legal scholar (though an unhappy practicing attorney) and a passionate champion of racial justice.

Tameez states at the outset that his biography is a warts-and-all portrayal. Sumner made little or no effort to negotiate with fellow lawmakers, even when doing so might have helped him achieve his goals. Despite his fervent devotion to bettering the lives of African Americans, he showed no real interest in the needs of Indigenous people. Nor did he champion voting rights for women. He even suggested that the United States should be expanded to include the rest of North America.

Sumner was born in Boston in 1811 and raised in what was then a predominantly Black section of  Beacon Hill. The family was not well-to-do. His mother was a seamstress and homemaker. His father, a Harvard graduate and abolitionist, served at various times as clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, a working attorney, and sheriff of Suffolk County, Massachusetts.

Brilliant and high-minded, the younger Sumner initially steered clear of the radical abolitionism of William Lloyd Garrison. But by 1845, when Sumner delivered a Fourth of July address to Boston’s movers and shakers, he proudly embraced pacifism as war loomed with Mexico and backed the abolition of slavery, to free people guilty of nothing more than “skin not colored as our own.”

The Massachusetts Legislature sent Sumner to the U.S. Senate in 1851. (Voters did not win the right to elect U.S. senators until 1913.) Sumner got off to a slow start in Washington, but he outraged slavery’s supporters and galvanized abolitionists with a scathing attack on slavery during an hours-long speech on the Senate floor in 1852. Tameez says Sumner, who was no shrinking violet, displayed “grandiosity” and “haughtiness.” He was bombastic, unapologetic and a “frighteningly erudite champion” of the enslaved.

The passage in 1854 of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which purported to  allow voters in Kansas to decide if that territory would be slave or free, quickly degenerated into a bloodbath that resulted in an autocratic pro-slavery faction assuming control of the region. That further infuriated the already outraged Sumner, who delivered his blistering “Crime Against Kansas” speech over two days in 1856. It was shortly thereafter that Brooks caned Sumner, attacking him so feverishly that the cane broke into pieces.

Sumner appears to have been a force of nature. Seemingly humorless, almost always uncompromising and often petulant, he did not shy away from verbally pummeling pro-slavery senators by name during Senate sessions. And following the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Sumner antagonized moderate abolitionists who sought to compromise with the South to avert secession. He viewed abolishing slavery as an even greater good  than preserving the Union.

Once Lincoln took office, Sumner badgered him to free the slaves before Lincoln was prepared to do so. Sumner could be unrestrained in his face-to-face meetings with Lincoln, and Tameez writes that “heated fights” between the two men were common. But their “bewildering relationship became one of Washington’s most important and consequential friendships during the Civil War.”

By 1863, Sumner was “at the height of his power in Washington,” Tameez writes. Initially seen as a “foolish youth wasting his brilliance on a hopeless cause,” he emerged as “a battle-scarred political veteran, proven to have been right all along.” In fact, Tameez writes, the 1856 attack that nearly killed him represented “the first blows of the Civil War.” In time, Sumner came to chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, maintain close friendships with Lincoln and the first lady, and gain easy access to Lincoln’s Cabinet.

Following the end of the Civil War and the assassination of Lincoln, Sumner continued his crusade against racism, arguing in the Senate that freedom for former slaves had little value without guarantees of equality as well, including voting rights and integration. That placed him at odds not only with some of his fellow Radical Republicans but also with President Andrew Johnson, who “grew to hate Sumner,” Tameez writes.

The period that followed was eventful for Sumner, politically and personally. The 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, was enacted in December 1865, followed by two related amendments later in that decade. In 1866, Sumner, by then in his 50s, married Boston widow and socialite Alice Hooper, who was half his age. The marriage was a disaster. In 1868, the Senate failed to remove Johnson from office following his impeachment in the House. Later that year, voters chose Ulysses S. Grant to succeed Johnson as president. As the 1860s drew to a close and a new decade dawned, Reconstruction remained contentious.

Both Sumner and Grant were Republicans but they had never been allies, and by 1872, when Grant sought reelection, they were openly hostile toward one another. Hoping to block Grant, Sumner shocked many Republicans by urging Black voters to support Horace Greeley, the presidential candidate backed by the spin-off Liberal Republican Party and the Democratic Party. A onetime abolitionist with mercurial political views, Greeley was a white supremacist by 1872. Grant won a second term.

Even as his health deteriorated and his fellow Republicans moved on to other issues, Sumner continued to insist that more be done to protect Blacks in the South and that schools, theaters, hotels, streetecars, restaurants, etc. be integrated to create a multiracial society. But he failed to get his civil rights bill through Congress. A truncated version eventually became law after his death, yet racial gains were largely erased with the eventual demise of Reconstruction and the vicious, often deadly rise of Jim Crow.

Such setbacks cannot detract from Sumner’s accomplishments, however, even though he was unable to do all that he had hoped and the country later regressed before it advanced anew. The author notes that Sumner “helped to abolish chattel slavery, transform the Constitution, enfranchise millions of people, and, ever so briefly, reconstruct the republic.”

Sumner passed away on March 11, 1874 in his Washington home and was buried several days later in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In his final moments, Sumner instructed Ebenezer Hoar, a Massachusetts congressman and longtime friend, to tell Ralph Waldo Emerson that “I love him and revere him.” Recalling what Emerson had said about Sumner after the 1856 attack, Hoar replied: “i will tell him that you love him and revere him, for he said to me that you have the largest soul of any man alive.”