Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Charles Sumner Revisited (part 3) About this episode The third installment of our Charles Sumner episode covers how, two days after Charles Sumner delivered an incendiary speech before the senate, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina came into the Senate chamber and attacked Sumner at his desk.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:02 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:34 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
1:44 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. This is the third part of our three-parter about Charles Sumner. I don't want to call this a cliffhanger because we're talking about a person's actual human life, but we did leave off at a precarious moment. Charles Sumner had delivered an incendiary speech before the Senate called Crime Against Kansas. He had delivered that over two days in May of 1856. And so we are picking up with what happened two days later on May 22nd, when Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina came into the Senate chamber and attacked Charles Sumner at his desk.
2:27 Holly Frey? Representative Brooks thought Senator Sumner deserved to be punished for what he had said in his crime against Kansas speech. Brooks also thought this should be humiliating for Sumner, and his initial plan was to use a whip. But Sumner was a big man. He was six foot four with a barrel chest, and he outweighed Brooks by about 30 pounds. Brooks thought that Sumner might just take a whip out of his hand, so he decided to use a walking cane.
2:55 Tracy V. Wilson? When Brooks arrived at the Senate chamber that day, Sumner was at his desk. He was franking copies of the speech that he had just given. Another South Carolina representative, Lawrence Kitt, accompanied Brooks and was prepared to get in the way of anybody who might intervene. Kitt was a major part of planning this attack and of encouraging Brooks to go through with it when it seemed like he might change his mind.
3:20 Holly Frey? Brooks and Kitt waited for the session to end and for some women who were in the hallway to leave. Then Brooks approached Sumner. In a letter he later wrote to his brother, Brooks said he told the senator, quote, "Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech with care and as much impartiality as was possible, and I feel it my duty to tell you that you have libeled my state and slandered a relative who is aged and absent, and I am come to punish you for it."
3:48 Tracy V. Wilson? In this letter, Brooks went on to say, quote, "At the concluding words, I struck him with my cane and gave him about 30 first-rate stripes with a gutter perch of cane, which had been given me a few months before by a friend from North Carolina named Vic. Every lick went where I intended. For about the first five or six licks, he offered to make a fight, but I plied him so rapidly that he did not touch me. Towards the last, he bellowed like a calf." I wore my cane out completely, but saved the head, which is gold. The fragments of the stick are begged for as sacred relics.
4:28 Tracy V. Wilson? Every southern man is delighted, and the abolitionists are like a hive of disturbed bees.
4:35 Holly Frey? I have so much to say on our behind the scenes. Uh, Colonel Joseph H. Nicholson gave an eyewitness account to the Senate in which he said, quote, "I saw Colonel Brooks lean on and over the desk of Senator Sumner, and seemingly say something to him, and instantly, and while Senator Sumner was in the act of rising, Colonel Brooks struck him over the head with a dark colored walking cane, which blow he repeated twice or three times and with rapidity. I think several blows had been inflicted before Senator Sumner was fully in possession of his locomotion and extricated from his desk, which was thrown over or broken from its fastenings by the efforts of the senator to extricate himself.
5:17 Holly Frey? As soon as Senator Sumner was free from the desk, he moved down the narrow passageway under the impetuous drive of his adversary with his hands uplifted as though to ward off the blows, which were rained on his head with as much quickness as was possible for any man to use a cane on another whom he was intent on chastising." Nicholson described the cane as being broken into several pieces during this attack, and said Sumner finally collapsed in a, quote, "bleeding and apparently exhausted condition."
5:48 Tracy V. Wilson? Sumner's injuries, which were serious, went beyond just the ones that Brooks had inflicted on him. This desk that he was seated at was large, and it was heavy, and it was bolted to the floor, so when Brooks started attacking him, Sumner was basically pinned in between the chair and the underside of the desk. Trying to get away involved wrenching the desk out from the floor, and both of his thighs were severely bruised in the process.
6:17 Holly Frey? Violence in the halls of Congress was not unheard of at this point. The previous year, there had been an altercation between Senators Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri and Henry Foot of Mississippi, in which Foot had pulled a gun. Other fights over slavery had come to blows. In 1858, Kit would be involved in what was effectively a brawl in the House over a proposed pro-slavery constitution for Kansas.
6:44 Holly Frey? But this was different. In addition to being a much more serious and violent attack, Brooks's decision to attack Sumner with a cane had parallels to the way enslavers delivered physical punishments with things like canes and whips.
