05-07-2025
The Civil War That Never Ended
Rather than write a column for this Independence Day weekend edition of the newsletter, I decided to chat with Zaakir Tameez, a recent graduate of Yale Law School, about his new biography of Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts senator and great antislavery proponent who helped change the course of American history.
I hope you enjoy the discussion, which has been edited for clarity.
Zaakir, thank you so much for joining me to talk about your new book. Before we jump in, I just wanted to ask you to tell us a little bit about yourself. What brought you to Charles Sumner as a subject?
Thank you for having me. I graduated from the University of Virginia before going to law school at Yale. I wrote the book at Yale, but my interest in history started at I was there in Charlottesville in August 2017 when neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates stormed and desecrated our grounds with antisemitic bile, with racist chants and with their tiki torches. And at one point, these neo-Nazis converged at the statue of Thomas Jefferson, the founder of And the neo-Confederates wanted to, in some way, celebrate Jefferson as an icon of white supremacy, to celebrate his legacy as a slaveholder.
But a few of my classmates got to the Jefferson statue first. And they defended the Jefferson statue from these white supremacists. I think what they were doing was not saying that they value Jefferson, necessarily, but that we have to take ownership of our history, because if we don't tell the stories of history, then we leave it to others, like the neo-Confederates, to do so.
And I think that moment seared in my mind this interest in studying our past, because it's only through the past that we can understand our present moment.
So what brought you from this interest in history to wanting to take on the project of writing a biography of Sumner?
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