CHARLES SUMNER: Conscience of a Nation, by Zaakir Tameez
A strange, special fate belongs to those famous Americans known not for what they did but for what was done to them. Think of Sonny Liston, photogenically flattened by Muhammad Ali’s “phantom punch,” or Rodney King, brutalized by the Los Angeles police. Such figures are remembered more as prostrate symbols than as living, breathing people.
Then there is Charles Sumner, the antislavery Massachusetts senator “caned” by the South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks. The verb, rarely used in other contexts, masks the viciousness of the deed. In 1856, Brooks, offended by a speech Sumner had given, slammed his gold-topped walking stick into his colleague’s skull and body until he lost consciousness. Sumner was drenched in blood. His doctor was surprised he survived.
The attack inflamed the North and helped grow the new Republican Party, while white Southerners rallied around Brooks, an early hint there was a constituency for violence on behalf of slavery. But who was Sumner? What do we miss by remembering this fierce and visionary leader solely for his maiming on the Senate floor?
Until recently, curious readers were likely to consult a two-volume biography by the historian David Herbert Donald, published in 1960 and 1970. Yet Donald’s celebrated work — the first volume won the Pulitzer Prize — was marred by a dismissive attitude toward abolitionists, whom he held no less responsible for the national cataclysm than the traitorous enslavers who actually started the thing.
It is unsurprising that the present period of political tumult has produced fresh takes on Sumner’s colorful and consequential life. Last year, Stephen Puleo, the author of a book about the assault — called “The Caning” — published a book about the man — called “The Great Abolitionist” — that valiantly attempted to restore the reputation of one of “the most influential non-presidents in American history.” Now the recent Yale Law School graduate Zaakir Tameez offers “Charles Sumner,” an even more thorough recounting of the great legislator’s life and deeds, one that, while not without its flaws, is unlikely to be bettered anytime soon.
Tameez’s Sumner is a brilliant romantic, a committed racial egalitarian, a radical who pushed for justice from within the halls of power, and often did so alone. In 1849, he offered the first full-throated argument for “equality before the law” in an unsuccessful school-desegregation case. After the Civil War, Sumner advanced a civil rights bill that would have gone even further than the law President Lyndon Johnson signed a century later.
Influenced by the Supreme Court justice Joseph Story and former President John Quincy Adams, Sumner saw the Constitution as an implicitly antislavery document that inclined the government toward ensuring freedom and equality for all, despite the founders’ own complicity with human bondage. As Sumner once put it, “our fathers builded wiser than they knew.”
Sumner began pushing Lincoln on emancipation even before the first major Confederate assault — and never stopped pushing for more. When a crowd celebrating the achievement of Black male suffrage stopped outside Sumner’s Washington home, he appeared despondent. “It is my nature, fellow citizens,” he told them, “to think more of what remains to be done than what has been done.”
A 600-plus-page biography is no mean feat. Copious footnotes evince a comprehensive grasp of the relevant historiography, and Tameez is expert at explaining Sumner’s legal thought. At times, however, the writing feels unpolished, rife with clichés and awkward, anachronistic phrasings. Enslavers “fight tooth and nail,” while Sumner stands out “like a sore thumb,” and rivals expect him “to get chewed up in the dog-eat-dog world of national politics.”
And yet Tameez succeeds in giving us a richer understanding of Sumner’s private life than previous biographers. The legislator habitually brooded alone and feuded with friends, wore bedazzling clothes (English tweeds, clashing plaids) and often accompanied Mary Todd Lincoln to the opera.
He also may have been gay. “He would at once desert the most blooming beauty to talk to the plainest of men,” one friend recalled. When a belle he was ostensibly wooing bought him a birthday present, he cut off contact. A late-in-life marriage ended with his estranged wife spreading rumors of impotence. Years earlier, as an aimless 33-year-old, Sumner had suffered a breakdown after his best friend married. He found salvation by committing himself to advocacy for the oppressed. If he could not love men as individuals, Tameez’s account suggests, he would love and serve them in aggregate.
In the end, Sumner’s caning turns out to be a surprisingly appropriate way to remember him. Never particularly effective as a lawmaker, he was a superb provocateur. Friends and foes observed at the time that he may have intentionally brought the beating on himself, predicting it would hasten the reckoning he knew had to come. Early in his career, he told a crowd there were three things to look for in a politician: “The first is backbone, the second is backbone and the third is backbone.” One cannot help wishing we had a Charles Sumner in Washington today.
CHARLES SUMNER: Conscience of a Nation | By Zaakir Tameez | Holt | 629 pp. | $38.99
The post Charles Sumner Was More Than Just a Guy Who Got Caned on the Senate Floor appeared first on New York Times.
