CHARLES SUMNER was an American lawyer and statesman died on this date (b: 01-06-1811), who represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate from 1851 unil his death in 1874.
The eldest son of a well-educated, if unambitious, sheriff and his wife, Sumner was raised on Beacon Hill’s humble north slope, Boston’s hub of Black culture at the time. A poor but brilliant interloper amid the city’s elites, he strived to excel, a student of history and languages and a sterling Harvard Law graduate, winning the admiration and affection of Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story.
Although a future as a gentleman scholar beckoned, a trip to Europe convinced him to funnel his prodigious intellect and energies toward ending America’s racial apartheid, lobbying for integration of Boston’s schools over a century before Brown v. Board of Education. His transformation may have been partly personal: He’d developed feelings for his dearest friend, the married Samuel Howe, an intimacy that endured until his death but may or may not have been consummated. I say let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.
Before and during the American Civil War, he was a leading American advocate for the abolition of slavery. He 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 over reconstruction, he joined the Liberal Republican Party, spending his final two years in the Senate alienated from his party. Sumner had a controversial and divisive legacy for many years after his death, but in recent decades, his historical reputation has improved in recognition of his early support for racial equality.
He was known in the day as “Lincoln’s bishop” and was one of the — if not THE — chief forces that brought Lincoln to write the Emancipation Proclamation. He was close friends with Frederick Douglass.
In May 1861, Sumner counseled Lincoln to make emancipation the war’s primary objective. He believed that military necessity would eventually force Lincoln’s hand and that emancipation would give the Union higher moral standing, which would keep Britain from entering the Civil War on the Confederacy’s side. In October 1861, at the Massachusetts Republican Convention in Worcester, Sumner openly expressed his belief that slavery was the war’s sole cause and that the Union government’s primary objective was to end it. Sumner argued that Lincoln could command the Union Army to emancipate slaves under color of martial law. In the conservative press, Sumner’s speech was denounced as incendiary. Conservative Massachusetts newspapers editorialized that he was mentally ill and a “candidate for the insane asylum,” but the Radicals fully endorsed Sumner’s speech, and he continued to advance his argument publicly.
As an intermediate measure, the Radicals passed two Confiscation Acts in 1861 and 1862 that allowed the military to emancipate confiscated slaves whom the Confederate military had impressed into service.
On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, abolishing slavery in all Confederate territory. The Thirteenth Amendment subsequently abolished the practice of chattel slavery.
Sumner was also at the center of a legendary attack in the U.S. Senate Chambers. On the afternoon of May 22, 1856 Representative Preston Brooks confronted Sumner in the Senate chamber and beat him severely on the head, using a thick gutta-percha cane with a gold head. Sumner was knocked down and trapped under the heavy desk, which was bolted to the floor.
Blinded by his own blood, he staggered up the aisle and collapsed into unconsciousness. Brooks continued to beat the motionless Sumner until his cane broke, at which point he continued to strike Sumner with the remaining piece. Several other senators attempted to help Sumner, but were blocked by Laurence Keitt, who brandished a pistol and shouted, “Let them be!” The episode became a symbol of polarization in the antebellum period; Sumner became a martyr in the North and Brooks a hero in the South.
Sumner was known as a flamboyant dresser, and frequently accompanied Mary Todd Lincoln to the theater and opera. He was a bachelor for most of his life; he was probably gay. In 1866, he began courting Alice Mason Hooper, the widowed daughter-in-law of Massachusetts Representative Samuel Hooper, and they married that October. Their marriage was unhappy. Sumner could not respond to his wife’s humor, and Alice had a ferocious temper. That winter, Alice began going out to public events with Prussian diplomat Friedrich von Holstein. This caused gossip in Washington, but Alice refused to stop seeing Holstein. When Holstein was recalled to Prussia in the spring of 1867, Alice accused Sumner of engineering the action, which Sumner denied. They separated the following September. Sumner’s enemies used the affair to attack Sumner’s manhood, calling him “The Great Impotency.” The situation depressed and embarrassed Sumner. He obtained an uncontested divorce on the grounds of desertion in May 1873.
Long ailing, Charles Sumner died of a heart attack at his home in Washington, D.C., on March 11, 1874, aged 63. He lay in state at the United States Capitol rotunda, the second senator (Henry Clay being the first, in 1852) and fourth person so honored. At his March 16 burial in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the pallbearers included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Greenleaf Whittier.
In the aftermath, Mississippi Senator Lucius Lamar’s eulogy for Sumner was controversial enough considering his Southern heritage that the incident resulted in Lamar’s inclusion in John F. Kennedy’s book Profiles in Courage.
Sumner is the subject of Zaakir Tameez’s biography, Charles Sumner: The Conscience of a Nation and David Donald’s Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man.