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What Didn’t Make It Into
THE GREAT ABOLITIONIST

Note from Stephen Puleo: I’ve been thrilled by the wonderful reader reactions to The Great Abolitionist: Charles Sumner’s Fight for a More Perfect Union, many of whom have written to let me know how much they enjoyed the book. But as with any work of history, some revealing stories had to be dropped for space and narrative reasons. And with Charles Sumner’s involvement in so many issues, the “some” becomes “many” – vignettes that shed light on this accomplished and complex man. Periodically, I’ll feature a “dropped story” in this blog space.

Dropped Story 2: A Charles Sumner Letter Electrifies the Nation

In one of the most celebrated and highly celebrated episodes of the antislavery era, Sumner uses his influence to free Pennsylvania abolitionist Passmore Williamson from jail.

In late May 1855, following the end of the Congressional session, Charles Sumner left Boston for a journey to the West, a section of the country he had long desired to see, but never had the opportunity to do so. With an uncertain political situation in Boston – would the Know Nothings continue to gain power? – and with tensions running high in Washington D.C. in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act passage, Sumner decided a prolonged break from politics would suit him and reinvigorate him for the anti-slavery battles ahead.

His journey westward presented him with a first-hand look at slavery, the institution he sought most to undermine. He traveled through Kentucky and Tennessee, and witnessed slavery often, convincing him time and again of its barbarity and vowing to redouble his efforts to eradicate it.

Glad to leave the slave states behind him, Sumner boarded a steamboat on the Mississippi and visited numerous places, along the river and wide of its banks. He then toured the Great Lakes, going as far as Lake Superior. On August 11, a beautiful Saturday morning aboard the steamer North Star, Sumner read the newspapers for the first time in two weeks. One story caught his attention and outraged him – so much so that he immediately wrote a letter to a Philadelphia man languishing in prison, which years later a fellow senator said, “not only cheered the prisoner in his cell, but electrified the Christian world.”

Vacation or not, Charles Sumner again was compelled to speak his mind on an injustice caused by slavery.


The prisoner was Passmore Williamson, a 33-year-old Philadelphia Quaker and abolitionist, whose arrest and incarceration would become one of the most publicized cases of the antislavery era, one that would inspire much of the North and infuriate most of the South.

An ardent abolitionist since he was twenty-years old, Williamson received word in July that John H. Wheeler, United States minister to Nicaragua, was traveling through Philadelphia to New York City, from where he would embark on a voyage to the Central American country. Accompanying Wheeler were three Virginia slaves whom he had purchased two years earlier, Jane Johnson and her sons, Daniel, age 12, and Isaiah, 7. Wheeler warned Jane at least twice that she was to talk to no one during their travels through Philadelphia.

But she disregarded his orders, and while Wheeler and other members of his party ate and drank at Bloodgood’s Hotel awaiting the trip to New York on July 18, Jane at least twice informed passing black men that she was a slave and, since she was in a free state, desired her freedom. Wheeler finished at the hotel, rejoined his slaves, and they boarded the Washington, a ship that was scheduled to sail from Philadelphia to New York at 5:00 p.m.

Williamson had been handed a hasty note from one of the people Jane contacted, boarded the ship at 4:30 p.m., located Jane and her sons, and announced that they were free according to Pennsylvania law. “If you want your freedom, come now,” he said. “If you go back to Washington, you may never get it.”

As a crowd gathered around the group, the final bell for going ashore rang and Williamson told Jane she must act at once if she desired her freedom. Jane rose from her seat only to be pushed down by Wheeler, who said, “Now don’t go, Jane.” As she tried to rise a second time, Williamson restrained Wheeler, and Jane and her sons – who were now crying in fear – were whisked off the ship into a waiting carriage by a group of black men who had followed Williamson aboard.

After Williamson released him, Wheeler tried to pursue his slaves, but was physically restrained by two blacks who threatened to “cut his throat from ear to ear,” according to one journalist’s account.

