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EVERY WORD IS TO BE CONSTRUED IN FAVOR OF LIBERTY  
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Joshua D. Rothman
June 3, 2025
Los Angeles Review of Books
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_ Joshua D. Rothman reviews Zaakir Tameez’s biography “Charles
Sumner: Conscience of a Nation.” _

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_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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