Charles Sumner
Conscience of a Nation
-
- $28.99
Publisher Description
"A thorough recounting of the great legislator’s life and deed... unlikely to be bettered anytime soon... Tameez is expert at explaining Sumner’s legal thought... One cannot help wishing we had a Charles Sumner in Washington today."
—The New York Times
"An excellent book about the courageous Massachusetts senator... Drawing from hundreds of letters, articles and speeches, Mr. Tameez has created a remarkable portrait of a complex man who faced many personal challenges... Charles Sumner is a moving portrayal of a courageous, long-overlooked American who, in the words of one contemporary, 'stood in the vanguard of Freedom.'”
—Wall Street Journal
A landmark biography of Charles Sumner, the unsung hero of the American Civil War and Reconstruction
Charles Sumner is mainly known as the abolitionist statesman who suffered a brutal caning on the Senate floor by the proslavery congressman Preston Brooks in 1856. This violent episode has obscured Sumner’s status as the most passionate champion of equal rights and multiracial democracy of his time. A friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, an ally of Frederick Douglass, and an adviser to Abraham Lincoln, Sumner helped the Union win the Civil War and ordain the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
In a comprehensive but fast-paced narrative, Zaakir Tameez presents Sumner as one of America’s forgotten founding fathers, a constitutional visionary who helped to rewrite the post–Civil War Constitution and give birth to modern civil rights law. He argues that Sumner was a gay man who battled with love and heartbreak at a time when homosexuality wasn’t well understood or accepted. And he explores Sumner’s critical partnerships with the nation’s first generation of Black lawyers and civil rights leaders, whose legal contributions to Reconstruction have been overlooked for far too long.
An extraordinary achievement of historical and constitutional scholarship, Charles Sumner brings back to life one of America’s most inspiring statesmen, whose formidable ideas remain relevant to a nation still divided over questions of race, democracy, and constitutional law.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The renowned abolitionist and Massachusetts senator was a political thinker far ahead of his time, according to this exceptional debut from constitutional scholar Tameez. Best known today for his brutal caning by a proslavery congressman on the Senate floor in 1856—an episode that Tameez says has obscured his legacy—Sumner had a visionary understanding of the Constitution that led him to champion equal rights and a multiracial democracy long before such advocacy was widespread. Not only did he help devise the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th Amendment, and the Freedmen's Bureau, but in 1870 he also designed, with Black lawyer John Mercer Langston, a civil rights bill—"astonishing for its prescience"—that would eventually become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Well known for coining the phrase "equality before the law," Sumner also frequently used the term "human rights" ("nearly three hundred times," by Tameez's count), a fact that has gone almost wholly unnoted by scholars of the term's history. Seeking to understand what made Sumner such a staunch advocate for equality, Tameez takes rewarding, sinuous deep dives into his childhood growing up in a Black neighborhood of Boston, his friendships with thinkers like Alexis de Tocqueville and Frederick Douglass, and his "probable" homosexuality. The result is a smart and sweeping biography that makes a profound argument for considering Sumner a founding father of modern America.