With the slaves liberated, Williamson presented his card to Wheeler and said he would assume full legal responsibility for his actions.

Wheeler wasted no time in making him pay.


Within hours, Wheeler had petitioned his old friend, federal and pro-slavery Democrat Judge John K. Kane, asking for a writ of habeas corpus against Passmore Williamson to produce Jane, Daniel, and Isaiah. Wheeler maintained that Virginia law granted him property rights over his three slaves. Pennsylvania authorities had no more right to confiscate his slaves than they would to impound a carriage or a horse that had conveyed him from Virginia to Pennsylvania – crossing state lines did not deprive an individual of guaranteed property rights.

Judge Kane issued the writ, which was served on Williamson on the morning of July 20. Williamson responded that he did not possess – and never had – the “bodies” of the three slaves, and therefore was unable to comply with the order to produce them in court. He knew only from compatriots that Jane and her sons were safe, but not their location.

Lawyers for both sides went back and forth for several days before Judge Kane, on the morning of July 27, charged Williamson with contempt of court, with his remarkable order containing two demonstrable falsehoods: that Jane Johnson did not desire her freedom, and that she was forcibly abducted against her will by Passmore Williamson. For his part, Williamson denied “that the prisoners were within his power, custody, or possession at anytime whatsoever.” For refusing to tell the truth, Kane sentenced Williamson him to prison for an indefinite period of time.

On July 27, at Moyamensing Prison, a cell door slammed shut on Passmore Williamson.


During the more than 100 days Williamson spent in prison, his case became a cause for both North and South, both for its legal implications on the slavery question and for the personal toll prison took on Williamson. Before public pressure caused Judge Kane to relent and release Williamson on November 3, the prisoner had missed the birth of his third child, nearly lost his business, and suffered a serious decline in his health.

Throughout Williamson’s imprisonment, the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society kept up a drumbeat of publicity, selling a lithograph of Williamson in his cell, and spreading the story throughout the nation. He was allowed visitors, and Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass were among a flood of well-wishers who trekked to see him. Expressions of sympathy poured in from virtually every northern state and Great Britain. Resolutions and petitions from various anti-slavery societies condemned Judge Kane and commended Williamson for his courage and integrity. Ministers preached sermons with Williamson as the hero of their message.

And then there was Charles Sumner’s August 11 letter to Williamson that eventually became public. Sumner called Williamson’s conviction and imprisonment an “unmitigated outrage” and Kane’s decision allowing a slave-master to voluntarily import his slave into the free states as “more odious than preposterous.”

Yet, Sumner assured Williamson, there was a sliver of positive news in his imprisonment – slaveholders had overplayed their hand and it would cost them. They had shown “overflowing madness” with their cruel enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, “felonious administration” with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but now they had enraged almost all Northerners “in the imprisonment of an unoffending [American] citizen.”

He urged Williamson to stay strong behind bars. “It is a privilege to suffer for truth,” he said in admiration.


Sumner’s letter lent the weight of a United States senator to Williamson’s cause, and as word trickled out of its arrival at the prison, Northern newspapers and public opinion stepped up their attacks on Judge Kane and hammered away at the injustice of Williamson’s confinement. Two weeks after Sumner’s letter became public, the New York Tribune deemed the judge to be one of the most tyrannical legal despots of all time. Judge Kane had imprisoned a brave and good man in what was the most outrageous abuse of power the paper had ever seen. The Tribune and other northern papers called for Kane’s impeachment, pointing out that Williamson’s “only hope of release is in the weight of public indignation and loathing.” Sumner urged friends to continue the public pressure to rescue Williamson from “an unjust judgment.”

Kane, clearly succumbing to northern pressure, and perhaps dismayed that he had become something of a folk hero in the South, finally ordered Williamson released on November 3. The Philadelphia Daily Sun saw the benefits of Williamson’s three-month prison sentence. “[It] has made more abolitionists, and excited a more rancorous feeling against slavery than all the debates, feuds, and broken compromises in the past.”

