As a student of American history, I believe there are some very important heroes who have never received the acknowledgement and acclaim they deserve. Charles Sumner from Massachusetts is one of those heroes. If I was guessing, I would estimate 95 out of 100 Americans have never heard of Sumner. It appears to be the fate of many 19th century protagonists, no matter how outstanding. They were famous long ago.
Along with Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, Charles Sumner led the struggle for abolition of slavery in the United States. Both as a lawyer and as a U.S. Senator from 1852 to his death in 1874, Sumner steadfastly fought the Slave Power. His story is beautifully told in “The Great Abolitionist,” a 2024 biography by historian Stephen Puleo.
Sumner was an unlikely hero. At the same time as he was ferociously principled, he was painfully shy, almost geeky. He was wealthy, intellectual and pretentious but his oratorical skills and his bravery were undeniable. He hung out with a high-powered literary crowd that included his best friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
He experienced some awful tragedies in his life. At age 33, his 22-year-old sister, Mary, died. They were very close and that death rocked him to his core. He married at age 55 to a much younger, beautiful woman. It didn’t end well. To call it disastrous would be entirely accurate.
Most historically well-known, Sumner was the victim of a vicious assault on the floor of the U.S. Senate on May 22, 1856, by a congressman from South Carolina, Preston Brooks. With a cane of gutta-percha, he repeatedly beat Sumner over the head, nearly killing him.
Brooks attacked Sumner because of an anti-slavery speech he made called “The Crime Against Kansas.” Brooks considered the speech a libel. In his speech, Sumner had singled out Brooks’s cousin Senator Andrew Butler for vicious criticism. Sumner was the most outspoken anti-slavery advocate in the Senate and that was true for Sumner’s entire tenure as a senator.
As Puleo wrote, from Brooks’s perspective, “Sumner represented a dangerous group of Radical Republicans who threatened the South, its sense of order and its cherished institutions.”
Sumner survived but it took him over three years to recover. The effects of the traumatic brain injury were life long. It’s likely, as Puleo surmises, that Sumner also had PTSD. For years, he suffered severe headaches when he would re-enter the Senate and it improved whenever he left.
Even before he became a U.S. Senator, Sumner had distinguished himself. Over 100 years before the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education, Sumner and an African American lawyer Robert Morris litigated Roberts v. City of Boston. In that case, the plaintiffs argued against segregated schools.
It is not an exaggeration to say that in Brown, Thurgood Marshall made the same argument Sumner made in Roberts. Sumner lost then but the argument that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal did eventually win both in Brown and in the state of Massachusetts. In 1855, the Massachusetts legislature forbade racial discrimination in schools, something that proved extremely difficult to prevent in practice.
To appreciate the greatness of Sumner, you have to recognize the minority status of abolitionism in the 1840s. Abolitionists were not just hated — they were an absolutely despised fringe. Abolitionists were subject to physical assault, mob attacks and social ostracism. It was not until the mid-1850s that the tide turned. The assault on Sumner elicited much sympathy and propelled the abolitionist movement. He became a revered figure in the North while becoming a pariah in the South.
Sumner had made his first major anti-slavery speech at Faneuil Hall in Boston in 1845. He spoke against the admission of Texas into the nation as a slave-holding state. He turned on the ruling class of his time, including his own world of Boston high society, and he excoriated their accommodation with slavery. He spoke out against the Fugitive Slave Act, the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
Puleo wrote that Sumner was relentless in his view that American slavery was a violation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the laws of God.
When Abraham Lincoln became president, Sumner remained a close friend but he always pushed Lincoln toward the goals of equality and total emancipation for Black people. Before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Sumner consistently pressured Lincoln to free the slaves and to allow them to serve in the Union army. He did not want to re-admit the Confederate states to the Union after the Civil War unless they agreed to universal suffrage.
Sumner was way ahead of his time. Very ambitiously, he had wanted to re-make the South. He anticipated the voting rights problems which have bedeviled the Southern states since Reconstruction. Before he died, he worked on the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which forbade discrimination in public accommodations. President Ulysses Grant signed it, but in 1883, the Supreme Court largely reversed it.
Sumner was integrally involved in passage of the Thirteenth Amendment which outlawed slavery. He was instrumental in the establishment of the Freedmens’ Bureau. Congress repealed all fugitive slave acts, allowed “colored” persons admission into railroad carriages and allowed “colored” testimony in U.S. courts. Sumner had introduced all those measures.
When Sumner died in 1874, his coffin was placed in the center of the Capitol rotunda and many thousands came to pay their respects. It was the first time in American history a senator was so honored. What was unique about Sumner was that he more resembled a revolutionary intellectual than a party politician.
With voting rights so threatened now and with an inert Congress, we could so use more brave and principled legislators like Charles Sumner.
Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.