The Great Abolitionist

Starred review from January 15, 2024
The story of a haughty and courageous senator who was dedicated to racial equality and the extinction of slavery. Boston-based historian and teacher Puleo, author of Voyage of Mercy and American Treasures, presents the first serious treatment in over 50 years of Charles Sumner (1811-1874), one of America's most influential abolitionists and legislators, now vaguely remembered from textbook images as cowering on the Senate floor when he was nearly caned to death by a fellow legislator for insulting his cousin. As the author reminds us, Sumner was a man of firsts: the first American to employ the phrase "equality before the law," a member of the first integrated legal counsel in the U.S., and the first to deconstruct the principle of separate but equal. Puleo's vast knowledge of 19th-century Boston and its diffident attitude toward slavery and integration--due in no small part to textile merchants and financiers who relied on Southern cotton for their prosperity--adds tremendous value to his account of Sumner's transformation from depressed and sullen Harvard-educated lawyer to uncompromising and unrelenting civil rights champion, orator, and senator. Evenhandedly and adroitly, the author describes the intense sectional and political strife that accompanied the debate about the extension of slavery in the U.S., the role of Sumner's unsparingly effective rhetoric in moving the republic toward civil war, and the many personal foibles that accompanied the better attributes that won Sumner renown that, at the time, rivaled that of Lincoln. So great was his fame that the base of a statue of him that stands in Boston's Public Garden is inscribed simply with his surname. Puleo cogently and vividly demonstrates why, and his book is required reading for anyone with even a slight interest in Civil War-era U.S. history. A wonderfully written book about a true American freedom fighter.

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Starred review from March 4, 2024
Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner’s lifelong devotion to equal rights was akin to “digging a deep well with nothing more than a spoon... yet he never stopped digging,” according to this rousing biography from historian Puleo (Voyage of Mercy). As a young lawyer in 1849, Sumner coined the phrase “equality before the law,” a concept that rapidly propelled universal suffrage to the forefront of abolitionism. Elected senator in 1852, for the next 23 years Sumner was “the nation’s most passionate and inexhaustible” antislavery and equality advocate—someone who not only embraced controversy but would “grab it around the waist, and dance it across speaker platforms.” Sumner’s antagonism of pro-slavery colleagues—he often got “personal”—came to a head in 1856, when enraged South Carolina representative Preston Brooks famously attacked the abolitionist with a cane. A painful and lonely three-year recovery followed, during which Sumner’s vacant Senate chair, an ever-present reminder of the assault, catalyzed the nation’s political polarization. As a trusted wartime adviser to Abraham Lincoln, it was Sumner, according to Puleo, who ultimately guided the president toward emancipation. Postwar, Sumner championed universal suffrage as a pillar of Reconstruction. Puleo’s easygoing narrative style (“The people couldn’t get enough of Sumner”) is peppered with insight, including into how the “personality difficulties” that made empathizing with others impossible for Sumner contributed to his relentless, fact-based argumentativeness. Readers won’t be able to get enough of Puleo’s indomitable Sumner.

April 1, 2024
Historian Puleo chronicles the life and times of Charles Sumner, a Bostonian who campaigned for human rights as an attorney and then as a U.S. senator, in what he asserts is the first detailed Sumner biography in 50 years. Readers may be familiar with an historic illustration showing South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks beating Sumner with a cane. Brooks' attack took Sumner out of public life for three years and prematurely aged him. Puleo vividly describes Sumner's two-day long antislavery speech, which incited Brooks, and the atmosphere in the Senate during the speech. Puleo portrays Sumner as a major force in three important American eras, antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction. Sumner was often abrasive and held grudges, expressing his dislike of Grant after the president didn't appoint him to his cabinet and staying mad at Grant even after he intervened to stop racial violence in the South. As shown in Puleo's riveting account of the aftermath of the largest attempted escape of enslaved people in American history on the schooner Pearl, Sumner was at his best when displaying deft leadership.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.