Charles Sumner “rejoiced” that this latest travesty would demonstrate to all citizens that slaveholders were possessed with madness, but “madness which precedes a fall.”

Nonetheless, for the remainder of 1855 and into 1856, the North-South battle over slavery moved to “bleeding Kansas,” where violence and mayhem rocked the territory following passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Such violence would eventually lead, in May 1856, to Charles Sumner’s caning on the floor of the Senate, a shocking episode that set the nation irrevocably on the road to Civil War.

What Didn’t Make it Into
THE GREAT ABOLITIONIST

Note from Stephen Puleo: I’ve been thrilled by the wonderful reader reactions to THE GREAT ABOLITIONIST: Charles Sumner’s Fight for a More Perfect Union, many of whom have written to let me know how much they enjoyed the book. But as with any work of history, some revealing stories had to be dropped for space and narrative reasons. And with Charles Sumner’s involvement in so many issues, the “some” becomes “many” – vignettes that shed light on this accomplished and complex man. Periodically, I’ll feature a “dropped story” in this blog space.

Dropped Story 1: A Widow’s Pension

Charles Sumner’s moral courage and authenticity on the great issues of slavery and equal rights helped him exert influence on many other matters – one of them was securing a Congressional pension for financially destitute former First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln.

One thought kept recurring as I researched and wrote THE GREAT ABOLITIONIST: Charles Sumner’s Fight for a More Perfect Union: Americans today who crave, above all else, moral courage, perseverance, and authenticity in their leaders would have enjoyed watching Charles Sumner work in the mid-nineteenth century.

His was a lone voice early in his career, but as time went on his fellow lawmakers saw Sumner’s strength and integrity on the issues of slavery and equal rights – tested often by the white-hot fire of North-South sectionalism, secession, a ghastly war, and Reconstruction – as virtues worthy of admiration and even emulation. This respect enabled the Massachusetts senator to bank a wealth of political capital that enhanced his influence and gravitas later in his career, which enabled him to take the lead on several other critical matters that came before Congress and the country.

In the summer of 1870, Sumner took the lead on one of these. He pushed Congress to honor the memory of the President who led America through the war against slavery by coming to the aid of his widow, Mary Todd Lincoln, in her time of dire need.


In 1869, Sumner became aware of Mrs. Lincoln’s sorry condition. She was destitute and living alone in Germany in a “small cheerless desolate looking room,” according to a friend, Sally B. Orme, who had visited Mary Lincoln in Baden-Baden. Orme wrote to Sumner pleading for help on behalf of the former first lady. “Is this not dreadful – that the wife of Abraham Lincoln should be so situated?”

Mary Lincoln, already in a fragile state after the assassination of her husband, never stopped mourning after she left Washington (she would dress in black up until her death in 1882, a full seventeen years after President Lincoln’s murder). She became further agitated when she was held personally liable for the debts she and President Lincoln had incurred for improvements to the White House. Accompanied by her son, Tad, she fled to Germany in 1868 for her health and to escape her many creditors.

In February 1870, almost penniless and both mentally and physically ill, Mary Lincoln wrote an agonizing letter – on black-bordered mourning stationery – from Frankfurt-on-the-Main complaining of an inflammation of the spine, brought on, according to her doctor, “by great mental suffering.” Her destitution was debilitating. “I suffer greatly often,” she wrote. “With my small means, I can only lodge in second-class boarding houses – the horror and humiliation of the situation to me, surpasses anything you can imagine.”

She appealed to Sumner, and the senator knew the road to assisting his old friend (whom he had not seen after she left Washington) would not be an easy one.

Her status as grieving widow and former first lady notwithstanding, Mary Todd Lincoln was unpopular among members of the Senate and the public at large.


