Charles Sumner (6 January 1811 – 11 March 1874) was a US Senator from Massachusetts (R) from 24 April 1851 to 11 March 1874, succeeding Robert Rantoul Jr. and preceding William B. Washburn. He was most famous for being subjected to a near-fatal caning by Southern Democrat Preston Brooks on the Senate floor in 1856, and he later emerged as a leader of the Radical Republicans. Despite his staunch abolitionist and pro-civil rights views, he defected to the Liberal Republican Party in 1872 and fell from power as a result.
Biography[]
Charles Sumner was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1811, and he became a lawyer in 1834. He became an outspoken opponent of the Mexican-American War and became a sought-after orator, taking an active abolitionist role after Texas was incorporated as a slave state. In 1848, he helped organize the Free Soil Party, and he lost in his campaign for the US House of Representatives as a Free Soiler. However, he was elected to the US Senate in 1851 as a Free Soiler, serving for almost 23 years. In 1856, he affiliated himself with the nascent Republican Party, and he became the leader of anti-slavery forces in Massachusetts and a prominent leader of the Radical Republicans. In 1856, he gave an intensely anti-slavery speech called "The Crime Against Kansas", in which he characterized Senator Andrew Butler as a pimp for slavery. Butler's cousin Preston Brooks, viewing this as an attack on his family's honor, responded by attacking Sumner with a cane on the Senate floor two days later, nearly killing him. During the American Civil War a few years later, he criticized President Abraham Lincoln for being too moderate on the American South, but he helped Lincoln with keeping Britain and France out of the war. In the Reconstruction era that followed the war, he fought to minimize the power of the ex-Confederates and guarantee equal rights to the freedmen, and he battled President Andrew Johnson's plans. Although he forcefully supported the Alaska Purchase, he opposed President Ulysses S. Grant's plan to annex the Dominican Republic, defeating Grant's 1870 treaty and defecting to the conservative "Liberal Republican Party"; while he believed that his civil rights ideas could coexist with his Liberal Republican affiliation, Sumner was one of the very few Liberal Republicans who made Black civil rights a priority. Grant and Secretary of State Hamilton Fish retaliated by deposing Sumner as head of the Foreign Relations Committee and stripping him of his power. Sumner failed to defeat Grant's re-election in 1872, and he died in office in 1874.