7:00 Tracy V. Wilson? People noticed the similarity between what Brooks did to Sumner and what enslavers did to the enslaved more broadly. This included black journalists and abolitionists who condemned the attack. Mary Ann Shad Carey, who we covered on the show in July of 2016, described this as an indication that the violence of slavery had spread, quote, "from the black man to the white."
7:24 Holly Frey? Thanks to the existence of the telegraph, word of the attack spread quickly, with people in major cities hearing about it less than an hour after it happened. Broadly speaking, Brooks's actions drew outrage from the North and praise from the South, although there were Southerners who thought it went against Southern ideas of gentility and gentlemanly behavior.
7:46 Tracy V. Wilson? Brooks received a letter from five people from Charleston, South Carolina, who wrote, quote, "You have put the senator from Massachusetts where he should be. You have applied a blow to his back. He has undergone the infamy of personal punishment. His submission to your blows has now qualified him for the closest companionship with a degraded class."
8:09 Holly Frey? An Alabama newspaper also celebrated the attack, saying, quote, "Sumner has been needing something of the sort since the first day he put his foot into the Senate chamber." The Richmond Whig was exuberant, quote, "A glorious deed, a most glorious deed. Mr. Brooks of South Carolina administered to Senator Sumner a notorious abolitionist from Massachusetts an effectual and classic caning. We are rejoiced. The only regret we feel is that Mr. Brooks did not employ a slave whip instead of a stick."
8:43 Tracy V. Wilson? From the northern point of view, Julia Ward Howe wrote a poem praising Sumner called "A Woman's Word for the Hour," which was published in the New York Tribune. It said in part, quote, "Never on a milder brow gleamed the crown of the martyr." The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher drew a comparison between the North and the South in response to the attack, quote, "The symbol of the North is the pen. The symbol of the South is the bludgeon."
9:10 Holly Frey? Sumner also got a lot of support from Boston's black community. Attorney Robert Morris wrote to him and said, quote, "No persons felt more keenly and sympathized with you more deeply and sincerely than your colored constituents in Boston." There was also a meeting of black abolitionists at Boston's 12th Baptist Church, who wrote in support of our senator, saying, quote, "That in this dastardly attempt to crush our free speech, we painfully recognize the abiding prevalence of that spirit of injustice, which has for two centuries upon this continent, ground our progenitors and ourselves under the iron hoof of slavery, that we hereby express to Mr. Sumner our entire confidence
9:53 Holly Frey? in him as a faithful friend of the slave."
9:56 Tracy V. Wilson? Perhaps unsurprisingly, or at least that was how I felt about it, living in the year 2025, Brooks and Kitt faced minimal consequences. The Senate investigated but found that it did not have the standing to discipline representatives from the House. The House voted on a measure to expel Brooks and Kitt from their number, and while a majority did vote in favor of that measure, it did not get the two-thirds majority that was necessary to actually expel them. There was also a recommendation to censure Henry A. Edmondson of Virginia for having prior knowledge of the attack, but he was not censured. The House did censure Kitt, and both Kitt and Brooks resigned in protest.
10:40 Tracy V. Wilson? When special elections were held to fill their seats, they were both reelected.
10:45 Holly Frey? Brooks was also charged with misdemeanor assault. He confessed, or to be more accurate, he bragged about it. He was fined $300, which his supporters raised money to pay. Brooks died the following year at the age of 37 after coming down with what people initially thought was just a cold. Kit would later be killed in action during the Civil War. Kansas was eventually admitted to the Union as a free state in 1861.
11:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Sumner's injuries included multiple severe bruises, lacerations, and a concussion. He initially appeared to be recovering pretty well, but then he developed a high fever. And when some of his sutured wounds were examined, it became clear that he had developed an infection. As his body started to heal, some of his other symptoms persisted. A lot of his regular activities, including reading and writing, made his head hurt. He just couldn't get comfortable. He couldn't keep his balance while he was walking. In today's terms, he also probably developed post-traumatic stress disorder.
11:51 Holly Frey? Three months after being attacked, Sumner had worked his way up to being able to write 10 letters a day. He had to lie down and rest between each one, and he had to travel on horseback since he could not keep his balance when he walked.
12:06 Tracy V. Wilson? There is some speculation that the pro-slavery doctor who treated him, Cornelius Boyle, didn't do an adequate job. Boyle definitely minimized the extent of Sumner's injuries when talking to investigators in the press. Southerners and slavery supporters accused Sumner of faking it.