Since 1865, Mary Todd Lincoln had smoldered with a visceral anger over her belief that her financial destitution was hastened by an ungrateful Congress and public, who refused to provide her with sufficient remuneration to compensate her for the shattering loss of her husband while in service to his country. Along the way, she had publicly insulted congressmen, senators, former cabinet members, military men, other government officials, and even members of the general public, many of whom had long memories and were reluctant to rally to her defense now.

Toward the end of 1865, Mrs. Lincoln had lobbied Congress for President Lincoln’s remaining salary for his entire four-year term. But Congress instead followed the precedent set when William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor died in office – Mrs. Lincoln received only the remainder of one year’s salary, about $22,000. Bitter with disappointment, Mary Lincoln cried foul, insulted that her husband, the great martyr, was placed on equal footing with two uninspiring presidents who had died of illness after much shorter periods in office. The decision by Congress victimized her again, she declared, just as her husband’s assassination had done.

Matters deteriorated from there.

In the years following the salary controversy, Mary Lincoln engaged in a two-pronged effort to engender sympathy for her cause – a constant barrage of public statements indicating her unprecedented level of suffering (although thousands of American women had become widows during the Civil War, many of whom were in far worse financial straits); and aggressive and often caustic letter-writing campaigns to friends asking them to approach specific – and presumably sympathetic – members of Congress on her behalf. But many Congressmen had little patience for her sharp tongue, her well-known financial extravagances, her public whining, or what some felt was her deceitful reputation.

Meanwhile, Mary Lincoln’s public behavior became increasingly bizarre. She tried to raise funds by selling her used clothing and other personal items in New York under an assumed name; when discovered, many officials and citizens felt that “begging” was beneath a former First Lady. Then she took part in an ill-advised bribery plot against prominent Republican politicians, hatched by unscrupulous con men who urged her to write letters describing her poor financial conditions. The con men planned to show the letters to the politicians and threaten to reveal them to the public and embarrass them for failing to assist Mrs. Lincoln. The scheme backfired. Not a single politician contributed to Mary Lincoln’s cause; instead, the letters became public and Republicans vilified her in the press.

Finally, she approached Sumner, and composed her own official petition to Congress, seeking a pension, reminding them that her husband’s “life was sacrificed to his country’s service.” She also asked friends to lobby on her behalf, including Boston “spiritualist” Obediah Wheelock, who penned a twenty-nine-page letter to Sumner urging him to reward Mrs. Lincoln with a pension to honor President Lincoln’s service to the Union.

At several turns in the process, House and Senate members tried to kill Mary Lincoln’s pension request. But Sumner was relentless in his efforts to keep it alive. He cajoled House members until the bill passed there, and simply would not let it die in the Senate.

On July 14, 1870, the bill to provide Mrs. Lincoln a pension of $3,000 annually came to the Senate floor.


Those who opposed the pension did so for a variety of reasons: they felt Mrs. Lincoln’s time spent abroad and unaccompanied was scandalous and disloyal to the United States; that taxpayers already had expended thousands on a lavish funeral tribute to President Lincoln; they objected to Mrs. Lincoln’s subterfuge letter-writing campaign; they remembered and were furious about her blackmail attempt; they thought awarding her a pension was an improper use of taxpayer money and were fearful of the precedent it would set.

Almost no one who favored the pension bill, even Sumner, spoke glowingly on behalf of Mary Lincoln. Supporters either focused on the ultimate sacrifice President Lincoln had made for the nation, or the distasteful image of a broken, destitute, suffering former First Lady, which reflected poorly on the country. Sumner could not “forget that she is the widow of our President” and made it clear that, his friendship with Mary Lincoln notwithstanding, his support rested largely on his gratitude for Abraham Lincoln’s heroic leadership and sacrifice.

When the final roll was called late on July 14, the Senate, one day before adjournment and without enthusiasm, passed the bill 28-20 approving Mary Todd Lincoln’s pension. All “yea” votes, including Sumner’s, were Republicans, most of whom acknowledged Sumner’s influence on their votes; twelve Republicans and eight Democrats voted against the bill.

