Charles Sumner is best known as the statesman caned within an inch of his life on the Senate floor for speaking against the expansion of slavery.
Sumner counted among his friends Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Frederick Douglass. He sat by Abraham Lincoln’s bed as the martyred president breathed his last. His political legacy included work culminating in the Emancipation Proclamation, the Reconstruction Amendments, and the posthumous Civil Rights Act of 1875.
Sumner towered over American politics as a man of deep principle. By the end of his life, a rivalry with President Ulysses S. Grant left him exiled from the Republican Party. Nonetheless, the party he co-founded as a renegade senator remains his most visible legacy.
The most recent attempt to chronicle the life of Sumner comes in the form of Zaakir Tameez’s recently released Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation. Tameez is a recent distinguished graduate of Yale Law School whose prior experience consists of several internships. His exposition of Sumner’s constitutional interpretation is sure to break some ground on the legal thought that undergirded Reconstruction.
However, the book’s legal analysis is overshadowed by several extreme claims Tameez makes about Sumner’s personal background, most notably that the leading senator was “likely a gay man who didn’t understand his sexuality.”
Painting the rainbow over historical figures has much recent precedent. Recent victims of such pop historiography include even Abraham Lincoln (for having a male roommate) and George Washington (for decorating uniforms).
As regards the suggestion that Charles Sumner was a closeted gay man, his wife might have taken umbrage.
David Herbert Donald’s two-volume study of Sumner pioneered psychoanalysis in history. In his 1960 Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War he tells of an awkward young workaholic too consumed by his idealism to accede to the many dates his friends set him up with despite a clear interest in women.
In the second volume, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man, the failure of Sumner’s marriage is dived into with great detail. At the age of 55 and at the peak of his influence in the Senate during Reconstruction, he found himself entangled with a Washington wallflower 30 years his junior.
His infatuation with her notwithstanding, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was steadfast in his commitment to work constantly towards ideals of liberty. This detachment did not pair well with his wife, a young social butterfly. The marriage ended darkly as Alice Sumner abandoned her husband to travel Europe.
Surely a failed heterosexual marriage cannot be the criteria for classifying a historical figure as homosexual. If it were, one might imagine leftist historians next targeting the actress Zsa Zsa Gabor for her nine marriages to male celebrities.
Tameez twists a quip from a friend of Sumner’s that “he would at once desert the most blooming beauty to talk to the plainest of men” to support this thesis. Preferring such company in the context of Victorian views on gender relations seems in line with the pattern of Sumner being a neurotic worker. Such behavior today would probably be labelled as misogyny, not homosexuality.
The decision to label Sumner in such a way seems a clear ploy to sell books. If misconstruing his political views as those of a modern progressive were not enough, Tameez also must find a way to force him into a marginalized group. The attention this work received, unfortunately, makes it seem as though inventing a suppressed identity for sales is a successful ploy in the world of left-wing criticism.
The rainbow glaze is not the only lie given to readers in an attempt to mischaracterize Sumner. Tameez makes the erroneous claim that Sumner grew up in a “black neighborhood” based on the thousand free black Americans in Boston at the time. This is, in short, nonsense.
There was a free black population in Boston at the time, but they certainly did not comprise a “predominant community” in a neighborhood like Sumner’s, populated by upper class families that sent their lineages back to Plymouth and their children forward to Harvard.
Attempting to hide this diminishes the lessons of Sumner’s story.
Sumner castigated his fellow Boston brahmins as “lords of the loom” who had betrayed the morals of their Puritan forefathers by allying their cotton mills with plantations run by the “lords of the lash.”
Lying about the demography of where he grew up transforms Sumner from a fiery preacher of American values who recognized hypocrisy among his class of Boston elites into a sort of Eminem-style modern liberal caricature of a white man raised in black surroundings.
The real Sumner wasn’t speaking from outside mainstream American culture. He was imploring Americans regardless of race to honor their heritage by recognizing the natural rights of all men as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. For this, he became a pariah in elite Massachusetts circles before being vindicated by the great trial of the Civil War.
From the author’s perspective, the reasoning is clear. Modern leftist historiography refuses to recognize virtue in the heritage or traditions of white Americans and thus must concoct a fictional black neighborhood to explain away Sumner’s righteousness.
For a work by an expert in constitutional law, not a peep is heard in the biography about Sumner’s involvement with the National Reform Association. This group of conservative Protestants, largely Covenant Presbyterians, sought a constitutional amendment repealing the separation of church and state to pay homage to “the revealed will of Lord Jesus Christ as the supreme law of the land.”
Sumner saw the conflict over slavery as a battle for “the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man,” leading him to introduce their petition to the Senate beginning during the Civil War. Sumner presented the petition at least six more times between then and his death in office. He heeded the requests of Jewish constituents by also trying versions narrowing the language from an explicitly Christian reference to an acknowledgement of “Almighty God.”
Even within the field of his expertise, Tameez characterises Sumner’s constitutional philosophy as “akin to many liberal jurists today.” Describing the constitution as “not stingy,” Sumner was certainly not a strict constructionist. However, his judicial adherence to the common good could easily be read as more akin to right-wing thinkers such as Adrian Vermuele than the left.
To his credit, Tameez covers Sumner’s willingness to advocate for former Confederates as well. He battled with erstwhile allies to ensure Confederate prisoners of war were well cared for and sought to reintegrate the South into the nation. Sumner sought to return voting rights to those willing to swear allegiance to the stars and stripes anew.
In this, Sumner presciently outdid his contemporaries by recognizing that the South could only move forward “linked together in the community of a common citizenship” across lines of race or wartime allegiance. Sumner possibly went overboard by opposing widespread commemoration of the Union victory on the grounds that it impeded this vital national reunion.
Readers might concur with the New York Times’ assessment that Tameez’s prose was “unpolished…with awkward, anachronistic phrasings.”
At one point, Tameez describes Sumner as having a heart that “bled for abolition, racial justice, and constitutional democracy.” Of course, Sumner did care for the abolition of slavery, the natural rights of man, and the preservation of the republic, but the phrasing is carefully written to reflect modern progressivism rather than a 19th-century reformer.
Overall, one is forced to come to the conclusion that Tameez committed the cardinal sin of the biographer, falling so in love with an idea of his subject that the historical record was either willfully ignored or intentionally omitted to draw a caricature of Sumner for his fellow progressives that rejects the Sumner of reality.
The real Charles Sumner patterned himself after Edmund Burke, the father of the Anglosphere political right. He fancied himself a “conservative reformer” that sought to revive the American tradition of liberty, not a radical seeking to replace it with another.
Zaakir Tameez has wandered into the field of Sumner scholarship, but his work is more left-wing screed than biography. For readers interested in the conscience of Charles Sumner, the prudent maintain David Herbert Donald’s two-volume masterpiece as the gold standard.
Shiv Parihar is an editorial intern at The American Spectator. You can follow him on X @ShivomMParihar.
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