Charles Sumner

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Charles Sumner (January 6, 1811 – March 11, 1874) was an American politician and United States Senator from Massachusetts.

As an academic lawyer and a powerful orator, Sumner was the leader of the anti-slavery forces in Massachusetts and a leader of the Radical Republicans in the U.S. Senate during the American Civil War.

During Reconstruction, he fought to minimize the power of the ex-Confederates and guarantee equal rights to the freedmen.

He fell into a dispute with fellow Republican President Ulysses Grant on the question of taking control of Santo Domingo.

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Early life, education, and law career

Sumner was born on Irving Street in Boston on January 6, 1811. He was the son of Charles Pinckney Sumner, a liberal Harvard-educated lawyer who pioneered racially integrated schools and who shocked 19th-century Boston by refusing anti-miscegenation rules, and he was his second cousin of Edwin Vose Sumner.

His father was born in poverty, and Relief Jacob's mother, Relief Jacob, had a common background and worked as a seamstress before her marriage. Sumner's parents were described as exceedingly formal and undemonstrative. 4 His father taught law and served as Clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1806 to 1810 and again 1811, but his legislative career was only moderately profitable, and Sumner's family lived on the edge of the middle class. 6–7 In 1825, Charles P. Sumner became Sheriff of Suffolk County, a position he held until his death in 1838, but the family occupied a pew in King's Chapel after 1825.

Sumner's father feared slavery and told Sumner that freeing the slaves would "do us no good" unless they were treated equally by society. 130 Sumner was a close associate of William Ellery Channing, a leading Unitarian minister in Boston. Human beings, according to Channing, had an infinite ability to develop themselves. Sumner's argument extended on this point, that the environment played "an important, if not controlling role" in shaping people. 104 "The most forlorn" would develop into unimagined strength and beauty in a society where "knowledge, compassion, and faith" took precedence. 105 Moral law, he said, was as important for governments as it was for individuals and legal organizations that restricted one's growth as well as segregation."

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After becoming Sheriff Charles P. Sumner, he was able to afford higher education for his children. Charles Sumner attended the Boston Latin School, where he ranked Robert Charles Winthrop, James Freeman Clarke, Samuel Francis Smith, and Wendell Phillips as among his closest friends. He attended Harvard College, where he lived in Hollis Hall and was a member of the Porcellian Club. He attended Harvard Law School, becoming a Joseph Story protégé and a jurisprudence enthusiast.

Sumner was admitted to the bar and began private practice in Boston in collaboration with George Stillman Hillard after graduating from law school in 1834. He refused to work in politics after a trip to Washington, and he returned to Boston to practice law. He contributed to the quarterly American Jurist and edited Story's court decisions as well as some legislative text. Sumner lectured at Harvard Law School from 1836 to 1837.

In 1837, Sumner came to Europe. He arrived at Le Havre and discovered the cathedral at Rouen, France's north of France, "the majestic lion of the north... transcending everything that my imagination had imagined." He arrived in Paris in December, began to study French, and attended the Louvre "with a throb," describing how his art made him feel "cabined cribbed, confined" until repeat visits, which inspired Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci's "untutored" as it is. He learned French in six months and gave lectures at Sorbonne on topics ranging from geology to Greek history to criminal law. "One lecturer, or rather mulattos black," he wrote in his journal for January 20, 1838, he described one lecturer who was dressed à la mode and having the innate, jaunty air of young men of fashion." After the lecture, the students had been "well received."

He continued:

He figured out that the predisposition of Americans to see blacks as inferior from a learned viewpoint. The French had no problems with blacks learning and interacting with others. He had aspired to become an abolitionist on his return to America, which led him to his conversion to America.

On morning rounds at the city's top hospitals, he joined other Americans who were learning medicine. He became fluent in Spanish, German, and Italian, and he worked with many of Europe's best statesmen. Sumner returned to the United Kingdom in 1838, where Lord Brougham announced that he had never met with him or Sumner's age of such deep legal experience and natural legal wisdom. 66 He returned to the United States in 1840.

Sumner returned to Boston in 1840 to practice law, but devoted more time to writing and reviewing law journals, particularly on historical and biographical topics.

Early political career

Sumner maintained relationships with several influential Bostonians, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose house he visited often in the 1840s. 174 Longfellow's children found his stateliness amusing, with him opening doors for the children while saying, "In presequas" ("after you") in a clumsy tone.

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In 1843, he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. He served on the society's board from 1852 to 1853, and later in life, as the society's ambassador of foreign correspondence from 1867 to 1874.

In 1845, he delivered "The True Grandeur of Nations" in Boston on Independence Day. He spoke out against the Mexican American War and made an ardent call for independence and stability.

He has risen to fame as a sought-after orator for formal events. His lofty words and stately eloquence made a lasting impression. His platform presence was imposing. He was 6 foot (4.93 meters) tall with a massive frame. His voice was clear and strong. His gestures were unusual and personal, but also strong and impressive. His literary style was florid, with lots of detail, allusion, and quotation, often from the Bible as well as the Greeks and Romans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote that he delivered "like a cannoneer ramming down cartridges," while Sumner said, "You might as well look for a parody in the Book of Revelation."

Sumner took an active part in the anti-slavery movement after the annexation of Texas as a new slave-holding state in 1845. Sumner was an advocate for the plaintiffs in Roberts v. Boston, a case in which segregation's legality was challenged. Sumner said that black schools were physically impaired and segregation promoted harmful socioeconomic and socioeconomic injustice, which would be the subject of investigation in Brown vs. Board of Education over a century later. Sumner lost the lawsuit, but the Massachusetts legislature ended school segregation in 1855.

Sumner collaborated with Horace Mann to reform Massachusetts' public education system. He favoured a prison reform. He opposed the Mexican–American War as a war of war, but he was worried that conquered territories would expand slavery westward. Sumner protested a Boston Representative's vote for the declaration of war against Mexico with such vigor that he became a leader of the Massachusetts Whigs faction. In 1848, he declined to endorse their appointment for U.S. Representative. Sumner, rather, helped organize the Free Soil Party, which opposed both Democrats and Whigs, who had nominated Zachary Taylor, a slave-owning Southerner, for president. Sumner became chairman of the Massachusetts Free Soil Party's executive committee, a position he took to promote abolition by bringing anti-slavery Whigs and Democrats together in a group with the Free Soil movement.

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Democrats took over the Massachusetts state legislature in 1851 in alliance with the Free Soilers. Sumner was their pick for the United States by the Free Soilers. Senator. Democrats opposed him at the start and called for a less radical candidate. Sumner was elected by a one-vote majority on April 24, 1851, a victory he credited to Free Soil organizer and colleague Henry Wilson. His election marked a major change in Massachusetts politics as his abolitionist politics contrasted sharply with those of his most prominent supporters of the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act.

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