Every Word Is To Be Construed in Favor of Liberty
Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation by Zaakir Tameez. Henry Holt & Co, 2025. 640 pages.
IN A SENATE CHAMBER packed with his fellow lawmakers, journalists, and hundreds of gallery spectators, Massachusetts Republican Charles Sumner spent five hours over the course of two blisteringly hot days in May 1856 lacing into slavery’s political enablers. Responding to months of chaotic violence and obvious election fraud perpetrated by proslavery forces determined to bring the Kansas Territory into the Union as a slave state, Sumner castigated the cabal of slaveholders and their allies who made up the “Slave Power” in the United States. Consumed by a “madness for slavery” and indifferent to constitutional principles, they were, in Sumner’s estimation, criminal oligarchs, a “heartless, grasping, and tyrannical” bunch who cast aside law, democracy, and moral decency to protect human bondage. Their machinations in Kansas were but the most recent example of villainy that had to be stopped lest it lead to a “fratricidal, parricidal war.”
There was nothing unusual about either the charges Sumner leveled or the forcefulness with which he leveled them. Sumner had been outspoken about the malignant influence of slavery and slaveholders for more than a decade by the time of the “Crime Against Kansas” speech. Audiences were accustomed to his flashy clothes, flowing hair, and booming voice, and they knew that the erudition of any address by the tall and muscular 45-year-old Sumner would be leavened with more than a bit of arrogance, sarcasm, and self-indulgence.
But this time, even many of his supporters worried that he had gone too far. Outraged by the crisis in Kansas and disgusted with the politicians he believed had engendered the conditions for it, Sumner launched into a series of personal attacks. He reserved special invective for Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, comparing him to the delusional Don Quixote, deriding him as a drunkard, mocking him for a speech impediment he acquired after a stroke, suggesting that he and his fellow slaveholders were guilty of sexual depravity, and declaring that the world would lose nothing if the entire state of South Carolina was “blotted out of existence.”
Sumner knew what he was doing. Butler and some of Sumner’s other targets had insulted and belittled him on the Senate floor for years, and even as Sumner wanted his speech to rouse Northerners against slavery in Kansas, he also saw it as an opportunity to turn the humiliations under which he had chafed back onto his opponents. But as Zaakir Tameez observes in his compelling new biography, Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation, Sumner “had breached every form of decorum” and given “the most provocative speech in the history of the Senate.” Most of his colleagues were shocked at its nastiness and ferocity. His friends warned him that he was in danger. And two days later, Andrew Butler’s cousin, a congressman named Preston Brooks, approached Sumner at his desk in the Senate Chamber after the body had adjourned and savagely beat him within an inch of his life. Sumner would never be quite the same again.
Arguably the critical turning point of both Sumner’s life and Tameez’s book, the speech and the pummeling that followed it revealed Sumner’s unmatched capacity for delivering withering critiques of slavery and slaveholders as well as his capacity for letting his ego outpace good sense. The sequence of events also stands out as a visceral reminder of how much raw courage it took to confront the Slave Power in the years before the Civil War. Tameez is clear-eyed about Sumner’s foibles, limitations, and missteps. But he makes a persuasive case for Sumner’s heroism, for the brilliance of his moral vision of a multiracial democracy, and for the prescience of his unyielding insistence that the Constitution demanded universal freedom and legal equality.
The son of a seamstress and an unsuccessful lawyer, Charles Sumner grew up in a Black neighborhood on Boston’s Beacon Hill. A voracious reader, a compulsive talker, and an intense competitor, Sumner’s academic gifts were undeniable from a young age. But other boys at school made fun of him for his poverty and gawkiness, and even as an adult Sumner struggled to find firm footing in the world.
He graduated from Harvard, attended Harvard Law School, and so excelled there that his mentor, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, asked him to come to Washington, DC, to serve as his court reporter and then return to the law school to teach. Sumner also founded his own law practice with a classmate, and in the late 1830s, he traveled to Europe, where he spent more than two years touring the continent and wowing aristocrats of various countries with his intellect. When he returned to Boston, he was a celebrity feted by the Brahmin social and economic elites. They rushed to hire him for their litigation needs, invited him into their homes, and listened for hours as he regaled them with stories of his adventures.
But all the while, Sumner was discontented and adrift. He loved the law, but he hated commercial legal work. He avoided it even as his debts mounted, and he continued to live with his mother in Beacon Hill. He often told people that he was lonely and that he wanted to find a woman to share his life with, but the most emotionally intimate relationships he forged were with other men, and Tameez makes an entirely plausible case that Sumner was a gay man with no real capacity to understand his own sexuality. Temperamentally melancholy and likely a lifelong sufferer of depression, he was jealous and heartbroken when his closest friends married. On at least one occasion, he took to his bed for months, seemingly resigned to fade away and die.
