In the Harvard Law School (1831-33) Sumner became the devoted pupil and friend of its most eminent professor, Joseph Story, and at the end of his studies was urged to join the staff as an instructor, but he preferred to try his powers in active practice. Before entering upon its routine he took an orientation journey to Washington, especially to attend sessions of the Supreme Court, upon which Story was then sitting. For weeks young Sumner enjoyed the privilege of sitting at table in friendly intercourse with Chief Justice Marshall and his colleagues. He heard Webster and Francis Scott Key clash as opposing counsel before the Supreme Court, and in the Senate listened to the "splendid and thrilling" eloquence of Clay. Nevertheless, he left Washington declaring that nothing he had seen had made him look upon politics "with any feeling other than loathing" (Memoir, I, 142). Upon return to his office the drab routine of practice proved little to his liking. He became a lecturer in the Harvard Law School, a frequent contributor to the American Jurist, and devoted much time to reviewing and revising legal textbooks. He came into close intimacy with Francis Lieber and with William Ellery Channing, who exercised a profound influence upon him, and he formed a deep and lifelong affection for Whittier, Longfellow, and Emerson.

At twenty-six, though he had made no assured start in his profession, to the dismay of his friends he borrowed money and broke away from the law office for an indefinite sojourn in Europe. He remained abroad more than two years. It was no holiday trip. In every land which he visited he was an eager student and close observer. This experience gave him facile command of French, German, and Italian, an understanding of European governments and jurisprudence, and an intimate acquaintance with many of the leaders in public life and in letters in England, France, and Germany. Upon his return to Boston he had the entrée to the city's most cultivated social and intellectual circles. But he found the work of the law office weary, stale, and unprofitable. "Though I earn my daily bread, I lay up none of the bread of life" (Memoir, II, 167). The one position which would then have satisfied his ambition was that of reporter of the Supreme Court. That appointment went to another, and Sumner brought himself to the verge of collapse by undergoing the heartbreaking drudgery of annotating Francis Vesey's Reports of Cases . . . in the High Court of Chancery (20 vols., 1844-45).

In 1845 Sumner was chosen as the orator for Boston's Independence Day celebration. The delivery of that oration proved a turning-point in his career. For the first time he faced a great assembly gathered to hear him. He now stood six feet four inches in height, and his strong face kindled with animation as he spoke. His voice was of great power, and he used it with skill. Of that brilliant audience not less than one hundred were in full military or naval dress uniform. With terse introduction, Sumner announced the theme of his oration: "What is the true grandeur of nations?" He then proceeded to lay down his thesis, putting it interrogatively: "Can there be in our age any peace that is not honorable, any war that is not dishonorable?" (Works, I, 9). The city's military and naval guests felt themselves "officially assailed by the speaker as well as personally insulted" (Memoir, II, 346) and were with difficulty restrained from leaving the hall while he was still speaking. Ex-Mayor Eliot, whom Webster called "the impersonation of Boston," commented: "The young man has cut his throat!" (Quoted by Wendell Phillips, in Boston Daily Advertiser, Mar. 13, 1877). That oration revealed to Sumner not less than to his friends that he could thrill and sway great audiences. It brought him into closer cooperation with leaders like Theodore Parker and John A. Andrew. For years thereafter no lecturer on the Lyceum platform was more welcome than Sumner.

In the annual address before the American Peace Society (1849) he made a strong plea for "a Congress of Nations, with a High Court of Judicature," or for arbitration established by treaties between nations (Works, pp. 262-67). When his boyhood friend, Congressman Robert C. Winthrop, voted for the Mexican War bill, Sumner wrote a succession of letters publicly accusing him of sanctioning "the most wicked [act] in our history" (Works, I, 322). Such imputations brought upon Sumner a storm of criticism. Winthrop declined further social relations with him, and Boston's social autocrat, Ticknor, declared that Sumner was "outside the pale of society" (Haynes, post, p. 4).

From Sumner's office was issued the call for a convention of all citizens of the Commonwealth opposed to the nomination of Cass and of Taylor. In that convention, at Worcester on June 28, 1848, Sumner made the principal speech, and his denunciation of the conspiracy "between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom" (Works, II, 81) increased the antipathy of the rich and conservative Whigs of Boston for him. He was put forward as a candidate for the United States Senate by a coalition of Free Soilers and Democrats, but his election was blocked for more than three months by the impossibility of securing a two-thirds majority in the House. Finally the deadlock was broken when in several towns the voters met in special meetings, legally called for that one purpose, and by formal vote instructed their representatives to support Sumner.

