1. Charles Sumner was an American lawyer and politician who represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate from 1851 until his death in 1874.
91 Facts About Charles Sumner
1. 2.
Charles Sumner chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1861 to 1871, until he lost the position following a dispute with President Ulysses S Grant over the attempted annexation of Santo Domingo.
3.
Charles Sumner began his political activism as a member of various anti-slavery groups, leading to his election to the US Senate in 1851 as a member of the Free Soil Party; he soon became a founding member of the Republican Party.
4.
Charles Sumner supported the annexation of Alaska but opposed Grant's proposal to annex Santo Domingo.
5.
Charles Sumner opposed Grant's 1872 reelection and supported Liberal Republican Horace Greeley.
6.
Charles Sumner died in office less than two years later.
7.
Charles Sumner was born on Irving Street in Boston on January 6,1811.
8.
Charles Sumner's father, Charles Pinckney Sumner, was a Harvard-educated lawyer, abolitionist, and early proponent of racial integration of schools, who shocked 19th-century Boston by opposing anti-miscegenation laws.
9.
Charles Sumner's father served as Clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1806 to 1807 and from 1810 to 1811, and he had a moderately successful legal practice.
10.
Charles Pinckney Sumner hated slavery and told his son that freeing the slaves would "do us no good" unless society treated them equally.
11.
Charles Sumner was a close associate of Unitarian leader William Ellery Channing.
12.
Sumner's father was able to provide higher education for his children; the young Charles attended Boston Latin School, where he befriended Robert Charles Winthrop, James Freeman Clarke, Samuel Francis Smith, and Wendell Phillips.
13.
Charles Sumner then attended Harvard Law School, where he became a protege of Joseph Story and an enthusiastic student of jurisprudence.
14.
Charles Sumner contributed to the quarterly American Jurist and edited Story's court decisions as well as some law texts.
15.
From 1836 to 1837, Charles Sumner lectured at Harvard Law School.
16.
In 1837, Charles Sumner visited Europe with financial support from benefactors, including Story and Congressman Richard Fletcher.
17.
Charles Sumner mastered French within six months and attended lectures at the Sorbonne on subjects ranging from geology to Greek history to criminal law.
18.
Charles Sumner decided that Americans' predisposition to see blacks as inferior was a learned viewpoint, and he determined to become an abolitionist upon returning to America.
19.
In 1840, at age 29, Charles Sumner returned to Boston to practice law but devoted more time to lecturing at Harvard Law, editing court reports, and contributing to law journals, especially on historical and biographical themes.
20.
Charles Sumner developed friendships with several prominent Bostonians, particularly Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose house he visited regularly in the 1840s.
21.
Charles Sumner embarked on a public political career in 1845, when he emerged as one of the most prominent critics of slavery in the city of Boston and the state of Massachusetts, a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment.
22.
Charles Sumner's speech was critical of the move toward war with Mexico and an impassioned appeal for freedom and peace.
23.
Charles Sumner considered the conflict a war of aggression but was primarily concerned that captured territories would expand slavery westward.
24.
Charles Sumner soon became a sought-after orator for formal occasions throughout Boston.
25.
Charles Sumner declined the Whig nomination for the United States House of Representatives in 1848, instead helping organize the Free Soil Party and becoming chairman of the state party's executive committee, a position he used to advocate for abolition and build a coalition that included anti-slavery Whigs and Democrats.
26.
Charles Sumner worked with Horace Mann to improve Massachusetts's system of public education, advocated prison reform, and represented the plaintiffs in Roberts v City of Boston, which challenged the legality of racial segregation in public schools.
27.
Charles Sumner lost the case, but the Massachusetts General Court abolished school segregation in 1855.
28.
The impasse was broken after three months and Charles Sumner was elected on a parliamentary technicality by a one-vote majority on April 24,1851, in part thanks to the support of Senate President Henry Wilson.
29.
Charles Sumner's election marked a sharp break in Massachusetts politics, as his abolitionist politics contrasted sharply those of his best-known predecessor in the seat, Daniel Webster, one of the foremost supporters of the Compromise of 1850 and its Fugitive Slave Act.
