Charles Sumner

Description

Charles Sumner had been a firebrand years before he ever set foot in Washington, DC. Sumner was a lawyer and abolitionist, and he had litigated controversial cases over the rights of African Americans in his home state of Massachusetts. Sumner’s righteous streak was one of the few qualities he shared with his father, Pinckney, a stern but fair man. Despite his strong beliefs on abolition and pacifism, Sumner wouldn’t have given politics a second thought if it weren’t for the encouragement of his friend and mentor, John Quincy Adams. Sumner became a senator in 1851, and within a year, he became a thorn in the side of his fellow congressmen and senators as he advocated against the expansion of Slavery in the United States. Uncompromising in his opinions, Sumner was the target of death threats and was on the receiving end of a near-fatal drubbing from Congressman Preston Brooks in 1856.

Author Zaakir Tameez has written an expansive and polished biography of the Republican senator from Massachusetts. The most readable and inspiring biographies cover a subject without pretense, and the well-researched Charles Sumner portrays Sumner as a brilliantly flawed man who took his activist beliefs to the national stage and made sure he left his mark.