Charles Sumner Was More Than Just a Guy Who Got Caned on the Senate Floor

New York Times

02-06-2025

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.
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