30.
Charles Sumner was knocked down and trapped under the heavy desk, which was bolted to the floor.
31.
The Richmond Enquirer editorialized that Charles Sumner should be caned "every morning" and Southerners sent Brooks hundreds of new canes in endorsement of his assault.
32.
When Charles Sumner returned to the Senate in 1857, he was unable to last a day.
33.
Charles Sumner sailed once more for Europe on May 22,1858, the second anniversary of Brooks's attack.
34.
Charles Sumner chose to refuse anaesthesia, which was thought to reduce the effectiveness of the procedure.
35.
Charles Sumner attacked attempts to depict slavery as a benevolent institution, said it stifled economic development in the South, and that it left slaveholders reliant on "the bludgeon, the revolver, and the bowie-knife".
36.
Charles Sumner spent the summer rallying the anti-slavery forces for the election of 1860 and opposing talk of compromise.
37.
In May 1861, Charles Sumner counseled Lincoln to make emancipation the war's primary objective.
38.
Charles Sumner believed that military necessity would eventually force Lincoln's hand and that emancipation would give the Union higher moral standing, which would keep Britain from entering the Civil War on the Confederacy's side.
39.
In October 1861, at the Massachusetts Republican Convention in Worcester, Charles Sumner openly expressed his belief that slavery was the war's sole cause and that the Union government's primary objective was to end it.
40.
Charles Sumner argued that Lincoln could command the Union Army to emancipate slaves under color of martial law.
41.
Secretary of State William Seward believed the diplomats were contraband of war, but Charles Sumner argued the men did not qualify as such because they were unarmed.
42.
Charles Sumner favored their release along with an apology from the US government towards Britain.
43.
On December 25,1861, at Lincoln's invitation, Charles Sumner addressed the cabinet.
44.
Charles Sumner read letters from prominent British political figures, including Richard Cobden, John Bright, William Ewart Gladstone, and the Duke of Argyll as evidence that political sentiment in Britain supported the envoys' return to the British.
45.
Charles Sumner emerged as an idealist and a champion for civil rights through this turbulent and controversial period.
46.
Charles Sumner joined fellow Republicans in overriding President Andrew Johnson's vetoes, though his most radical ideas were not implemented.
47.
Charles Sumner favored partial male suffrage with a literacy requirement for all Southerners in order to vote.
48.
Charles Sumner was a friend of Samuel Gridley Howe and a guiding force for the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission, started in 1863.
49.
Charles Sumner was one of the most prominent advocates for suffrage for blacks, along with free homesteads and free public schools.
50.
Charles Sumner was largely excluded from work on the Thirteenth Amendment, in part because he did not get along with Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull, who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee and did much of the work on it.
51.
Charles Sumner introduced an alternative amendment that combined the Thirteenth Amendment with elements of the Fourteenth Amendment.
52.
Charles Sumner viewed segregation and slavery as two sides of the same coin.
53.
Charles Sumner introduced a civil rights bill in 1872 to mandate equal accommodation in all public places and required suits brought under the bill to be argued in the federal courts.
54.
The bill failed, but Charles Sumner revived it in the next Congress, and on his deathbed begged visitors to see that it did not fail.
55.
Charles Sumner repeatedly tried to remove the word "white" from naturalization laws.
56.
Charles Sumner introduced bills to that effect in 1868 and 1869, but neither came to a vote.
57.
On July 2,1870, Charles Sumner moved to amend a pending bill in a way that would strike the word "white" wherever in all Congressional acts pertaining to naturalization of immigrants.
58.
Charles Sumner co-authored the Civil Rights Act of 1875 with John Mercer Langston and introduced the bill in the Senate on May 13,1870.
59.
When Johnson was impeached, Charles Sumner voted for conviction at his trial.
60.
Charles Sumner wanted to block British expansion from Canada, arguing that Alaska was geographically and financially strategic, especially for the Pacific Coast States.
61.