He entered the Senate on Dec. 1, 1851. By the great majority the compromise measures of 1850 were accepted as a finality. Only five days before the end of the nine months' session, Sumner gained the floor as a matter of right, to speak to an amendment which he had moved, that no allowance under the pending appropriation bill should be authorized for expenses incurred in executing the law "for the surrender of fugitives from service or labor; which said Act is hereby repealed" (Works, III, 94). For more than three hours he presented a tremendous arraignment of the Fugitive-slave Law. The galleries filled. For an hour Webster himself was an attentive listener, this being his last visit to the Senate chamber. Near Webster, while Sumner was speaking, sat Horace Mann, who wrote in his journal: "the 26th of August, 1852, redeemed the 7th of March, 1850" (Mary T. P. Mann, Life of Horace Mann, 1865, p. 381). In the debate Southern senators heaped angry derision upon Sumner's amendment. Only Chase and Hale took the floor in its support, and but four votes were given in its favor. Nevertheless, Chase declared that in American history Sumner's speech would mark the day when the advocates of the restriction of slavery "no longer content to stand on the defensive in the contest with slavery, boldly attacked the very citadel of its power in that doctrine of finality" which both political parties were endeavoring "to establish as the impregnable defense of its usurpations" (Congressional Globe, 32 Cong., 1 Sess., App., p. 1121).

Sumner was outspoken, both in the Senate and in the Massachusetts convention, in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. This brought him into greater disfavor with the Boston press and society, both dominated by conservative Whigs, whom he still further offended by presenting in the Senate "with pleasure and pride" petitions from New England clergymen protesting against the passage of that bill. In the debate upon the right of petition Southern senators who had hitherto been on friendly terms with Sumner poured contempt upon his "vapid rhetoric," charged him with repudiating his oath of office and with declaring his intention to disobey the Constitution, and denounced him as a "miscreant," a "sneaking, sinuous, snake-like poltroon." They urged his expulsion, but an informal poll showed that the requisite two-thirds vote could not be secured. Sumner declared that he had sworn to support the Constitution as he understood it. "Does he recognize the obligation to return a fugitive slave?" demanded Toucey. Sumner's reply was: "To that I answer distinctly, 'No.'" (June 28, 1854, Congressional Globe, 33 Cong., 3 Sess., p. 1559). Sumner's vindication of Massachusetts against attack and his courage in maintaining his own opinion won admirers in quarters where he had been held in slight regard.

Sumner had a large part in the organization of the Republican party. Resistance of influential Whigs to the formation of a new party with the main object of opposing the extension of slavery gave opportunity for the rapid growth of the Know-Nothing party, by the votes of whose oath-bound members some Massachusetts politicians, notably Henry Wilson and Nathaniel P. Banks, were enabled to climb to high office. Sumner scorned such association, and boldly denounced "a party which, beginning in secrecy, interferes with religious belief, and founds a discrimination on the accident of birth" (Works, IV, 80). Such defiant language led to some futile intriguing to prevent his reëlection.

At the opening of the new Congress, Dec. 5, 1855, hot debate began at once with the Senate's demand for documents relating to the struggle in Kansas. With sure prescience Sumner declared: "This session will not pass without the Senate Chamber's becoming the scene of some unparalleled outrage" (T. W. Higginson, Contemporaries, p. 283). Two days before he was to speak, he wrote to Theodore Parker: "I shall pronounce the most thorough philippic ever uttered in a legislative body" (Memoir, III, 439). When he began his speech, "The Crime against Kansas" (Works, IV, 137-256), the air was tense in the Senate chamber, for none of his hearers could doubt that blood would soon be shed in the territory. Sumner denounced the Kansas-Nebraska Act as "in every respect a swindle . . . --no other word will adequately express the mingled meanness and wickedness of the cheat" (Works, IV, 155). Turning his attention to the senators who "had raised themselves to eminence on this floor by the championship of human wrongs," he characterized Butler as Don Quixote, paying his vows to a mistress who, "though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight. I mean the harlot, Slavery." Douglas he described as "the squire of Slavery, its very Sancho Panza, ready to do its humiliating offices" (May 20, 1856, Congressional Globe, 34 Cong., 1 Sess., App. pp. 530-31). Of Mason, the author of the Fugitive-slave Law, he said: "He holds the commission of Virginia . . . of that other Virginia from which Washington and Jefferson avert their faces, where human beings are bred as cattle for the shambles" (Ibid., p. 543). Writhing under Sumner's denunciation of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill as a "swindle," Douglas shouted: "Is it his object to provoke some of us to kick him as we would a dog in the street, that he may get sympathy upon the just chastisement?" (Ibid., p. 545). Mason deplored the political necessity of tolerating in the Senate a man whose very presence elsewhere would be "dishonor," and "the touch of whose hand would be a disgrace" (Ibid., p. 546). Sumner branded some of Douglas' statements as false, and rejoined: "No person with the upright form of man can be allowed, without violation of all decency, to switch out from his tongue the perpetual stench of personality. . . . The noisome, squat and nameless animal, to which I refer, is not the proper model for an American Senator" (Ibid., p. 547). Sumner's brutal frankness may find some palliation in the fact that heretofore he and other antislavery leaders had been subjected to the most galling epithets. His speech gave great satisfaction to antislavery men throughout the North. Within a few weeks a million copies of it had been distributed.

