Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation

The renowned abolitionist and Massachusetts senator was a political thinker far ahead of his time, according to this exceptional debut from constitutional scholar Tameez. Best known today for his brutal caning by a proslavery congressman on the Senate floor in 1856—an episode that Tameez says has obscured his legacy—Sumner had a visionary understanding of the Constitution that led him to champion equal rights and a multiracial democracy long before such advocacy was widespread. Not only did he help devise the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th Amendment, and the Freedmen’s Bureau, but in 1870 he also designed, with Black lawyer John Mercer Langston, a civil rights bill—“astonishing for its prescience”—that would eventually become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Well known for coining the phrase “equality before the law,” Sumner also frequently used the term “human rights” (“nearly three hundred times,” by Tameez’s count), a fact that has gone almost wholly unnoted by scholars of the term’s history. Seeking to understand what made Sumner such a staunch advocate for equality, Tameez takes rewarding, sinuous deep dives into his childhood growing up in a Black neighborhood of Boston, his friendships with thinkers like Alexis de Tocqueville and Frederick Douglass, and his “probable” homosexuality. The result is a smart and sweeping biography that makes a profound argument for considering Sumner a founding father of modern America. (June)