Charles Sumner said Alaska would increase America's borders, spread republican institutions, and represent an act of friendship with Russia.
62.
Charles Sumner was well regarded in the United Kingdom, but after the war he sacrificed his reputation in the UK with his stand on US claims for British breaches of neutrality.
63.
Charles Sumner held that since Britain had accorded the rights of belligerents to the Confederacy, it was responsible for extending the duration of the war and consequent losses.
64.
Charles Sumner demanded $2,000,000,000 for these "national claims" in addition to $125,000,000 for damages from the raiders.
65.
Charles Sumner did not expect that Britain ever would or could pay this sum, but he suggested that Britain turn over Canada as payment.
66.
Charles Sumner said that he had only promised to give the treaty friendly consideration.
67.
Charles Sumner, opposed to American imperialism in the Caribbean and fearful that annexation would lead to the conquest of the neighboring black republic of Haiti, became convinced that corruption lay behind the treaty, and that men close to Grant shared in the corruption.
68.
Charles Sumner had been leaked information from Assistant Secretary of State Bancroft Davis that US Naval ships were being used to protect Baez.
69.
Charles Sumner's committee voted against annexation and, at Charles Sumner's suggestion and possibly to save the party from an ugly fight or Grant from embarrassment, the Senate debated the treaty behind closed doors in executive session.
70.
Charles Sumner said that Grant's use of the US Navy as a protectorate was a violation of international law and unconstitutional.
71.
The next day, Grant, feeling betrayed by Charles Sumner, retaliated by ordering the dismissal of Charles Sumner's close friend John Lothrop Motley, Ambassador to Britain.
72.
Charles Sumner believed that the civil rights program he championed could not be carried through by a corrupt government.
73.
Charles Sumner never saw his support for civil rights as hostile to the South.
74.
The proposal was not new: Charles Sumner had offered a similar resolution on May 8,1862, and in 1865 he had proposed that no painting hanging in the Capitol portray scenes from the Civil War, because, as he saw it, keeping alive the memories of a war between a people was barbarous.
75.
Charles Sumner's proposal did not affect the vast majority of battle-flags, as nearly all the regiments that fought had been state regiments, and these were not covered.
76.
Charles Sumner's resolution had no chance of passing, but its presentation offended Union army veterans.
77.
Charles Sumner succeeded early in 1874 with the help of abolitionist Joshua Bowen Smith, who was serving in the legislature that year.
78.
Charles Sumner was able to hear the rescinding resolution presented to the Senate on the last day he was there.
79.
Charles Sumner sympathized with the Cuban rebels and those executed by Spain, but refused to support US military intervention or the annexation of Cuba.
80.
On November 17,1873, Charles Sumner stated his views in an interview on the Virginius Affair at a local library in Boston.
81.
Charles Sumner believed that although the ship was flying a US flag, its mission was illegal.
82.
Charles Sumner, who opposed the Cuban insurgent neutrality of the Grant Administration, believed that the United States needed to support the First Spanish Republic.
83.
Long ailing, Charles Sumner died of a heart attack at his home in Washington, DC, on March 11,1874, aged 63.
84.
Charles Sumner lay in state at the United States Capitol rotunda, the second senator and fourth person so honored.
85.
Just before he died, Charles Sumner turned to his friend Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar.
86.
Charles Sumner was a great man in his absolute fidelity to principle, his clear perception of what his country needed, his unflinching courage, his perfect sincerity, his persistent devotion to duty, his indifference to selfish considerations, his high scorn of anything petty or mean.
87.
Charles Sumner was essentially simple to the end, brave, kind, and pure.
88.
Donald concludes that Charles Sumner was a coward who avoided confrontations with his many enemies, whom he routinely insulted in prepared speeches.
89.
Charles Sumner was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1843.
90.
Charles Sumner served on the society's board of councilors from 1852 to 1853, and later in life served as the society's secretary of foreign correspondence from 1867 to 1874.
91.
Charles Sumner obtained an uncontested divorce on the grounds of desertion on May 10,1873.