Two days after his speech was delivered, at the end of the day's session Sumner, who had remained at his desk, heard his name called. Looking up he saw a tall stranger who said: "I have read your speech twice over carefully; it is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine" (Sumner's testimony, Works, IV, 261)--and down upon the head of the defenseless man crashed a blow from a heavy walking stick. Pinioned by his desk, Sumner could not rise till he had wrenched it from its fastenings. Blow followed blow, till he fell bleeding and unconscious to the floor. The man guilty of this brutal assault was Representative Preston S. Brooks [q.v.] of South Carolina. From the North came an outburst of universal condemnation of the attack and expressions of deepest sympathy for its victim. Sumner's injury was far more serious than at first appeared. Twice he tried to resume his duties, only to find that he could not undertake even the lightest tasks. Haunted by "the ghost of two years already dead," he went to Europe in quest of health a second time, and subjected himself many times without anesthetic to the moxa, which his physician described as "the greatest suffering that can be inflicted on mortal man" (Dr. Brown-Séquard, quoted in Memoir, III, 564-65). Three and a half years had passed before he was sufficiently recovered to return to the Senate. Meantime he had been reëlected by the almost unanimous vote of the Massachusetts legislature.

Sumner found a new Senate in which Southern leaders were taking more aggressive ground than ever before. Jefferson Davis' resolutions, affirming the sanctity of slave property in the territories, were passed by a vote of two to one. Under these circumstances Sumner determined to attempt an "assault on American slavery all along the line" (Memoir, III, 606). In the debate on the bill for the admission of Kansas as a free state, in an impassioned speech, "The Barbarism of Slavery" (Works, V, 1-174), he proceeded to set forth his indictment of slavery in its social, moral, and economic as well as political aspects. Many of his friends doubted the wisdom and timeliness of such an utterance on the eve of a presidential election; but it proved of immense influence and was distributed broadcast by the Republican national committee.

In the months following the Republican victory in 1860, alone among the Massachusetts delegation in Congress Sumner opposed the state's being represented in the peace conference (February 1861) and he was unyielding to petitions signed by tens of thousands of Massachusetts citizens urging his support of the Crittenden Compromise. In October 1861, at the Massachusetts Republican convention, he was the first statesman of prominence to urge emancipation, insisting that the overthrow of slavery would make an end of the war. Throughout the following year in the Senate, in public addresses, and in conferences with the President he never ceased to press for emancipation. When the Proclamation was finally issued, no man had done more than Sumner to prepare public sentiment for its approval.

When the Republicans got control of the Senate in 1861, for the first time Sumner received a committee assignment worthy of his abilities: he was made chairman of the committee on foreign relations, a position for which he was preeminently fitted and in which he was destined to render invaluable service. Although Captain Wilkes's seizure of Mason and Slidell was hailed with wild enthusiasm and at first seemed to have official approval, Sumner at once declared: "They will have to be given up" (G. H. Monroe, in Hartford Courant, Nov. 22, 1873). By the President's invitation he came into conference with the cabinet, set forth the principles of international law involved in the case, and read letters which he had just received from Cobden and Bright. The next day, with suitable apologies, Seward informed the British minister that the envoys would be given up. Sumner's influence was undoubtedly potent both in effecting a peaceful solution and in reconciling the American people to the inevitable surrender. In his chairmanship of the committee on foreign relations he aided the Union cause by defeating or suppressing resolutions which would almost inevitably have involved the United States in war with France and with Great Britain.

Already in the second year of the war he began the struggle to secure for all citizens of the United States, regardless of race or color, absolute equality of civil rights. As early as February 1862, he announced his extravagant doctrine that the seceded states had abdicated all rights under the Constitution; as he later phrased it, they had committed suicide (Congressional Globe, 37 Cong., 2 Sess., pp. 736-37, 2189). He was insistent that the initiation and the control of reconstruction should be by Congress, not by the President. It was Sumner's influence more than that of any other, as Lincoln declared in a cabinet meeting on the last day of his life, that blocked the recognition of Louisiana which was the most vital point for reconstruction in accordance with the Lincoln plan. Despite Sumner's opposition to policies nearest to the President's heart, he treated him with the greatest personal consideration.

