Can someone make a musical about this guy? While secular music is still permitted?

This is a biography of Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts senator before, during, and after the U.S. Civil War. Sumner was an early member of no less than three political parties (Free Soil, Republican, and Liberal), all of them influential in their era, yet none around today. 

The author, a lawyer himself like Sumner, focuses on Sumner's relevance in his jurisprudence, a sort of small-c, small-p conservative progressivism. While at a time when the Constitution was irreconcilable to human dignity and civil rights, Sumner represented the redemptive take. The Constitution stood for an increase in liberty, thus it should always be read with that in mind. He also gave us the term equal protection under the law, at least as a term of art, and the name Alaska, or popularized it.

Sumner's oratory was legendary. He has, perhaps, the benefit of history, but he put his considerable education to its best political use. Likewise his Rolodex. The list of Sumner's confidants and corespondents would overwhelm a review to try and list, so the clever comments fly freely between them. It also earned him enemies, notably within his own party(ies) that would effectively block him from any office outside of senator. Oh, yeah, and the guy who beat him up on the Senate floor.

This is a masterful biography. It is long, and moves slowly, but it is worth it. The author is a lawyer acting as historian, which works because it manages to provide a lot more context to Sumner's life and work. The relevance of Sumner's father and grandfather in his beliefs is particularly interesting in what can only be described as trauma working itself out well. The speculation on his sexuality is middling. I feel like it is going to draw a lot of attention, and outside of the impossibly of speculation, Sumner scans to me less gay than asexual, with a misogynistic streak that seems drawn from the Greek and Roman work with which he was familiar. (Okay, there is that book, but he did not write it).

What moves it from like to love for me is the time spent on Sumner's career after the U.S. Civil War and how that ought to re-frame our thinking about the country.

There are many figures who were important in their time and are forgotten about now. That is what history is. The act of repeating and restating that to figure out what is meaningful. In the case of Sumner, his reduction to a AP history note about the causes of the Civil War is more than the fickleness of memory and reputation, but a memory hole out of the Lost Cause mythos and the result, first of perfidy, then of negligence, of the campaign to re-imagine the Antebellum south as something other than the mother of terrorists and treasoners. 

Sumner’s attacker would get written as having a Texas defense, where, sure, it was a crime, but Sumner had it coming fro being so outspoken about slavery, making Sumner less a victim of violence – violence, which should be noted was both premeditated and chosen to invoke the violence of slavery – as someone who shared responsibility for what happened to him.

This is a convenient lacuna. Forgetting why Sumner achieved the popularity he did allows the erasure of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the power that Black voting had and the fear it provoked, before it was crushed, buried under legal arguments that are equal to or better than the ones used for the act around a century later. Sumner has his faults: pride, certainly, no consideration for the American Indian, and an antipathy to women's rights, but he stands out as someone who was not anti-slavery but pro-racial equality. He does not just outshine his contemporaries, but politicians now. 

My complaint about the book is that it sort of name checks this elision of Sumner's legacy, but as a blur of quotes in the beginning and the end. Yes, it is outside of the scope of biography, but it seems relevant to understanding the texture of the biography, and what sort of lessons it could take moving forward as the citizens of the republic labor under new attempts to erase Black history et al. 

My thanks to the author, Zaakir Tameez, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Henry Holt & Company, for making the ARC available to me.