Charles Sumner, U.S. senator, abolitionist, and
civil rights advocate, was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Relief Jacob Sumner
and Charles Pinckney Sumner, a sheriff and lawyer. He graduated from Harvard in
1830 and entered Harvard Law School, studying under U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Joseph Story, who became his legal mentor. Sumner practiced law during
1835-1837, but, although he loved the intellectual aspect of the law, he had no
affinity for its everyday practice. He also became an opponent of slavery at
that time. In the late 1830s he spent almost two-and-a-half years in Europe,
studying their languages, cultures, and governments.
In 1840 Sumner returned to Boston where he became
involved in several reform movements: public education, prisons, and antiwar
(including opposition to the Mexican War). Most of all, he lent his time and
considerable talents to the antislavery movement. In politics, he sided first
with the "Conscience" Whigs who opposed both slavery and the
accommodating views of the "Cotton" Whigs, then he helped form the
Free Soil party in the 1848 election year. He spoke out against "the lords
of the lash and lords of the loom"; that is, the financial ties between
Southern slaveowners and Northern industrialists. He also worked to defeat
racial discrimination in the North. In 1849 he represented in court a group
trying (unsuccessfully as it turned out) to integrate the public schools in
Boston.
In 1851, a coalition in the Massachusetts legislature of Free Soilers and
Democrats elected Sumner to fill the U.S. Senate seat of Daniel Webster, who
had resigned to become secretary of state. An opponent of the Compromise of
1850, Sumner tried to repeal its Fugitive Slave Act. He argued that the
intention of the constitutional framers had been to leave the states as the
“guardians of Personal Liberty," thus forcing state governments to cooperate
in the return of runaway slaves was unconstitutional. His talent for
oratory quickly made him the major antislavery voice in the Senate. After
Congress opened the Western territories to the possibility of slavery in the
Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, Sumner joined other Free-Soil Democrats and
Conscience Whigs to establish the antislavery Republican Party.
When Kansas became embroiled in violence between
pro- and antislavery forces, Sumner delivered a stinging attack from the floor
of the Senate. His speech—"The Crime against Kansas"—used
vitriolic rhetoric, focusing particular venom on fellow-Senator Andrew Butler of
South Carolina who was tarred as "mistress" to the "harlot
Slavery." In retaliation, Butler’s nephew, Congressman Preston Brooks,
found Sumner seated at his desk on the Senate floor and beat the senator
unconscious with his cane. The incident raised Sumner to the status of
antislavery martyr. He was absent from the Senate for over three years, yet
Massachusetts refused to fill his position. Butler, meanwhile, became a hero to
many in the South for upholding the honor of his family and region. Returning to
the Senate in 1859, Sumner continued where he left off with a four-hour
antislavery harangue, "The Barbarism of Slavery."
At the onset of the Civil War Sumner began
pushing for emancipation of the slaves. While lobbying Lincoln for sweeping
action, he drafted legislation that undermined the institution incrementally.
The Senator also helped convince the president to use black troops in the Union
war effort. As chair of the important Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sumner
sparred with Secretary of State William Henry Seward for control of the
administration’s foreign policy. On the issue of Reconstruction Sumner was a
radical who pushed for treating the former Confederate territory as conquered
land to which the federal government could dictate with few restrictions. He was
dissatisfied with Lincoln’s mild reconstruction proposals and later became the
chief adversary of President Andrew Johnson’s policies, leading the call for
the latter’s impeachment and removal. Sumner, a key spokesman for the
African-American community, drafted or sponsored the major civil rights
legislation of the period.
Sumner stood firm against the expansionist and
interventionist foreign policy of Republican President Ulysses S. Grant
(1869-1877). He used his chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee to stop
the Grant administration’s planned annexation of Santo Domingo and their
formal recognition of the Cuban faction rebelling against Spanish rule. In
response, the Grant administration orchestrated Sumner’s removal as the
committee’s chair. Previously a harsh critic of Britain’s pro-Confederate
policies, the Senator sought retribution through a forced cession of Canada from
Britain to the United States. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish blocked that
effort, compelling the senator to accept the (1870) Washington Treaty’s
stipulation of monetary damages extracted from Britain.
Disgruntled not only by Grant’s foreign policy,
but by the president’s hesitancy on desired liberal reforms, such as a merit
bureaucracy, and by the administration’s apparent corruption, Sumner
reluctantly joined the Liberal Republican movement in 1872. In May a convention
of Liberal Republicans nominated maverick newspaper editor Horace Greeley for
president. A few months later the desperate Democrats also endorsed Greeley, who
was soundly defeated by Grant in November. After the election, Sumner continued
to use his Senate seat to work for racial equality. In every session of Congress
since 1870 he had introduced a civil rights bill to outlaw racial discrimination
in public accommodations. Finally, shortly after his death, the outgoing
Republican Congress passed a watered-down version of his bill as the Civil
Rights Act of 1875. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional in
1883.
Source consulted: American National Biography