US senator, born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. An exceptional law student, he originally rejected a law practice and political career to become a lecturer at Harvard Law School and an editor of legal textbooks. He travelled in Europe (18357) and emerged as a public figure when he denounced the Mexican War at an Independence Day speech in Boston (1845), and he toured as a lyceum lecturer. He then entered the US Senate through a coalition of Free Soilers (an anti-slavery political party whose slogan was free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men) and Democrats (Massachusetts, 18514), later becoming the Republican senator (185474). He became an outspoken abolitionist and was physically assaulted by Representative Preston Brooks (South Carolina) while sitting at his Senate desk (1856) and was left slightly crippled for life. He continued to advocate the emancipation of slaves, and as a Radical Republican after the Civil War, he pressed for imposing harsh terms on the former Confederate states and for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. He soon fell out with President Ulysses Grant's administration, but he remained a voice of moral integrity until his death.
An academic lawyer but a powerful orator, Sumner was the leader of the antislavery forces in Massachusetts and the Radical Republicans in the U.S. Senate during the American Civil War and Reconstruction. After years of therapy Sumner returned to the Senate to help lead the Civil War. Sumner, who specialized in foreign affairs, was a leading exponent of abolishing slavery to weaken the Confederacy.As the Radical Republican leader in the Senate during Reconstruction, 1865-1871, Sumner fought hard to provide equal civil and voting rights for the freedmen, and to block ex-Confederates from power. Sumner, teaming with House leader Thaddeus Stevens defeated Andrew Johnson, and imposed their hard-line views on the South. Grant's Senate supporters then took away Sumner's power base, his committee chairmanship. Sumner supported the Liberal Republicans candidate Horace Greeley in 1872 and lost his power inside the Republican party.
Early life, education and law career
Sumner was born in Boston on Irving Street on January 6, 1811.
In 1834, Sumner was admitted to the bar, entering private practice in Boston, where he partnered with George Stillman Hillard. From 1836 to 1837, Sumner lectured at Harvard Law School.
Travels in Europe
From 1837 to 1840, Sumner traveled extensively in Europe.
Sumner visited England in 1838 where his knowledge of literature, history, and law made him popular with leaders of thought. Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux declared that he "had never met with any man of Sumner's age of such extensive legal knowledge and natural legal intellect." Not until many years after Sumner's death was any other American received so intimately into British intellectual circles.
Beginning of political career
In 1840, at the age of 30, Sumner returned to Boston to practice law but devoted more time to lecturing at Harvard Law School, to editing court reports, and to contributing to law journals, especially on historical and biographical themes.
A turning point in Sumner's life came when he delivered an Independence Day oration on "The True Grandeur of Nations," in Boston in 1845. Henry Wadsworth 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 Revelations."
Sumner cooperated effectively with Horace Mann to improve the system of public education in Massachusetts. In 1847, the vigor with which Sumner denounced a Boston congressman's vote in favor of the declaration of war against Mexico made him a leader of the "conscience Whigs," but he declined to accept their nomination for the House of Representatives.
Sumner took an active part in the organizing of the Free Soil Party, in opposition to the Whigs' nomination of a slave-holding southerner for the presidency. After filling the state positions with Democrats, the Democrats refused to vote for Sumner (the Free Soilers' choice) and urged the selection of a less radical candidate. An impasse of more than three months ensued, which finally resulted in the election of Sumner by a single vote on April 24.
Biographer David Donald has probed Sumner's psychology:
Distrusted by friends and allies, and reciprocating their distrust, a man of "ostentatious culture," "unvarnished egotism," and "'a specimen of prolonged and morbid juvenility,'" Sumner combined a passionate conviction in his own moral purity with a command of nineteenth-century "rhetorical flourishes" and a "remarkable talent for rationalization." Stumbling "into politics largely by accident," elevated to the United States Senate largely by chance, willing to indulge in "Jacksonian demagoguery" for the sake of political expediency, Sumner became a bitter and potent agitator of sectional conflict.
Service in the Senate
Antebellum career and attack by Preston Brooks
Sumner took his seat in the Senate in late 1851. For the first few sessions Sumner did not push for any of his controversial causes, but observed the workings of the Senate. On August 26, 1852, Sumner delivered, in spite of strenuous efforts to prevent it, his first major speech. Slavery Sectional" (a popular abolitionist motto), Sumner attacked the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and called for its repeal. Reckless of political expediency, Sumner moved that the Fugitive Slave Act be forthwith repealed;
In 1856, during the Bloody Kansas crisis when "border ruffians" approached Lawrence, Kansas, Sumner denounced the Kansas-Nebraska Act in the "Crime against Kansas" speech on May 19 and May 20, two days before the sack of Lawrence. Sumner attacked the authors of the act, Stephen A.
Sumner said Douglas (who was present in the chamber) was a "noise-some, squat, and nameless animal...not a proper model for an American senator."
Two days later, on the afternoon of May 22, Preston Brooks, a congressman from South Carolina and Butler's nephew, confronted Sumner as he sat writing at his desk in the almost empty Senate chamber. Preston said "Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech twice over carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine—" As Sumner began to stand up, Brooks began beating Sumner on the head with a thick gutta-percha cane with a gold head. Sumner was trapped under the heavy desk (which was bolted to the floor), but Brooks continued to bash Sumner until he ripped the desk from the floor. By this time, Sumner was blinded by his own blood, and he staggered up the aisle and collapsed, lapsing into unconsciousness. Brooks continued to beat Sumner until he broke his cane, then quietly left the chamber.
Sumner did not attend the Senate for the next three years, recovering from the attack;
The act revealed the increasing polarization of the Union in the years before the American Civil War, as Sumner became a hero across the North and Brooks a hero across the South. the Richmond Enquirer editorialized that Sumner should be caned "every morning," praising the attack as "good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequences" and denounced "these vulgar abolitionists in the Senate" who "have been suffered to run too long without collars.