For many years, Sumner was politically unmoored as well. He had sympathies for antislavery and other burgeoning antebellum reform movements, rooted in his exposure to the politics and experiences of his Black neighbors and his absorption of Joseph Story’s equity jurisprudence that took ethics, fairness, and moral ideals seriously, alongside statutes and precedent. But Story was also a committed constitutional nationalist, and many of the Boston elites with whom Sumner had come to associate were sober-minded conservative Whigs who wore their commitments to social activism lightly. They all tended to give a wide berth to anything that reeked of radicalism.
By the mid-1840s, however, Sumner had set caution aside. He remained wary of the more extreme version of abolitionism that disdained the Constitution and the Union for their countenancing of slavery. But as he pulled himself out of one of his stints of despondency, he got involved in efforts for public education, prison reform, and the peace movement. He gave public speeches and wrote newspaper essays in which he advocated for emancipation and condemned the Mexican War as a militaristic land grab on behalf of slaveholders. He helped organize the Boston Vigilance Committee to protect free Black Bostonians from being arrested and sent south into slavery. And he leaned into the relentless moral righteousness and egotistical brashness that would define his public persona forevermore.
All of it turned him into an outcast among Boston elites, who did not care for his sudden turn to stridency and grandstanding, particularly on issues of racial justice. But, as Tameez notes, “the same speeches that distanced him from Boston’s privileged financial and intellectual circles won him a far larger social network among the Massachusetts masses.” He also attracted the attention of former president John Quincy Adams, who had become ardently antislavery since leaving the White House and who urged on Sumner the idea that the nationalism of the Constitution had to be understood as fundamentally linked to the liberty and equality promised by the Declaration of Independence.
Sumner took to heart both the lesson in constitutionalism and Adams’s advice that he pursue politics. He joined a faction of Massachusetts “Conscience Whigs” troubled by the complicity of New England textile magnates and their political avatars with the institution of slavery, and he helped build interstate political alliances that coalesced in 1848 into the Free Soil Party, whose platform centered on opposing slavery’s expansion into federal territories. Sumner lost when he ran for Congress as a Free Soil candidate that year. But when the draconian Fugitive Slave Act passed in 1850, it outraged white Northerners and led to political gains for antislavery forces throughout the free states, including in Massachusetts, where the legislature chose Sumner that fall for the Senate seat that had been held by Daniel Webster.
Sumner arrived in Washington as the most prominent antislavery lawmaker in the country. Impatient and hostile to compromise, he would never be particularly good at the practical task of crafting legislation. But he was a masterful rhetorician, and he could hold forth like few others, in an age when oratory could move millions. In speech after speech, he made the case that slavery was out of keeping with the true intent and vision of the Founding Fathers as well as with the text and spirit of the Constitution. Asserting that “in any question under the Constitution, every word is to be construed in favor of liberty,” Sumner conceded that slavery might be recognizable within the boundaries of individual states, but it could never legitimately expand into new territories, and it was illegal nationally. By Sumner’s lights, in fact, no one was under any obligation at all to abide by federal laws like the Fugitive Slave Act, which demanded that citizens and public officials of free states aid in capturing and returning people who had escaped from slavery.
In short, Sumner’s position was “freedom national; slavery sectional,” a phrase he borrowed from fellow senator Salmon Chase as the title of his first major antislavery address in Congress. Tameez admires Sumner’s approach, finding it grounded in solid legal analysis and an apprehension of the Constitution as Sumner believed it was understood by those who drafted it. In fact, Tameez wryly suggests, Sumner “might be called something akin to an originalist.”
There was more than a bit of wishful thinking in such originalism. Sumner himself saw the flimsiness of some of his claims, and his notion that even slaveholding Founders could somehow not have genuinely believed in slavery subsumed reality into Sumner’s reverence for their professed ideals. But Sumner’s articulation of an unapologetic and deeply patriotic antislavery resonated at a moment when the proslavery forces that had dominated the federal government for decades were on the offensive. It helped lay the groundwork for the emergence and vibrancy of the Republican Party, founded in 1854, which Sumner quickly joined and which Tameez observes “was essentially the Free-Soil Party refurbished, rebranded, and expanded.” And it made Sumner a target. The vicious assault he suffered at the hands of Preston Brooks came not only because of the particulars of his speech about events in Kansas but also because he had been a thorn in the side of proslavery politicians since the day he arrived in the Senate.
