Derrick Morrison
The Great Abolitionist:
Charles Sumner and the Fight for a More Perfect Union
By Stepen Puleo
Thriftbooks, 2024, 464 pages.
“In a scene similar to Lincoln’s funeral nine years earlier, Sumner’s body had been transported north by special train that left Washington around 3:00 P.M. on March 13 [1874].
“But unlike Lincoln’s train returning to Springfield, Illinois, which stopped numerous times along the way, the train carrying Sumner’s body traveled nonstop to New York — much to the deep disappointment of enormous crowds that had gathered in Wilmington, Delaware, and Philadelphia — where it halted at midnight. The next morning it continued through Connecticut, where, in New Haven and other cities, what seemed like the entire population gathered to pay their last tribute to Sumner.
“And then the train crossed into Massachusetts. Beginning in Springfield, throngs gathered at every station to watch it rumble eastward, while church bells tolled along the entire route.”
“Meanwhile, in Boston, several thousand mourners had filled Faneuil Hall for a public prayer meeting, and later poured onto the tracks to greet the train when it arrived in the early evening of March 14. Then a long procession followed the coffin, which was escorted by mounted guard of honor from the Massachusetts First Battalion, up Beacon Hill to the Massachusetts State House, where Sumner’s body was placed in Doric Hall and, appropriately for a man who had devoted his life to equality, guarded by African American troops.” (page 394)
CHARLES SUMNER WAS a giant! During the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, Taylor Branch wrote a three-volume set on America in the King Years, a chronicle of how Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights movement overturned the Jim Crow system in the South — a system that negated civil democracy as defined by the Constitution in that region. Well, Stephen Puleo has now written a book that could be called America in the Sumner Years.
Sumner entered the U.S. Senate in 1851. He was reelected to a fourth term in January 1869. Those two decades saw the near death, tearing apart, and eventual rebirth of the constitutional republic. Sumner was a central figure in those political events. A key guide through those years is Puleo’s book, The Great Abolitionist, Charles Sumner and the Fight for a More Perfect Union. He does it in one readable volume.
After the Missouri Compromise of 1820, Puleo writes, “…Congress had cobbled together a series of convoluted agreements — some legislative and some informal — to maintain the precarious sectional truce on the slavery issue….In short, for thirty years, both spoken and unspoken congressional ground rules dictated the tone and tenor of debate, but always with an eye toward the status quo, designed to reduce the potential for sectional conflict.” (87)
This 30-year delicate dance was blown apart by two pieces of legislation: the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. The first included the Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed slaveowners or their agents to “capture, imprison, degrade, and return runaway slaves to bondage,” (88) wherever the runaways were found, be it the South or the North. No longer was the North off limits — the agents of the slaveowners could operate nationwide.
The response of Massachusetts in 1851 was to send Sumner to the U.S. Senate.
The second piece of legislation, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, opened all of the territories within the continental United States to the expansion of slavery.
In August of 1852 Sumner gave an almost four-hour speech blasting the institution of bondage. “Antislavery reformers were jubilant with Sumner’s speech, and praise poured in from the North and across the Atlantic. A writer from England ‘wept with joy’ when he read Sumner’s ‘magnificent’ speech; one Cincinnati jurist believed Sumner’s view of the unconstitutionality of slavery was the view ‘of all candid men, and even of the Southerners,’ if they cared to admit it.” (124)
On May 19, 1856, Sumner gave a three-hour oration on “The Crime Against Kansas.” The public galleries in the chamber were packed. He completed the speech on the next day by taking two more hours. “Sumner’s speech was printed at once in leading newspapers in many Northern cities, and large pamphlet editions were soon made available in New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. — more than one million copies of The Crime Against Kansas would be distributed within a couple of months.” (151) The antislavery cause had finally found its tribune within the U.S. Senate.
But then the unspeakable occurred. A South Carolina congressman, Preston Brooks, entered the Senate chamber on May 22 and proceeded to beat a sitting Sumner with his cane. The beating lasted between 60 and 90 seconds, leaving Sumner unconscious and blood streaming from his head. He did not return to the Senate until early 1857.
However, there was an immediate response in the North. “Throughout late May and early June, huge public gatherings and ‘indignation meetings’ were held to protest the caning in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Albany, Cleveland, Detroit, New Haven, Providence, Rochester, and virtually every city and small town East and West—including places like Berea, Ohio; Rahway, New Jersey; and Burlington, Iowa. Attendees of all political persuasions jammed into halls and churches, stomped their feet, cheered speeches, and roared their approval for Sumner—and shouted their denunciations against Brooks, the South, and slavery. In many places Brooks was hanged in effigy.” (165)
The attack fueled the rise of a new political formation that had been organized in 1854 — the Republican Party. Led by railroad and industrial magnates in the North and West, and supported by small farmers and urban progressives and professionals, this party would execute the historical task of first stopping the spread of slaveholder power, and then abolishing the slavocracy by emancipating the slaves.
Puleo takes the reader on a journey through the outbreak and unfolding of the Civil War, the growth of the collaboration between President Abraham Lincoln and Sumner, and their initial discussions on reconstructing the South — cut short by Lincoln’s assassination in April of 1865.
Sumner was at the center of the Congressional debates on the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. The first abolished the system of property in human beings, the second accorded citizenship to the newly emancipated and included anybody born in the U.S., and the third established universal male suffrage.
Puleo also details the differences on Reconstruction between Sumner and President Ulysses S. Grant. On all three amendments, Sumner was tactically and sometimes strategically incorrect on the breadth and depth of the measures. Lincoln and Grant had a better grasp of the pulse of the nation than the Senator.
That’s why this book is such a wonderful read. And it illustrates in a broad way the problems and prospects of the fight against autocracy today. All the big reforms — from the New Deal of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the civil rights measures of Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, the civil and social reforms initiated by President Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the extension of those reforms under every administration until the present one — are under attack and attempted rollback.
All those civil democratic reforms and social democratic measures were accompanied by huge civil and social movements. We are in the initial stages of efforts today to build movements that will fight those attacks and rollbacks.
In respect to the 2026 Congressional elections, the Trump gang will attempt to either suspend the elections or overturn the election results — in other words, a coup to keep his majority in Congress. That could spark widespread civil and social activity. Charles Sumner and the movements of his time are examples of how to thwart the plans of autocracy and autocrats. Read Puleo’s book.
August 30, 2025