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Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation
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About This Book
"A thorough recounting of the great legislator's life and deed... unlikely to be bettered anytime soon... Tameez is expert at explaining Sumner's legal thought... One cannot help wishing we had a Charles Sumner in Washington today." —The New York Times "An excellent book about the courageous Massachusetts senator... Drawing from hundreds of letters, articles and speeches, Mr. Tameez has created a remarkable portrait of a complex man who faced many personal challenges... Charles Sumner is a moving portrayal of a courageous, long-overlooked American who, in the words of one contemporary, 'stood in the vanguard of Freedom.'" —Wall Street Journal A landmark biography of Charles Sumner, the unsung hero of the American Civil War and Reconstruction. Charles Sumner is mainly known as the abolitionist statesman who suffered a brutal caning on the Senate floor by the proslavery congressman Preston Brooks in 1856. This violent episode has obscured Sumner's status as the most passionate champion of equal rights and multiracial democracy of his time. A friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, an ally of Frederick Douglass, and an adviser to Abraham Lincoln, Sumner helped the Union win the Civil War and ordain the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, the Freedmen's Bureau, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. In a comprehensive but fast-paced narrative, Zaakir Tameez presents Sumner as one of America's forgotten founding fathers, a constitutional visionary who helped to rewrite the post–Civil War Constitution and give birth to modern civil rights law. He argues that Sumner was a gay man who battled with love and heartbreak at a time when homosexuality wasn't well understood or accepted. And he explores Sumner's critical partnerships with the nation's first generation of Black lawyers and civil rights leaders, whose legal contributions to Reconstruction have been overlooked for far too long. An extraordinary achievement of historical and constitutional scholarship, Charles Sumner brings back to life one of America's most inspiring statesmen, whose formidable ideas remain relevant to a nation still divided over questions of race, democracy, and constitutional law.
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Reviews
"Charles Sumner reads like a work from a seasoned biographer rather than a debut—never has a Victorian-era legacy been more vital."
"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."
"Tameez offers new information and insights about the lawmaker who was infamously and viciously assaulted by a representative on the Senate floor, while his accessible legal analysis underlines how modern debates about federal authority are still shaped by nineteenth-century disputes ..."
"Copious footnotes evince a comprehensive grasp of the relevant historiography, and Tameez is expert at explaining Sumner's legal thought."
"A skillful blend of legal history and biography that honors the 19th century's foremost champion of civil rights."
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