Sumner had been proud to be that thorn. He understood that his brazenness might provoke physical retaliation, and Tameez suggests that, in some measure, Sumner welcomed becoming an antislavery martyr. But if Brooks’s attack confirmed the case Sumner and others made about slaveholders as thugs who would stop at nothing in pursuit of power, it also exacted a horrifying price. Racked with agonizing pain in his skull and by severe neuralgia, Sumner could barely walk, read, or even sleep for months. He experienced intense anxiety about the thought of going back to the Senate, and it would be several years before he returned, with Republicans keeping his seat empty as a symbol of the Slave Power’s aggression. An experimental and painful medical treatment in France only made matters worse, and he developed angina and would suffer spasms of pain for the rest of his life. Once thought by many to be stoic and unbreakable, Sumner after the attack appeared frail and much older than he was, and friends observed he was more emotional and easily moved to tears.
But Sumner was not finished. On the contrary, when he did return to public life, he was more combative than he had ever been before. In the spring of 1860, he delivered a speech entitled “The Barbarism of Slavery” on the Senate floor, ripping into the slave states as backward, violent, degenerate places and vowing that freedom would reign in the United States with the ascension of a Republican president. Months later, when Abraham Lincoln’s election prompted Southern rebellion, Sumner saw no point in trying to compromise with states attempting secession. Previous generations of historians have sometimes criticized this position, seeing Sumner and other abolitionists as inflexible zealots pushing the nation into an unnecessary war. But it was slaveholders who had created the crisis, and Sumner understood all too well that they were bullies who would only see bending to their whims as a sign of weakness. There was no such thing as appeasing them.
Moreover, to conciliate was to consign millions of enslaved people and their descendants to bondage until some undetermined time under some undetermined conditions, and Sumner was done with all of that. Dreadful though it was, war was an opportunity to bring about emancipation that could not be squandered, and once the Civil War began, Sumner did everything he could to define and shape it as a war to end slavery. He prodded the more pragmatic Lincoln to embrace emancipation and to see the value of opening enlistment in Union armies to Black men. As chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he worked to keep European powers from recognizing the Confederacy and helped secure diplomatic recognition of the Black republics of Liberia and Haiti. His centrist colleagues continued to see him as haughty and moralizing, but the course of the war showed that perhaps he had understood things more clearly than most. “Once considered an unhinged radical,” Tameez writes, “Sumner now seemed like a prophet.” Indeed, he was always looking ahead toward a future without slavery. Practically from the war’s outset, Sumner was thinking about how to use the power of the federal government to rebuild Southern states as egalitarian and democratic places where white and Black people would live as equals in a nation committed to justice, freedom, and what he referred to often as “human rights.”
The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment formally proscribing slavery in the United States was an enormous step in that direction. But the jubilation it produced was soon tempered by the assassination of Lincoln, by whose bedside Sumner sat for hours, holding the president’s hand and weeping as he died. Sumner was initially optimistic about President Andrew Johnson’s seeming willingness to support Black suffrage and punish leaders of the Confederacy for their treason. But he quickly came to understand that Johnson had little actual interest in aiding freedpeople or responding in any substantive way to the violent white Southern backlash that almost immediately developed against Reconstruction. After a meeting with Johnson late in 1865, during which the president paid so little attention to Sumner’s entreaties that he spit into the senator’s hat thinking it was a spittoon, Sumner realized that the burden of fulfilling what he saw as the promise of the Civil War would fall upon him and his congressional colleagues.
The ensuing decade, however, was frequently frustrating and demoralizing for Sumner. Some of the discouragement was personal. In the fall of 1866, Sumner married Alice Hooper, a young war widow and the daughter-in-law of a Boston merchant, but Tameez writes that “Sumner seemed to care more about the idea of getting married than about the woman he was marrying.” He was inattentive, Hooper grew bored and angry, and she left for Europe less than a year after the wedding, essentially never returning and effectively abandoning Sumner. Embittered by the experience and plagued by embarrassing rumors that he was impotent, Sumner divorced Hooper in 1873. Sumner’s health declined precipitously as well. He was easily exhausted, walked with a cane, and endured excruciating angina attacks that knocked him flat and left him cranky and depressed. By the time of his divorce, Sumner was confined to a chair or his bed most of the time, and he was in such chronic pain that he needed a nightly morphine injection to sleep.