The $3,000 pension doubled Mrs. Lincoln’s income and was the largest individual annuity ever granted to an American citizen.

She had hoped for $6,000 annually, but the normally combative Mary Lincoln realized she had escaped total indignity and ongoing poverty by only a few votes. “The sum will greatly assist me and not a murmuring word shall be heard from me as to the amount,” she wrote. “I feel assured that if a larger sum had been insisted upon, it would have fallen through altogether.”

She wrote to Sumner thanking him, and in a second letter, closed with: “Words are inadequate to express my thanks for all your goodness to me.”

In his first major antislavery speech, U.S. Senator Charles Sumner establishes freedom and equality as the underpinnings of the nation’s founding

NOTE FROM STEPHEN PULEO: I adapted this blog from my book, THE GREAT ABOLITIONIST: Charles Sumner and the Fight for a More Perfect Union because I thought it was important to highlight how Charles Sumner differed from other abolitionists. Sumner’s belief was that freedom and equality were America’s birthright, and racist laws were a perversion of those ideals.  He saw the government’s tolerance and support for the growth of slavery in the 1840s and 1850s as an ignorant misreading of the country’s founding documents, not an inevitable condition flowing from them.  As one of his congressional eulogists declared, Sumner “believed in his country, in her unity, her grandeur, her ideas, and her destiny.”  

In the parlance of his day, U.S. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was considered a “Radical Republican.”  But throughout his political life, in his battles against slavery and in favor of equal rights, Sumner makes a consistent conservative argument – that based on the country’s founding documents and the beliefs of its founders and framers, the default position of the United States should be freedom and equality.

He establishes his position during his first major speech in the Senate; literally the first major antislavery speech in U.S. Senate history.  It was a four-hour masterpiece on August 26, 1852, against the Fugitive Slave Law, entitled Freedom National; Slavery Sectional, in which Sumner argued that slavery was a “deviant” sectional institution, while freedom was virtuous and national in scope.

Sumner set out to achieve a radical end – the destruction of the Fugitive Slave Law and perhaps the first step in the eradication of slavery itself – by employing conservative means.  He put forth the case that supporters of the law, who most often saw themselves as conservative unionists, were actually “radical” sectionalists, while anti-slavery so-called “radicals” (like himself), portrayed as sectional agitators, were the true unionists.

He argued that the United States was born in an atmosphere of freedom for all men – it was only the “imbecility of Southern states” that had poisoned that atmosphere by condoning slavery – and that the notion of slavery as a national institution was anathema to the very precepts of the nation’s origins.  With this approach, Sumner differed even from other prominent abolitionists, who often argued that slavery’s stain on the country’s founding was indelible.

Sumner demonstrated with ample evidence what he had been preaching for months prior – that a deep antislavery philosophy wove through the tapestry of the country’s founding and was incorporated within the Declaration of Independence (with its “all men are created equal” and “endowed with inalienable rights” clauses) and in several places within the Constitution.  While compromise with the slave states was necessary to make possible the adoption of the Constitution – one reason the document did not explicitly prohibit slavery outright – its very ratification without mention of slavery was proof of the Founders’ intent to create a federal framework based on freedom, a system that defaulted to freedom (not slavery, as the South argued).

This point was most critical, Sumner argued.  For slavery to be considered “national” in scope, it would require that the Constitution contain affirmative, unequivocal language that endorsed, sanctioned, or mandated it.  Yet, in the same way the Constitution “contains no power to make a King,” it also contained “no power to make a slave or hunt a slave,” Sumner said.  To find support for slavery in the Constitution was a fool’s errand because it simply did not exist, and no one could “infer, suppose, conjecture, surmise, fancy, guess, or presume that slavery can have any sanction in words which do not plainly and unequivocally declare it.”

Even the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, in which the Framers excluded slavery from all western territories then owned by the federal government, was another example of their devotion to liberty and hope for a slave-free future on the American continent.

