Charles Sumner
Charles Sumner was an American lawyer and statesman who represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate from 1851 until his death in 1874. Before and during the American Civil War, he was a leading American advocate for the abolition of slavery, and after the war he was a key figure in the Reconstruction era, during which he and other Radical Republicans successfully fought to end slavery and ensure basic rights for Black Americans. He continued advocating for racial equality until his death, lobbying in his final days for a civil rights bill that served as a model for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Historians credit Sumner with coining the phrase "equality before the law," which he first used as part of an early attempt to integrate Boston's public school system.
Sumner chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1861 to 1871, until he lost the position following a dispute with President Ulysses S. Grant over the attempted annexation of Santo Domingo. After breaking with Grant, he joined the Liberal Republican Party, spending his final two years in the Senate alienated from his party.
Sumner began his political activism as a member of various anti-slavery groups, leading to his election to the U.S. Senate in 1851 as a member of the Free Soil Party; he soon became a founding member of the Republican Party. In the Senate, he devoted his efforts to opposing the "Slave Power," which in 1856 culminated in a vicious beating, almost to death, by Representative Preston Brooks on the Senate floor. Sumner's severe injuries and extended absence from the Senate made him a symbol of the anti-slavery cause. Though he did not return to the Senate until 1859, Massachusetts reelected him in 1857, leaving his empty desk as a reminder of the incident, which polarized the nation as the Civil War approached.
During the war, Sumner led the Radical Republican faction, which was critical of President Abraham Lincoln for being too moderate toward the South. As chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, Sumner worked to ensure that the United Kingdom and France did not intervene on behalf of the Confederate States. After the Union won the war and Lincoln was assassinated, Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens led congressional efforts to grant equal civil and voting rights to freedmen and to block ex-Confederates from power so they would not reverse the gains derived from the Union's victory in the war. President Andrew Johnson's persistent opposition to these efforts played a role in his impeachment in 1868.
During the Grant administration, Sumner fell out of favor with his party. He supported the annexation of Alaska but opposed Grant's proposal to annex Santo Domingo. After leading senators to defeat the Santo Domingo Treaty in 1870, Sumner denounced Grant in terms that made reconciliation impossible, and Senate Republicans stripped Sumner of his power. Sumner opposed Grant's 1872 reelection and supported Liberal Republican Horace Greeley. Sumner died in office less than two years later.
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 Joseph Story and an enthusiastic student of jurisprudence.
After graduating in 1834, Sumner was admitted to the bar and entered private practice in Boston in partnership with George Stillman Hillard. A visit to Washington decided him against a political career, and he returned to Boston resolved to practice law. He contributed to the quarterly American Jurist and edited Story's court decisions as well as some law texts. From 1836 to 1837, Sumner lectured at Harvard Law School.
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:
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" in a sonorous tone.
In 1840 he became an hereditary member of the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati in succession to his father.
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 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 Massachusetts's system of public education, advocated 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.