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Charles Sumner

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   Charles Sumner
   Charles Sumner

                        Senior Senator, Massachusetts

           Term of office:
   March 4, 1851– March 11, 1874

   Political party: Republican
     Preceded by:   Robert Rantoul, Jr.
    Succeeded by:   William B. Washburn
        Born:       January 6, 1811
                    Boston, Massachusetts, USA
        Died:       March 11, 1874
                    Washington D.C., USA
       Spouse:      Alice Mason Hooper

   Charles Sumner ( January 6, 1811 – March 11, 1874) was an American
   politician and statesman from Massachusetts. 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. He jumped from party to party,
   gaining fame as a Republican. One of the most learned statesmen of the
   era, he specialized in foreign affairs, working closely with Abraham
   Lincoln. He devoted his enormous energies to the destruction of what he
   considered the Slave Power, that is the conspiracy of slave owners to
   seize control of the federal government and block the progress of
   liberty. His severe beating in 1856 by South Carolina Representative
   Preston Brooks on the floor of the United States Senate helped escalate
   the tensions that led to war. 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. Although he kept on good terms with Abraham Lincoln,
   he was a leader of the hard-line Radical Republicans.

   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. In 1871, however, he broke
   with President Ulysses Grant; 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. He
   attended the Boston Latin School. He graduated in 1830 from Harvard
   College (where he lived in Hollis Hall), and in 1834 from Harvard Law
   School where he studied jurisprudence with his friend Joseph Story.

   In 1834, Sumner was admitted to the bar, entering private practice in
   Boston, where he partnered with George Stillman Hillard. A visit to
   Washington filled him with loathing for politics as a career, and he
   returned to Boston resolved to devote himself to the practice of 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

   From 1837 to 1840, Sumner traveled extensively in Europe. There he
   became fluent in French, German and Italian, with a command of
   languages equaled by no American then in public life. He met with many
   of the leading statesmen in Europe, and secured a deep insight into
   civil law and government.

   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. He
   spoke against war, and made an impassioned appeal for freedom and
   peace.

   He became a sought-after orator for formal occasions. His lofty themes
   and stately eloquence made a profound impression; his platform presence
   was imposing (he stood six feet and four inches tall, with a massive
   frame). His voice was clear and of great power; his gestures
   unconventional and individual, but vigorous and impressive. His
   literary style was florid, with much detail, allusion, and quotation,
   often from the Bible as well as ancient Greece and Rome. 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. He advocated prison reform and
   opposed the Mexican-American War. He viewed the war as a war of
   aggression but was primarily concerned that captured territories would
   expand slavery westward. In 1847, the vigor with which Sumner denounced
   a Boston congressman's vote in favour 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. In 1848, he was defeated as a candidate for the U.S.
   House of Representatives.

   In 1851, control of the Massachusetts General Court was secured by the
   Democrats in coalition with the Free Soilers. However, the legislature
   deadlocked on who should succeed Daniel Webster in the U.S. Senate.
   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. Carving out a reputation as the South's most hated foe and
     the Negro's bravest friend, he inflamed sectional differences,
     advanced his personal fortunes, and helped bring about national
     tragedy.

Service in the Senate

Antebellum career and attack by Preston Brooks

   John L. Magee of Philadelphia created Southern Chivalry—Argument Versus
   Clubs, a lithograph that shows Northern outrage over Preston Brooks's
   attack on Sumner.
   Enlarge
   John L. Magee of Philadelphia created Southern Chivalry—Argument Versus
   Clubs, a lithograph that shows Northern outrage over Preston Brooks's
   attack on Sumner.

   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. Entitled "Freedom National; Slavery Sectional" (a popular
   abolitionist motto), Sumner attacked the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and
   called for its repeal.

   The conventions of both the great parties had just affirmed the
   finality of every provision of the Compromise of 1850. Reckless of
   political expediency, Sumner moved that the Fugitive Slave Act be
   forthwith repealed; and for more than three hours he denounced it as a
   violation of the Constitution, an affront to the public conscience, and
   an offense against the divine law. The speech provoked a storm of anger
   in the South, but the North was heartened to find at last a leader
   whose courage matched his conscience.

   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. Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Butler of South Carolina,
   comparing Douglas to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

   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." Most serious was his extreme insult of Butler as a pimp who
   took "a mistress 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."

   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; Sumner suffered from nightmares, headaches, and
   post-traumatic shock in addition to the head trauma. The Massachusetts
   General Court reelected him, in the belief that in the Senate chamber
   his vacant chair was the most eloquent pleader for free speech and
   resistance to slavery.

   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. Northerners were outraged, with the
   editor of the New York Evening Post, William Cullen Bryant, writing:

          The South cannot tolerate free speech anywhere, and would stifle
          it in Washington with the bludgeon and the bowie-knife, as they
          are now trying to stifle it in Kansas by massacre, rapine, and
          murder.
          Has it come to this, that we must speak with bated breath in the
          presence of our Southern masters?... Are we to be chastised as
          they chastise their slaves? Are we too, slaves, slaves for life,
          a target for their brutal blows, when we do not comport
          ourselves to please them?"

   The outrage heard across the North was loud and strong, and historian
   William Gienapp later argued that the success of the new Republican
   party was uncertain in early 1856; but Brooks’s "assault was of
   critical importance in transforming the struggling Republican party
   into a major political force."