All of this meant that Congress lacked authority to establish slavery within its purview, in the same way, Southerners argued it had no authority to impose laws in individual states to eliminate slavery.  Here with decided brilliance, Sumner used the argument of slaveholders against them.  The Fugitive Slave Law was the most egregious example, a “monstrous act” of the national government’s overreach.  If the Constitution provided no protection for slavery in any federal jurisdiction – and he had made the case that it did not – it most certainly did not allow authorities from slave states, in the form of slave-hunters, to “stretch their arms” into free states and mandate the return of runaway slaves.

When Sumner took his seat, amid tumultuous applause from spectators who had given him their unbroken attention throughout the long speech, many in the citizens’ gallery – men and women alike – were reduced to tears.

Sumner lost the 1852 vote to repeal the Fugitive Slave Law in a most humiliating fashion – by a vote of 47-4.  But for the first time ever, antislavery fire and brimstone rained upon the U.S. Senate in the heart of the nation’s capital.  Sumner had, in a more thorough and effective way than anyone had ever before, set down the intellectual underpinnings that proved America’s founding tradition had its roots in antislavery dogma; and had credibly argued that the Constitution’s omission of slavery left no legal avenue for the federal government to support it, condone it, accept it, or mandate it.

In so doing, Sumner established the foundation for the antislavery and equal rights views he would articulate in the years to come in his nearly quarter-century fight to form a more perfect union.

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Christmas Day, 1863: Charles Sumner Visits the Wounded in Army Hospitals

(Excerpted from THE GREAT ABOLITIONIST: Charles Sumner and the Fight for a More Perfect Union)

Christmas Day, 1863, Washington, D.C.

With his mother and sister miles away, and other Washington acquaintances otherwise occupied, Charles Sumner spent Christmas in the nation’s capital in a contemplative and selfless way, unusual for him during the heat of political battle but perhaps expected as he struggled with the recent death of his brother and his own deep loneliness.

He visited the wounded in nearby army hospitals.

Sumner does not identify precisely which of the more than fifty hastily constructed hospitals in Washington he visited, but from his descriptions, it appears he toured the Lincoln General Hospital on the corner of East Capitol and 15th Street, and the more well-known Armory Square Hospital on the national mall in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol building, whose new dome, capped by the statue of freedom, had been completed only weeks earlier.

Wounded, sick, and suffering Union soldiers made up the overwhelming majority of patients, but Sumner also visited a rebel ward that housed about eighty bedridden soldiers. While the Confederates were treated “precisely like our own soldiers,” Sumner conceded that he had “never before noticed so great a contrast in . . . human beings.” Union soldiers, even in their suffering, appeared reasonably content to Sumner, or at least quietly resigned to their fates, but “the rebels seemed in a different scale of existence . . . mostly rough, ignorant, brutal, scowling.” Sumner talked with several Confederates, inquired about their health, offered his best wishes that they enjoy their holiday meal, and in many cases “softened them into a smile.” Still, Sumner admitted, “when they knew who I was they seemed uncertain whether to scowl extra or be civil.”

Convalescing Confederates may have been agitated when they learned of Sumner’s identity, but as the congressional session got underway in late 1863 and moved into 1864, Sumner felt a sense of calm about the state of the nation, perhaps another reason he decided to visit army hospitals on Christmas. Recent Union victories and shifting political attitudes convinced Sumner that it was simply a matter of time before the United States prevailed and slavery was abolished forever.

“The result is certain—sooner or later,” he said.

Ulysses S. Grant’s headquarters at City Point, VA – where Charles Sumner Witnessed the “Abraham Lincoln Magic”

In my upcoming book, The Great Abolitionist: Charles Sumner and the Fight for a More Perfect Union, I include a chapter on the important events that took place during April, 1865, at General Ulysses S. Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Virginia.

Grant and his Army of the Potomac command staff ensconced themselves at City Point during the siege of Petersburg, and, after the fall of Richmond on April 2, awaited the surrender of General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia (which would occur on April 9 at Appomattox Court House, Virginia).

