Washington Lawyer - November/December 2024 - 32

WORTH READING
The Great Abolitionist:
Charles Sumner and the
Fight for a More Perfect
Union
Stephen Puleo
St. Martin's Press, 2024
Review by Diane Kiesel
I
n 1834, 23-year-old Charles
Sumner, fresh out of Harvard Law
School and traveling to Washington,
D.C., looked out the window
of his stagecoach and for the first
time saw enslaved people working
in a field outside Baltimore.
In a letter to his
parents, he wrote:
" My worst preconception
of their
appearance and
ignorance did not
fall as low as their
actual stupidity. "
The appalling letter
offered no
hint that Sumner
would later devote
his life -
and almost lose
it - to making the aspirational words of the
Declaration of Independence a reality, which
eventually ensured that even those brought
here in chains from Africa were equal in the
eyes of the law.
Historian Stephen Puleo's engaging and wellwritten
new biography of Sumner, The Great
Abolitionist, traces Sumner's moral and political
journey from bored lawyer, indifferent to the
plight of four million enslaved human beings, to
radical United States senator with an unquenchable
thirst for freedom.
Sumner and his twin sister, Matilda, were born
on January 6, 1811, the eldest of nine children.
Their father, Charles Pinckney Sumner, was the
sheriff of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, and
their grandfather was a Revolutionary War hero.
Charles Senior ruled with an iron fist, expecting
Junior to excel in academics and demonstrate
32 WASHINGTON LAWYER
* NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2024
physical prowess, but his uncoordinated son
was a disappointment.
After dabbling in law, Sumner embarked on the
Grand Tour of Europe. At the Sorbonne he saw
students of color mingling with white students.
" It was at that moment, in France in 1838 . . . reinforced
by similar scenes in Italy - that Sumner
recognized the full import of what he was witnessing
and reached the conclusion that would
anchor his antislavery and equal rights philosophy, "
writes Puleo. Sumner thought Americans
were indoctrinated to accept racial inequality.
Returning to America on May 3, 1840, he began
his fight to change that.
Expressed in letters to friends and newspaper
editors, Sumner's antislavery position at first was
moderate: ban it in the District of Columbia and
the new territories. But he was outraged by the
proposal to annex Texas as a slave state in 1845
and by the Compromise of 1850, which allowed
California to enter the Union as a free state, let
Utah and New Mexico decide for themselves,
and strengthened the Fugitive Slave Law, forcing
Northerners to be complicit in returning runaway
slaves to bondage.
Beyond his increasingly angry public speechmaking,
Sumner finally put his law degree to
good use. In 1849 he argued an appeal before
the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court involving
a Black child seeking to enroll in a white
public school in Boston. Of course, Sumner lost,
but his legal argument - that separate school
systems based on race were inherently unequal
- would be the same argument that Thurgood
Marshall would successfully make more than 100
years later in Brown v. Board of Education.
When Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster resigned
to become President Fillmore's secretary
of state in 1850, Sumner ran for his seat. In an
era before senators were elected by the public,
Sumner won after 26 rounds of balloting by the
Massachusetts House of Representatives on
April 24, 1851, with a coalition of abolitionists
and Free Soilers. His reaction was odd, to say the
least. While church bells rang, fireworks exploded,
and people celebrated in the streets, Sumner
was hiding at the Cambridge home of his friend,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. " [T]he guns are
thundering out their triumph, " Longfellow wrote
in his diary, " meanwhile the hero of the strife is
sitting quietly here, more saddened than exalted. "
Sumner's strange behavior leads Puleo to
speculate that he displayed " several symptoms
of . . . Asperger's Syndrome, including awkwardness
in social situations, difficulty expressing empathy,
clumsiness, and . . . [a tendency] to hyperfocus
on a specific topic. "
In the Senate, Sumner became the conscience
of the country, giving fiery antislavery speeches
that elicited applause in the public galleries
and disgust on the Senate floor. The South was
sick of him. On May 22, 1856, after Sumner had
blasted Senators Andrew Butler and Stephen
Douglas for authoring the Kansas-Nebraska
Act, South Carolina Representative Preston
Brooks (Butler's relative) walked from the House
onto the floor of the Senate and savagely beat
Sumner with a cane. Until January 6, 2021, it
ranked as one of history's most serious acts of
violence on Capitol Hill.
After the brutal attack, which left a vigorous
Sumner looking like " a man ninety years of age, "
legislators in the deeply divided antebellum
Congress refused to hold Brooks accountable.
A vote to expel him from the House fell 23 votes
short of passage. Nonetheless, Brooks was insulted
that many of his peers had voted against
him, and he resigned in a huff, only to be reelected
by South Carolina voters two weeks later.
To welcome his return to Washington, Brooks
received hundreds of canes as gifts, some bearing
the inscription " hit him again. "
Sumner's caning kept him away from Congress
until the end of 1859 and caused extreme suffering
that today would likely be resolved in a matter
of months, or even weeks. Sumner returned
to Europe to wander for years in a solitary effort
to heal his wounds with painful and ineffective
treatments and soothe the depression that followed.
After
his return, with Lincoln's election and
the resulting Civil War, Sumner became a powerful
political force. He championed the 13th
Amendment outlawing slavery. But his crowning
achievement was passage of the bill he sponsored,
the Civil Rights Act of 1875 (introduced in
1870), which prohibited discrimination by private
businesses and individuals. Unfortunately, after
Sumner died on March 11, 1874, much of his life's
work was laid to waste. Reconstruction ended in
1877, ushering in generations of Jim Crow laws.
And the Civil Rights Act was declared unconstitutional
by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883. It
would be nearly a century before Sumner's vision
for equality in America would be seen again
in the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964. Clearly,
Sumner was a man before his time.
Diane Kiesel is a retired judge of the New York
Supreme Court, adjunct professor of law, and
author.
Washington Lawyer - November/December 2024

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