When Senator Charles Sumner first met Abraham Lincoln before his inauguration in 1861, the two men appeared to have only one thing in common: they were both 6’4”. But Lincoln wanted to be sure. The rustic Illinoisan suggested they put their backs up against one another to see who was taller. Sumner, the Harvard-educated, well-traveled lawyer from Boston, wasn’t amused, scoffing that “this was a time for uniting our fronts and not our backs before the enemies of our country.” As Lincoln later recalled amusingly, “I reckon the truth was, he was afraid to measure!” The president then struck a more serious tone: “he is a good piece of man, though—Sumner—and a good man. I had never had much to do with bishops down where we live; but, do you know, Sumner is just my idea of a bishop.”

Lincoln was not the first to describe Sumner with religious imagery. Alexis de Tocqueville had compared the abolitionist to a prophet. When Sumner was famously caned on the Senate floor by South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks in 1856, an actual bishop in the Methodist Church declared that Sumner “bore in his body the marks of the Lord Jesus,” alluding to Galatians 6:17. For those in the anti-slavery cause, Sumner’s life often assumed a near-spiritual significance. “Grant won with the sword at Appomattox what Charles Sumner contended for half a century—an idea,” an abolitionist summarized after the Civil War. “That idea is the liberty of all, limited by the like liberty of each.” Sumner’s colossal footprint upon American political and social life is still seen and felt today. Not only did Sumner effectively help to found the Republican Party as its “moral spokesman,” but he was, according to Zaakir Tameez, “the most famous civil rights leader of the nineteenth century, much like Martin Luther King Jr. in the twentieth century.”

Scholars have not always remembered Charles Sumner in a favorable light. One historian recently described Sumner as a “Cassandra” who was eager to capitalize on the latest controversy for his political benefit. However, Tameez’s recent portrait, Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation (Holt, 2025), aims to return the Senator “to the place he deserves in the pantheon of American heroes.” Tameez’s work is set apart from past biographies by its attention to at least two things: Sumner’s constitutional legacy and his connections to the Black community, two significant elements of his life, long underappreciated by historians and legal scholars. As a constitutional lawyer, Tameez is well-equipped to explore these overlooked facets of one of America’s most famed abolitionists.

“He was, from the very beginning, a believer in constitutional nationalism,” Tameez states. Unlike radical abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison (who burned a copy of the Constitution), Sumner believed that the Constitution was a sacred document capable of protecting human rights and “that people had a direct relationship with the national government, one unmediated by the states.” In our own time, with many Americans highly critical of our constitutional order, Charles Sumner’s life is a rebuke to the idea that the Constitution has ever been a roadblock to freedom and social change.

The foremost champion of equality and liberty in nineteenth century America, and the man responsible for many of the legal arguments for the Civil Rights movement, was convinced that “every word” of the Constitution, as understood by the Founders, “is to be construed in favor of liberty.” For his time, and for ours as well, this is a badly needed message. “The Constitution is not mean, stingy, and pettifogging, but open-handed, liberal, and just, inclining always in favor freedom,” Sumner once said.

As Tameez illustrates, Charles Sumner was a liberal (or “radical”) who nevertheless saw himself in the conservative tradition by conserving the founding vision of America. As a result, he demonstrates to Americans today that even the most progressive social causes do not demand a negative view of the American Founding or a rigid devotion to one party. According to one abolitionist,

“It is Sumner’s first and not least glory that he saved us the fathers and the Constitution. His enemies expected him to assail that venerable document … They never dreamed that he was going to snatch this very platform from beneath their feet, and make them … the violators of the Constitution itself.”

After all, Sumner had an indirect connection to the Founders themselves. John Quincy Adams had taught Sumner that the Declaration of Independence phrase “all men are created equal” was actually a binding promise. As a result, in Roberts v. City of Boston (1850), a case seeking to end racial segregation in Boston public schools, Sumner coined the phrase “equality before the law.” Sumner was cited more than forty times by name by Thurgood Marshall in the NAACP’s brief in Brown v. Board of Education, tracing an intellectual lineage from the Civil Rights Movement to Sumner’s arguments more than a century earlier.

Sumner is of course most known for his delivery of the address that Tameez calls “the most provocative speech in the history of the Senate”: “The Crime Against Kansas.” Given on May 19, 1856, it provoked his horrific beating by Rep. Brooks three days later. “In retrospect,” Tameez contends, “the blows that had struck his head were the first blows of the Civil War.” With the help of John Quincy Adams, Sumner was also among the first to promote a wartime emancipation theory which culminated in the Emancipation Proclamation (1863). After the war, Sumner’s vociferous advocacy for Civil Rights played a significant part in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Sumner believed that the Declaration of Independence was a “baptismal vow” to all Americans irrespective of skin color.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Tameez’s biography is the author’s attention to Sumner’s upbringing, helping to explain Sumner’s passion for human equality and justice—something scholars have usually not explained. “Sumner grew up in a Black neighborhood in Boston, an astonishing and critical fact overlooked by almost every past biographer of Sumner’s life.” Sumner was no Boston Brahmin, and his experiences on the North Slope of Beacon Hill would ignite a zeal for racial justice that lasted his entire life. Tameez does not conceal Sumner’s prejudices, his pettiness, his loneliness, and his Harvard-styled haughtiness which often cost him political success. “There was a dose of narcissism to his love for praise,” Tameez admits. Sumner may have looked like a bishop and even sounded like one, but he did not always exhibit the humility of someone who preached the moral law of God. Yet, even as a remarkably flawed human being, Sumner was driven by a ceaseless pursuit of justice for the enslaved and the disenfranchised, eventually collaborating with African American professor John Mercer Langston in 1870 to draft a bill that became the “blueprint of modern-day civil rights law.”