Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War

David Donald's biography follows Charles Sumner from his 1811 birth on Boston's Beacon Hill, in a neighborhood that was then home to much of the city's Black population, through a father whose own abolitionist convictions shaped Sumner's earliest sense of racial injustice. It follows him through Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where he studied under Justice Joseph Story, and through a formative three years in Europe beginning in 1837, when Sumner watched Black students received as equals by their white classmates in Paris and concluded that American prejudice was a product of custom rather than nature. The book follows his growing public career, his collaboration with Horace Mann on school reform, his argument alongside the Black attorney Robert Morris in Roberts v. City of Boston against school segregation, and his 1851 election to the Senate by a single vote in the state legislature, won through a coalition of Democrats and Free Soilers.

Its most sustained episode is the 1856 attack that nearly killed him. After Sumner delivered his Crime Against Kansas speech attacking the political power of slaveholders in explicitly sexual language, Congressman Preston Brooks beat him unconscious with a cane on the Senate floor, breaking the cane over his head while Congressman Laurence Keitt brandished a pistol to keep other senators from intervening. Donald follows Sumner through years of slow, uncertain recovery, including painful and largely ineffective medical treatments in Paris, and through the symbolic gesture of Massachusetts voters who reelected him in 1857 while leaving his Senate desk empty as a protest against the violence done to him. The biography closes as Sumner, finally returned to full Senate duty by 1859, emerges as one of the chamber's leading Radical Republicans on the eve of secession, a man whose own body now carried, visibly, the cost of the conflict he had spent a decade predicting.

Donald, writing at a moment when Sumner's reputation had settled into either praise or dismissal, works from Sumner's own extensive papers to portray a man whose public rectitude concealed real psychological vulnerability, treating him as neither hero nor villain but as a difficult, self righteous figure whose convictions were nonetheless, on the central question of his era, correct.