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Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation
Hardcover
Historical FiguresCivil War Period (1850-1877)General Law
Publisher Price: $38.99
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ISBN10: 1250362555
ISBN13: 9781250362551
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
Published: Jun 3 2025
Pages: 640
Weight: 1.89
Height: 1.75 Width: 6.51 Depth: 9.42
Language: English
ISBN13: 9781250362551
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
Published: Jun 3 2025
Pages: 640
Weight: 1.89
Height: 1.75 Width: 6.51 Depth: 9.42
Language: English
A thorough recounting of the great legislator's life and deed... unlikely to be bettered anytime soon... Tameez is expert at explaining Sumner's legal thought... One cannot help wishing we had a Charles Sumner in Washington today.
--The New York Times
--Wall Street Journal
A landmark biography of Charles Sumner, the unsung hero of the American Civil War and Reconstruction Charles Sumner is mainly known as the abolitionist statesman who suffered a brutal caning on the Senate floor by the proslavery congressman Preston Brooks in 1856. This violent episode has obscured Sumner's status as the most passionate champion of equal rights and multiracial democracy of his time. A friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, an ally of Frederick Douglass, and an adviser to Abraham Lincoln, Sumner helped the Union win the Civil War and ordain the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, the Freedmen's Bureau, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. In a comprehensive but fast-paced narrative, Zaakir Tameez presents Sumner as one of America's forgotten founding fathers, a constitutional visionary who helped to rewrite the post-Civil War Constitution and give birth to modern civil rights law. He argues that Sumner was a gay man who battled with love and heartbreak at a time when homosexuality wasn't well understood or accepted. And he explores Sumner's critical partnerships with the nation's first generation of Black lawyers and civil rights leaders, whose legal contributions to Reconstruction have been overlooked for far too long. An extraordinary achievement of historical and constitutional scholarship, Charles Sumner brings back to life one of America's most inspiring statesmen, whose formidable ideas remain relevant to a nation still divided over questions of race, democracy, and constitutional law.
A landmark biography of Charles Sumner, the unsung hero of the American Civil War and Reconstruction Charles Sumner is mainly known as the abolitionist statesman who suffered a brutal caning on the Senate floor by the proslavery congressman Preston Brooks in 1856. This violent episode has obscured Sumner's status as the most passionate champion of equal rights and multiracial democracy of his time. A friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, an ally of Frederick Douglass, and an adviser to Abraham Lincoln, Sumner helped the Union win the Civil War and ordain the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, the Freedmen's Bureau, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. In a comprehensive but fast-paced narrative, Zaakir Tameez presents Sumner as one of America's forgotten founding fathers, a constitutional visionary who helped to rewrite the post-Civil War Constitution and give birth to modern civil rights law. He argues that Sumner was a gay man who battled with love and heartbreak at a time when homosexuality wasn't well understood or accepted. And he explores Sumner's critical partnerships with the nation's first generation of Black lawyers and civil rights leaders, whose legal contributions to Reconstruction have been overlooked for far too long. An extraordinary achievement of historical and constitutional scholarship, Charles Sumner brings back to life one of America's most inspiring statesmen, whose formidable ideas remain relevant to a nation still divided over questions of race, democracy, and constitutional law.
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