During the Johnson administration Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens [q.v.] were brought into a strange cooperation as the Senate and House leaders, respectively, of the opposition to the President's reconstruction policy. Sumner was intent upon securing equality of civil rights for the freedmen, while Stevens' main concern was to prevent the defeat of the Republican party by Democratic reënforcements from the Southern states. It was Sumner's persistence which led the Senate to add to the requirements for "readmission" of the seceded states the insertion in their constitutions of a provision for equal suffrage rights for whites and blacks. In effect this act of Congress, passed over the President's veto, abolished all the Johnson governments in the South. Sumner has been justly criticized for insisting upon the immediate grant of the ballot to the freedmen. It should be remembered, however, that in his own plan federal law was to guarantee to the blacks not only the ballot but also free schools and free farmsteads. In the movement for the impeachment of Johnson, Sumner took a prominent part. His first impressions favorable to the President soon gave way to a settled conviction that he was the chief menace to the country. Sumner regarded impeachment as a political rather than a judicial proceeding; hence neither in the Senate nor elsewhere did he put any curb upon his denunciations of Johnson's "misdeeds," and his opinion, filed with those of eighteen of the thirty-five who voted for conviction, was the longest and most bitter of them all (Works, XII, 318-410). He declared he would vote, if he could, "Guilty, of all [the charges] and infinitely more" (Ibid., XII, 401). In this document Sumner is seen at his worst. Lurid and furious invective largely took the place of argument. In his view, Johnson was the "enormous criminal" of the century.

By temperament, training, and experience President Grant and Sumner were antipathetic, and they soon came into antagonism. Sumner's opposition on constitutional grounds was largely responsible for the rejection of the nomination of Stewart for secretary of the treasury. Though Motley was named minister to England upon Sumner's recommendation, he was later removed. The President seemed to take no serious exception to Sumner's influence in preventing the ratification of the Johnson-Clarendon Convention, nor to his startling assertion of the United States' "national claims," amounting to billions of dollars, against Great Britain, owing to her concession of ocean belligerency to the Confederate States. The most violent clash developed over the President's pet project, the acquisition of Santo Domingo. Sumner's committee brought in an adverse report upon the treaties that had been negotiated by Grant's personal envoy. Motley's removal at this juncture seemed like retaliation. Grant persisted in urging annexation. Finally, in a scathing speech--made more exasperating by his entitling it "Naboth's Vineyard"--Sumner denounced the whole Santo Domingo project (Works, XIV, 89-130; see also, pp. 168-249).

While these controversies were in progress there came to Sumner one of the greatest griefs of his life, his demotion from the chairmanship of the committee on foreign relations. In distinguished qualifications for this position he was without a peer in public life. But the tension had become so great that Sumner was not on speaking terms with the President and the Secretary of State. His champions asserted that this was but "a flimsy pretext" and that "the San Domingo scheme was at the bottom of the whole difficulty" (Haynes, p. 366). A more reasonable explanation of the administration's pressure may have been a fear that his extraordinary views as to "national claims" against Great Britain would prove an obstacle to the adjustment which was then under negotiation. Though thus shut out from any official relations with the joint commission, Sumner was frequently consulted by its members, and was shown great consideration by the British commissioners, whose head told Sumner that without his speech "the treaty could not have been made and that he worked by it as a chart" (Memoir, IV, 491). Despite his demotion, Sumner not only gave his vote for the Treaty of Washington but made the principal speech in exposition and support of it (Memoir, IV, 489-90). It is clear that Sumner himself did not expect that the enormous sums suggested by him would actually be paid by Great Britain. He was reasonably satisfied with the result--that the new treaty, at least as construed by the United States, would secure an arbitral adjustment of all claims, whether individual or national, growing out of the cruisers' depredations. He considered this a most important advance in establishing the principle of arbitration, and predicted: "Great Britain will never, in any future wars, place herself in the predicament in which my speech demonstrated she was placed in the matter of the rebel cruisers" (Whipple, post, p. 209).