   Conversely, the act was praised by Southern newspapers; 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.
   They must be lashed into submission."

American Civil War

   After three years Sumner returned to the Senate in 1859. He delivered a
   speech entitled "The Barbarism of Slavery" in the months leading up to
   the 1860 presidential election. 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. With Southern senators
   no longer standing in the way, Sumner was successful in 1862.

   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. Mason and John
   Slidell must be given up. 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.
   Charles Sumner
   Enlarge
   Charles Sumner

   Sumner was a longtime enemy of United States Chief Justice Roger Taney,
   and attacked his decision in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case. In 1865,
   Sumner said:

          I speak what cannot be denied when I declare that the opinion of
          the Chief Justice in the case of Dred Scott was more thoroughly
          abominable than anything of the kind in the history of courts.
          Judicial baseness reached its lowest point on that occasion. You
          have not forgotten that terrible decision where a most
          unrighteous judgment was sustained by a falsification of
          history. Of course, the Constitution of the United States and
          every principle of Liberty was falsified, but historical truth
          was falsified also..."

   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. He resented the much
   more generous Reconstruction policy taken by Lincoln, and later by
   Andrew Johnson, as an encroachment upon the powers of Congress.
   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. Channing believed that
   human beings had an infinite potential to improve themselves. Expanding
   on this argument, Sumner concluded that environment had "an important,
   if not controlling influence" in shaping individuals. By creating a
   society where "knowledge, virtue and religion" took precedence, "the
   most forlorn shall grow into forms of unimagined strength and beauty."
   Moral law, then, was as important for governments as it was for
   individuals, and laws which inhibited a man's ability to grow -- like
   slavery or segregation -- were evil. While Sumner often had dark views
   of contemporary society, his faith in reform was unshakeable; when
   accused of utopianism, he replied "The Utopias of one age have been the
   realities of the next."

   The annexation of Texas -- a new slave-holding state -- in 1845 pushed
   Sumner into taking an active role in the anti-slavery movement. He
   helped organize an alliance between Democrats and the newly created
   Free-Soil Party in Massachusetts in 1849. That same year, Sumner
   represented the plaintiffs in Roberts v. Boston, a case which
   challenged the legality of segregation. 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. Board
   of Education over a century later. 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. The senator was one of the
   most prominent advocates for suffrage, along with free homesteads and
   free public schools for blacks. 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."
   His uncompromising attitude did not endear him to moderates and
   sometimes 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 the law. 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.
   During Reconstruction, he often attacked civil rights legislation as
   too weak and fought hard for legislation to give land to freed slaves;
   unlike many of his contemporaries, he viewed segregation and slavery as
   two sides of the same coin. He introduced a civil rights bill in 1872
   that would have mandated equal accommodation in all public places and
   required suits brought under the bill to be argued in federal courts.
   The bill ultimately failed, but Sumner still spoke of it on his
   deathbed.

Personal Life and Marriage

   Sumner and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
   Enlarge
   Sumner and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

   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. Longfellow's
   daughters found his stateliness amusing; Sumner would ceremoniously
   open doors for the children while saying "In presequas" in a sonorous
   tone.

   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. That winter, Hooper began going
   out to public events with Friedrich von Holstein, a German nobleman.
   While the two were not having an affair, the relationship caused gossip
   in Washington, and Hooper refused to stop seeing him. 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. The situation depressed and embarrassed
   Sumner; the two were finally divorced on May 10, 1873.

Reconstruction years and death

   Sumner was strongly opposed to the Reconstruction policy of Johnson,
   believing it to be far too generous to the South. Johnson was impeached
   by the House, but the Senate failed to convict him (and thus remove him
   from office) by a single vote.

   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 held that England's
   according the rights of belligerents to the Confederacy had doubled the
   duration of the war, entailing inestimable loss. 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. At the Geneva
   arbitration conference these "national claims" were abandoned.)

   Under pressure from the president, he was deposed in March 1871 from
   the chairmanship of the Committee on Foreign Relations, in which he had
   served with great effectiveness since 1861. 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.

   In 1872, he introduced in the Senate a resolution providing that the
   names of Civil War battles should not be placed on the regimental
   colors of army regiments. The Massachusetts legislature denounced this
   battle-flag resolution as "an insult to the loyal soldiery of the
   nation" and as "meeting the unqualified condemnation of the people of
   the Commonwealth." For more than a year all efforts– headed by the poet
   John Greenleaf Whittier– to rescind that censure were without avail,
   but early in 1874 it was annulled. His last words uttered around his
   closest colleagues and friends was noted to be "save my civil rights
   bill", a bill which in varied forms would finally pass not until almost
   100 years after his death.

   He lay in state in the U.S. Capitol rotunda and was buried in Mount
   Auburn Cemetery.

   Sumner was the scholar in politics. He could never be induced to suit
   his action to the political expediency of the moment. "The slave of
   principles, I call no party master," was the proud avowal with which he
   began his service in the Senate. For the tasks of Reconstruction he
   showed little aptitude. He was less a builder than a prophet. His was
   the first clear program proposed in Congress for the reform of the
   civil service. It was his dauntless courage in denouncing compromise,
   in demanding the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act, and in insisting
   upon emancipation, that made him the chief initiating force in the
   struggle that put an end to slavery.

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.

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