Sumner often found the political course of Reconstruction disheartening too. For a few years, Johnson’s obstinance and white Southern resistance led a preponderance of Republicans toward Sumner’s stance that the end of the Civil War marked “the Emancipation of the Constitution itself,” and toward his belief in the imperative of effecting Black suffrage and equal rights for all. Anything less, he insisted, failed to fulfill the constitutional guarantee of “a republican form of government” for every state in the Union. Republicans overrode Johnson’s vetoes of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and of an extension of the Freedmen’s Bureau that had been established to aid the formerly enslaved in their transition to freedom. They passed the Fourteenth Amendment, enshrining birthright citizenship and providing citizens with “equality before the law,” a formulation that Tameez argues Sumner “effectively coined.” And they passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, again over Johnson’s veto, imposing military rule over most former Confederate states until they ratified the Fourteenth Amendment and wrote new constitutions that enfranchised Black men.
But by the late 1860s, Republican enthusiasm for Reconstruction had peaked, and political disappointments accumulated for Sumner. Congress impeached Andrew Johnson but failed to convict him, a result that infuriated Sumner, who was certain it came from an aversion to the prospect of a more radical executive serving in Johnson’s stead. Early in 1869, Johnson was succeeded by Ulysses S. Grant. But Sumner had been skeptical of military men since his years in the peace movement, and Grant thought Sumner imperious and egotistical; their relationship never extended much beyond cordiality. Grant acted to combat Ku Klux Klan atrocities in the South, and he presided over the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which protected voting rights for Black men, but Sumner increasingly saw Grant and the Republican Party as cynical and corrupt.
Sumner also questioned their priorities. For him, the era’s constitutional transformation remained incomplete, and with the help of Black advisers and activists, he drafted sweeping civil rights legislation that he saw as critical to carrying it forward and entrenching it. First introduced in 1870, his bill provided for equal access to trains, hotels, theaters, schools, churches, and a wide range of other public places and institutions. It established criminal and civil penalties for failure to provide access, gave jurisdiction over civil rights cases to federal courts, made federal officials personally liable if they failed to prosecute suspected violations, barred racial discrimination in jury selection, and repealed explicitly discriminatory laws. The bill rested in profoundly expansive understandings of civil rights and the remedies for their violations. To Sumner’s endless consternation, they were far too expansive for most other lawmakers, who failed to pass it.
By 1872, Charles Sumner was the longest-serving member of the Senate. But he was also something of a relic of a bygone era, and he became progressively isolated as the truculent disposition that had sometimes made him his own worst enemy turned to self-defeating petulance when he could not get his way. His animosity particularly toward Grant escalated as the president failed to support Sumner’s civil rights bill, which Sumner saw as symbolic of an insufficient commitment to Reconstruction. Partially out of spite, Sumner so stubbornly fought a push by Grant to annex the country of Santo Domingo that it cost him his chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Tameez writes that he was soon “effectively exiled from the Republican Party.” Sumner began telling Black voters that they ought to reconsider their support for Republicans, and in the 1872 election, he endorsed Horace Greeley for president, despite Greeley’s overt white supremacy. Many of Sumner’s friends and Black political allies saw this choice as a betrayal and a sign that Sumner was letting his resentments blind him, if not that he was losing his mind altogether. It was certainly a sad denouement for a man who had long practically embodied the moral center of the Republican Party.
In March 1874, Charles Sumner suffered a heart attack at his Washington home, and as he lay delirious and half-conscious on his deathbed, he pleaded with visitors to keep pushing for the passage of his civil rights bill. Congress would pass it the following year as a tribute to Sumner. But the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was a stripped-down version of what Sumner had originally proposed, and it was short-lived, as the Supreme Court ruled in 1883 that its prohibitions on discrimination in public accommodations were unconstitutional. It would also prove to be the last piece of federal civil rights legislation for nearly 80 years.
Tameez notes that Sumner’s constitutional vision, in which “every clause and every line and every word is to be interpreted uniformly and thoroughly for human rights,” has never been embraced in American law. Indeed, we find ourselves in a moment when the elements of Sumner’s vision that did come into being feel as though they are in retreat, and when echoes of the malevolent forces that Sumner spent his life warring against reverberate through American public life. Once again, a reactionary movement backed by powerful moneyed interests aims to use raw political power to implement its agenda. Once again, that agenda is predicated on the brutalization of vulnerable racial minorities, the suppression of freedom of speech, a cartoonish understanding of masculinity grounded in dominance, and a fantastical economic vision that promises a glorious future while masking staggering disparities of wealth.
That these forces today align themselves behind the very party that Sumner helped birth is an irony of sorts. But the forces are products of illiberal impulses and ideologies running through the American past and present. They do not inhere in any partisan label, and even as one trembles to consider the fearsome consequences of battling them in their current guise, one also wonders who the Charles Sumners of this generation will be, and when they will emerge.
Joshua D. Rothman is a professor of history and the chair of the Department of History at the University of Alabama. He is the author, most recently, of A Pioneer in the Cause of Freedom: The Life of Elisha Tyson (2025).
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