Eager to leave the constraints of the Executive Mansion and to be close to the action as the long and brutal Civil War ended, President Abraham Lincoln visited City Point from March 23 through late in the evening of April 8 – interrupted only by his historic visit to Richmond on April 4 – to discuss end-game strategies and post-war decisions with Grant and his staff.  Charles Sumner was part of Lincoln’s close circle of advisors who joined him (Sumner and Mrs. Lincoln also visited Richmond two days after the President toured the former Confederate capital).

The gathering of luminaries is part of City Point’s rich history, a history my wife Kate and I were thrilled to experience on our recent road trip, which also took us to the Petersburg battlefield (and numerous other great places!).

In addition to City Point serving as Grant’s headquarters, an island right off the mainland was also the location of a massive Union tent hospital, which housed 5,000 sick and wounded Union troops, as well as some Confederate soldiers.  During the day on April 8, just before Lincoln and Sumner returned to Washington, Sumner watched in awe as the President shook hands with virtually every bedridden Union soldier.

Lincoln’s physical stamina was impressive enough – the President shook his head when Sumner asked him if his shoulder or hand was tired – but even more noteworthy was the way Lincoln so easily connected with these men, most of whom had suffered grievous wounds or were dying from debilitating diseases.  A handshake and a brief conversation here, a chuckle and mirthful smile there; Lincoln’s “where are you from, boy?” at one bed-stop, a “how do you do?” at another; a “thank you for your sacrifice” to an emaciated soldier whose head was swathed in bloody bandages, and even a magnanimous “I hope a Confederate colonel will not refuse me his hand,” when Lincoln reached the bedside of a captured rebel officer, who gratefully clasped the President’s hand in both of his.

It all seemed to come naturally to the President, Sumner observed – knowing what to say, how to say it, how long to visit, when to move on to the next bed; when to speak, when to listen, when to inject gentle humor even as he expressed grave concern.  Sumner possessed little in the way of these instincts, and as he watched the President in action, he marveled that Lincoln’s mannerisms were neither contrived nor disingenuous.  The President comforted all of these men but patronized none of them.  He asked questions and listened with patience for the answers. The sheer daunting number of soldiers to greet required that he move efficiently, yet the President seemed to give each man all the time he needed.  Authenticity and concern radiated from Lincoln’s tall, thin frame.

Sumner watched Lincoln – the indefatigable President’s face careworn, but his mannerisms energetic, personable, at ease, conveying to these men that he had nothing more pressing at this moment than visiting with them; expressing his love for them and their sacrifices.

It was yet another learning experience for Sumner about Lincoln; the President’s deep connection and popularity with ordinary people were keys to his success.  Sumner, brilliant and passionate and unshakeable in his convictions, was more aloof in his style and temperament and found it difficult to relate to others on an emotional level.

Sumner’s observation of Lincoln at City Point was just one example of how he and Lincoln learned from each other – it’s one reason I was excited to visit the historic spot where the two men interacted in 1865.  When Sumner first met the President in 1860, he had doubts about Lincoln’s commitment to abolish slavery and his ability to lead the country at such a perilous moment.  When Lincoln first encountered Sumner, he respected the Massachusetts senator’s commitment to abolitionism and his dedication to equal rights, but questioned whether Sumner’s inability to compromise and lack of strong personal relationships would hinder his ability to achieve these goals.

As time went on, both men realized how much they shared, how committed they were to saving the Union, to living in a country free of slavery, dedicated to equality, and striving to form the “more perfect union” promised at its founding. Sumner came to admire Lincoln’s steadfast leadership, and Lincoln deeply respected Sumner’s unwavering and uncompromising commitment to abolish slavery and enshrine the principle of equality into America’s laws and customs. Their close relationship enabled each man to learn about the other, and Lincoln’s warm interactions with wounded soldiers at City Point – which occurred just days before he was assassinated – was a reminder that the learning never stopped.

