Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation

A landmark biography of Charles Sumner, the unsung hero of American Reconstruction

Known mainly as the abolitionist senator brutally caned within an inch of his life by slaveholder Preston Brooks on the Senate floor in 1856, Charles Sumner also played a pivotal role in advancing democracy and shaping the Constitution during Reconstruction, America’s “Second Founding.” During the Civil War, Sumner convinced Lincoln to emancipate the South’s slaves; stopped England from joining the conflict; and created the Freedmen’s Bureau. After the war, Sumner transformed America by authoring the Fourteenth Amendment and thereby embedding his slogan—"equality before the law”—into the Constitution. Sumner was a martyr-like senator who put principles above politics at every turn.

In Charles Sumner, Zaakir Tameez shows how this overlooked luminary is one of the most significant figures in the history of civil rights, as well as a visionary progenitor of modern progressive politics. He focuses on Sumner’s passionate struggle to end slavery, promote civil rights, and redeem the Constitution, and considers how his emphasis on the Constitution as a vehicle for the promotion of human rights–rather than simply the protection of individual liberty–was a radical interpretation that anticipated much contemporary progressive jurisprudence. The book also looks at Sumner’s social milieu, which included an extraordinary range of prominent thinkers and writers, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Henry Longfellow to Frederick Douglass. Finally, it is the first biography to identify Sumner as a gay man who struggled with his sexuality, and as a committed white ally who had deep relationships with Black community leaders.

Eminently readable and meticulously researched, Charles Sumner promises to be a groundbreaking new portrait of this pivotal figure in American history.

About the Author

Zaakir Tameez is an emerging scholar of antitrust and constitutional law. He is currently a third-year student at Yale Law School, where he is an editor on the Yale Law Journal and has published multiple law review articles. He also holds degrees from the University of Virginia, where he was a Lawn Resident and Posse Scholar, and Queen Mary University of London, where he studied on a Fulbright Scholarship. In 2025, he will be clerking for Judge Jill Pryor of the 11th Circuit. He is from Houston, Texas.