CHARLES SUMNER

A life of the great abolitionist, progressive, and anti-imperialist.

Born in 1811, Charles Sumner, writes constitutional scholar Tameez, “worked with a Black lawyer on the first case argued by an interracial legal team in American history”—significantly, a case involving a young Black girl seeking admission into a whites-only Boston school. Sumner is best remembered today for being assaulted on the Senate floor by a southern politician who beat him with a cane, another significant act inasmuch as, Tameez notes, the cane was an instrument by which masters and overseers beat the enslaved, who were forbidden to carry canes themselves. Sumner earned the wrath of the South for having pressed for not just abolition but also civil rights, coining the phrase “equality before the law,” including equality of education. During the run-up to the Civil War, Sumner urged that slavery be prohibited in any of the nation’s territories, which were administered by Congress; during the Civil War itself, he helped Abraham Lincoln draft the Emancipation Proclamation, pressing the president to abandon language allowing any secessionist states that surrendered to immediately establish state governments and rejoin Congress “with no institutions changed.” As Tameez documents, Sumner was skillful in bending public opinion, an accomplished legal mind who kept his eye on the prize. Thwarted by the failure of Reconstruction, he also courted controversy by leaving the Republican Party, of which he was a key founder, and more so by urging Blacks to leave it as well: “Never vote for any man,” he urged, “who is not true to you.” He remained provocative to the last, agitating against Ulysses S. Grant’s plan to annex the Dominican Republic and pressing for a comprehensive civil rights bill that never passed. “Liberty has been won,” he said. “The battle for Equality is still pending.”

A skillful blend of legal history and biography that honors the 19th century’s foremost champion of civil rights.