American Civil War
After three years Sumner returned to the Senate in 1859. In the critical months following the election of Abraham Lincoln, Sumner was an unyielding foe to every scheme of compromise with the new Confederate States of America.
After the withdrawal of the Southern senators, Sumner was made chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in March 1861, a powerful position for which he was well-qualified owing to his years and background of European political knowledge, relationships, and experiences.
As chair of the committee, Sumner renewed his efforts to gain diplomatic recognition of Haiti by the United States, which Haiti had sought since winning its independence in 1804.
While the Civil War was in progress, Sumner's letters from Richard Cobden and John Bright, from William Ewart Gladstone and George Douglas Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll, were read by Sumner at Lincoln's request to Cabinet, and formed a chief source of knowledge on the delicate political balance pro- and anti-Union in Britain.
In the war scare over the Trent affair (where the US Navy illegally seized high-ranking Confederates from a British Navy ship), it was Sumner's word that convinced Lincoln that James M. Again and again Sumner used his chairmanship to block action which threatened to embroil the U.S. in war with England and France. Sumner openly and boldly advocated the policy of emancipation. Lincoln described Sumner as "my idea of a bishop," and consulted him as an embodiment of the conscience of the American people.
Sumner was a longtime enemy of United States Chief Justice Roger Taney, and attacked his decision in the Dred Scott v. In 1865, Sumner said:
As soon as the Civil War began when Sumner put forward his theory of Reconstruction, that the South had by its own act become felo de se, committing state suicide via secession, and that they be treated as conquered territories that had never been states. Throughout the war, Sumner had constituted himself the special champion of blacks, being the most vigorous advocate of emancipation, of enlisting the blacks in the Union army, and of the establishment of the Freedmen's Bureau.
Civil Rights
Sumner was unusually far-sighted in his advocacy of voting and civil rights for blacks. His father hated slavery and told Sumner that freeing the slaves would "do us no good" unless they were treated equally by society. Sumner was a close associate of William Ellery Channing, a minister in Boston who influenced many New England intellectuals, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. While Sumner often had dark views of contemporary society, his faith in reform was unshakeable;
The annexation of Texas -- a new slave-holding state -- in 1845 pushed Sumner into taking an active role in the anti-slavery movement. That same year, Sumner represented the plaintiffs in Roberts v. Arguing before the Massacusetts Supreme Court, Sumner noted that schools for blacks were physically inferior and that segregation bred harmful psychological and sociological effects -- arguments that would be made in Brown v. Sumner lost the case, but the Massachusetts legislature eventually abolished school segregation in 1855.
A friend of Samuel Gridley Howe, Sumner was also a guiding force for the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission. Sumner's outspoken opposition to slavery made him few friends in the Senate; after delivering his first major speech there in 1852, a senator from Alabama rose and urged that there be no reply to Sumner, saying "The ravings of a maniac may sometimes be dangerous, but the barking of a puppy never did any harm." Sumner did introduce an alternate amendment that would have abolished slavery and declare that "all people are equal before the law" -- a combination of the Thirteenth Amendment with elements of the Fourteenth Amendment. The bill ultimately failed, but Sumner still spoke of it on his deathbed.
Personal Life and Marriage
Sumner was serious and somewhat prickly, but he developed friendships with several prominent Bostonians, particularly Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose house he visited regularly in the 1840s.
A bachelor for most of his life, Sumner began courting Alice Mason Hooper, the daughter of a Massachusetts Congressman, in 1866, and the two were married that October. It proved to be a poor match: Sumner could not respond to his wife's humor, and Hooper had a ferocious temper she could not always control. When Holstein was recalled to Prussia in the spring of 1867, Hooper accused Sumner of engineering the action (Sumner always denied this) and the two separated the following September. News of the situation quickly leaked out, to the delight of Sumner's enemies, who referred to him as "The Great Impotency" and claimed (without proof) that Sumner could not perform his marital duties.
Reconstruction years and death
Sumner was strongly opposed to the Reconstruction policy of Johnson, believing it to be far too generous to the South.
Ulysses Grant became a bitter opponent of Sumner in 1870 when the president mistakenly thought that he had secured his support for the annexation of San Domingo.
Sumner had always prized highly his popularity in England, but he unhesitatingly sacrificed it in taking his stand as to the adjustment of claims against England for breaches of neutrality during the war. Sumner laid great stress upon "national claims." He therefore insisted that England should be required not merely to pay damages for the havoc wreaked by the Confederate Ship Alabama and other cruisers fitted out for Confederate service in her ports, but that, for "that other damage, immense and infinite, caused by the prolongation of the war," Sumner wanted Britain to turn over Canada as payment. The chief cause of this humiliation was Grant's vindictiveness at Sumner's blocking Grant's plan to annex Santo Domingo. Sumner broke with the Republican party and campaigned for the Liberal Republican Horace Greeley in 1872.
Sumner was the scholar in politics.
Namesakes
The following are named after Charles Sumner:
Charles Sumner Lofton, pioneering African-American high school principal Sumner High School in St. Louis, Missouri, opened in 1875, the first black high school west of the Mississippi . Sumner Academy of Arts and Science, (Sumner High School prior to 1978) in Kansas City, Kansas Charles Sumner School in Washington, DC (now a museum) Charles Sumner Elementary School in Scranton, PA Sumner Library in Minneapolis, Minnesota Sumner County, Kansas Sumner, Nebraska Sumner, Oregon Sumner, Washington Avenue Charles Sumner, in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti SS Charles Sumner, a World War II Liberty cargo ship. The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner 2 vol (1990) Edward L.
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