At the opening of the regular session of Congress in December 1872, Sumner introduced a bill which provided that, inasmuch as "national unity and good will among fellow-citizens can be assured only through oblivion of past difference, and it is contrary to the usage of civilized nations to perpetuate the memory of civil war," the names of battles with fellow-citizens should not be continued in the Army Register, or placed on the regimental colors of the United States (Works, XV, 255). Apparently as a penalty for his opposition to Grant in the preceding campaign a bill of precisely opposite intent was introduced in the House, passed and sent to the Senate, where both bills were temporarily laid on the table because of Sumner's illness. Meantime, in the Massachusetts legislature a report denouncing Sumner's bill as "an insult to the loyal soldiers of the nation" and as "meeting the unqualified condemnation of the people of the Commonwealth" was adopted (Journal of the Extra Session of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, 1872, 1873, p. 54). Sumner was deeply grieved by this injustice. Forthwith Whittier took the lead in a movement to rescind this resolution of censure, and two years later by large majorities in both houses of a new legislature it was annulled (Journal of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, 1874, 1874, pp. 131-35).

On Mar. 10, 1874, against his physician's advice, Sumner went to the Senate, for on that day his colleague was to report the rescinding resolution. His fellow Senators were generous in their expressions of congratulation and goodwill. That evening he was prostrated by a heart attack and the next day he died. His body lay in state in the rotunda of the Capitol, and the funeral services were held in Cambridge. On Oct. 17, 1866, at the age of fifty-five, he had married Mrs. Alice (Mason) Hooper, a young widow; but they separated within a year and later were divorced (Shotwell, post, pp. 557-58, 584-85).

At the end of the Civil War, it has been said that the two most influential men in public life were Abraham Lincoln and Charles Sumner (Rhodes, post, V, 55). Time has dealt very differently with them, for Sumner's figure has been crowded into the background. Unlike Lincoln, he outlived his best days. His most characteristic and beneficent labors belonged to the epoch closed by the war; their fruits were merged in its triumphs. His later years brought misfortunes in full train: domestic sorrow, racking illness, the loss of friends, and ceaseless struggle over the problems of reconstruction, with some of which he was little fitted to cope. In contrast with most other American leaders of comparable political influence, Sumner entered public life "at the top": when he took his seat in the Senate he had never held public office of any kind. By no effort, he found himself thrust forward as the champion of an unpopular cause. Throughout his many years in the Senate, the goal of his constant striving was "absolute human equality, secured, assured, and invulnerable." He judged every man and every measure by reference to that goal. That any slave could be happy or that any slave-owner could be humane seemed to him impossible. As years passed, he became more intolerant not only of opposition but also of dissent. His arraignments of Johnson and of Grant were extravagant beyond all reason. When George William Curtis, discussing with him some public question, suggested: "But you forget the other side!" Sumner's voice "shook the room, as he thundered in reply: 'There is no other side!'" (C. E. Norton, ed., Orations and Addresses of George William Curtis, 1894, vol. I, 256). To a senator's argument that the Constitution gave no authority for action which Sumner was urging, his reply was: "Nothing against slavery can be unconstitutional!" (Haynes, p. 279).

At the end of the war, the senator who for many years had been most vehement in denouncing all owners of slaves as "slave-mongers" was not the man to deal most tactfully and discriminatingly with the reconstruction problems. There is a measure of justice in the comment: "He would shed tears at the bare thought of refusing to freedmen rights of which they had no comprehension, but would filibuster to the end of the session to prevent the restoration to the southern whites of rights which were essential to their whole concept of life" (W. A. Dunning, Reconstruction, Political and Economic, p. 87). Yet in his later years Sumner displayed a kindness of sympathy toward the impoverished and suffering people of the South, and a magnanimity (as in his battle-flag resolution) which Congress did not reach till a full generation had passed.

Despite Sumner's intense devotion to the one "cause" which he championed with a crusader's zeal, he was diligent in the routine work of a senator, and commanded respect in his discussion of such topics as money and finance, the tariff, postal regulations, and copyright. He was much concerned over the abuses of patronage, through presidential favoritism or "senatorial courtesy," and introduced a well-thought-out bill for civil service reform. But his great work was not in the framing of laws. His was, rather, the rôle of an ancient Hebrew prophet--the kindling of moral enthusiasm, the inspiring of courage and hope, the assailing of injustice. His fearlessness in denouncing compromise, in demanding the repeal of the Fugitive-slave Law, and in insisting upon emancipation made him a major force in the struggle that put an end to slavery. It was his magnanimity and pertinacity that held in check barbarous attempts at retaliation, whether in the grant of letters of marque and reprisal, in the treatment of Confederate prisoners, or in the seizure of unoffending citizens of foreign countries in return for wrongs inflicted upon Americans abroad. Throughout the great national crisis his service was of inestimable value in keeping the United States at peace with Great Britain and with France, when war with either of them would have meant the disruption of the Union. He died March 11, 1874.

text by George Henry Haynes, Dictionary of American Biography