Sumner’s relationship with Lincoln is a key theme running through The Great Abolitionist – I think you’ll find fascinating the many examples of how each man influenced the other.  Theirs is a remarkable story.

My research on The Great Abolitionist repeatedly revealed Charles Sumner’s courage and authenticity

One message came through repeatedly while I was researching and writing THE GREAT ABOLITIONIST: Charles Sumner’s Fight for a More Perfect Union: Americans today who crave, above all else, courage and authenticity in their leaders would have enjoyed watching Charles Sumner work in the mid-nineteenth century.

Where others preached compromise and moderation, Sumner never wavered in denouncing slavery’s evils to all who would listen and demanding that it be wiped out of existence. Where others muttered cautious, even insipid platitudes, his voice was clear and strong, and unambiguous on the issues of freedom and equality. Where others wilted under the onslaught of political attack, he stood strong and fearless, a bulwark against the slings and piercing arrows of those who targeted him — Southern slaveholders for sure, but also many Northerners who placed their economic interests ahead of their moral outrage.

Sumner was beholden to no one, sought no ill-gotten gains, was unbribable and unbuyable, and had little interest in even currying favor to advance his own political fortunes.  And he never, ever pandered.

Hard to believe he was a politician!

Charles Sumner was the biggest, boldest, most controversial, and most influential national voice of America’s most turbulent two decades; the 1850s and 1860s.  No one else came close.  As great events played out across the land during the country’s most stormy and divisive period, Sumner seized the national narrative, refused to let go, and repeatedly held a mirror up to the country’s aspirations and ideals.  He inspired those who agreed with him, swayed fence-sitters, and eventually, converted millions of naysayers to his point of view.   

It was Sumner who first used the phrase “equality before the law” in the United States, who first argued that “separate but equal” violated the precepts of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and who infused the concept of “equal protection” for all into the language of the Fourteenth Amendment.

His oratory was his gift if occasionally his undoing.  He never backed down, never tempered his remarks, never prevaricated.  He understood the evocativeness of words and the power of sweeping themes.  Merely uttering the words “United States Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts” was enough to stop both his allies and his enemies in their tracks.  Supporters trumpeted his courage, his resilience, and his moral certitude.  Detractors detested his insolence, his arrogance, his seeming lack of empathy for others, and his contempt for those who disagreed with him.

But without question, when Charles Sumner spoke, everyone listened.

Like Winston Churchill during World War II and Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights era, Sumner relied most heavily on the uncompromising clarity of his ideas, his relentless honesty, and his fearless steadfastness as his most effective attributes as he sought to move the heart and mind of a country embroiled in crisis.  Like Churchill and King, too, he employed rhetoric befitting big moments, and like both twentieth-century leaders, he shaped – and was shaped by – grand causes and occurrences.

Sumner knew instinctively what was at stake and how to convey it in his oratory and his writing. No single individual did more to influence the anti-slavery movement on a national scale. No single person was more responsible for founding and fueling the growth of the anti-slavery Republican Party and influencing Abraham Lincoln’s ideas.  No single lawmaker advocated for such broad and sweeping equal rights, and made the discussion of such rights a reasonable and respectable option for so many Congressional colleagues during political discourse.  No single person insisted so fervently and so early that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution guaranteed both freedom and equality (Lincoln would eventually adopt and promulgate this view with brilliance).

His positions cost him dearly.  Southerners despised Sumner, sometimes feared him, and celebrated gleefully when he was beaten unconscious in the Senate Chamber.  Northerners blanched at his abolitionist calls at first, resisted his later demands for equal rights as detrimental to the nation’s attempts to heal, and often found his chafing personality off-putting.

But eventually, they came to respect him and his positions, and near the end of his life, they elevated Sumner to revered elder-statesman status.

More than any other person of his era, perhaps of any era, Charles Sumner’s political courage and moral authenticity blazed the trail on the nation’s long, uneven, and ongoing journey toward realizing its full promise – its ever-striving quest to become a more perfect union.

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