12:26 Holly Frey? On January 7, 1857, a little more than seven months after the attack, Lydia Maria Child wrote a letter to her husband about a visit she had from Sumner. Quote, "Charles Sumner called to see me and brought me his photograph. We talked together two hours, and I never received such an impression of holiness from mortal man. Not an ungentle word did he utter concerning Brooks or any of the political enemies who have been slandering and insulting him for years. He only regretted the existence of a vicious institution which inevitably barbarized those who grew up under its influence."
13:05 Tracy V. Wilson? While this letter makes it sound like Sumner might have been doing better than he had been the year before, he still did not feel fully well. Not long after this visit with her, he left for Europe, arriving in Paris in March of 1857. He both traveled and rested, and he visited the UK, Switzerland, Germany, Holland, and Belgium. He also spent a lot of time with Alexis de Tocqueville.
13:30 Holly Frey? He returned to the US in November and briefly tried to get back to his work in the Senate. But he was still having issues. He described fatigue and what sounds a lot like brain fog, along with serious back spasms, other pain, and susceptibility to illnesses, which he had not had before being attacked. He went back to France in the spring of 1859.
13:53 Tracy V. Wilson? This time, he went to Paris, and he sought medical treatment from physician Charles Édouard Brown-Sicard, who was from Mauritius. Brown-Sicard was groundbreaking as a physician, but he also could advocate experimental treatments that did not really seem to have a foundation in medical thought as it existed at the time. He diagnosed Sumner with a contrecoo brain injury, which is an injury that develops on the opposite side from the point of the impact. His treatment involved burning the skin along Sumner's spine over the course of six weeks. This raised concern and alarm from Sumner's friends. Like, these were not minor burns. Some of them seemed very serious. And during these treatments,
14:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Sumner started experiencing angina, which he dealt with for the rest of his life.
14:43 Holly Frey? Four years passed before Sumner was well enough to fully be able to resume his work in the Senate. During that time, he was reelected. The Massachusetts Legislature saw his empty Senate Chair as a visible reminder of what had happened to him and the brutality of slavery.
15:01 Tracy V. Wilson? This whole attack on Sumner is seen as one of the things that led up to the US Civil War and kind of made it seem like tensions between the North and South could not be resolved. Civil War, of course, started after Sumner returned to the Senate, and we will get to that after a sponsor break.
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18:34 Tracy V. Wilson? Charles Sumner returned to the US Senate full time in 1859, and he continued to represent Massachusetts for well over a decade. On June 4th of 1860, he delivered his first major speech after his return to the Senate called "The Barbarism of Slavery." This was another long speech. It was about 30,000 words, and it began, quote, "When I last entered into this debate, it became my duty to expose the crime against Kansas and to insist upon the immediate admission of that territory as a state of this union with a constitution forbidding slavery." Time has passed, but the question remains. This speech made it obvious that Sumner would not back down,
19:17 Tracy V. Wilson? even after being severely beaten after his last speech. He went on to say, quote, "The slave trade is bad, but even this enormity is petty compared with that elaborate contrivance by which, in a Christian age and within the limits of a republic, all forms of constitutional liberty were perverted, by which all the rights of human nature were violated, and the whole country was held trembling on the edge of civil war, while all this large exuberance of wickedness, destabil in itself, becomes tenfold more detestable when its origin is traced to the madness for slavery." He continued, quote, "Slavery must be resisted not only on political grounds,
20:01 Tracy V. Wilson? but on all other grounds, whether social, economical, or moral. Ours is no holiday contest. It is a solemn battle between right and wrong, between good and evil. Such a battle cannot be fought with excuses or rosewater. There is austere work to be done, and freedom cannot consent to fling away any of her weapons."
20:25 Holly Frey? While this was an anti-slavery speech, it had some racist elements, like comparing enslavers to these so-called uncivilized, primitive peoples of the world, meaning various indigenous peoples. He also compared enslavers to Brigham Young's practice of polygamy in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
20:45 Tracy V. Wilson? A number of pro-slavery senators walked out of this speech. And afterwards, Sumner got death threats, and people started to worry about what would happen if Republican Abraham Lincoln became president in the upcoming 1860 election. There were a lot of worries about Lincoln becoming president from multiple directions, and it seemed likely that Sumner would wind up with a lot of power if Lincoln were president. People on both sides of the aisle thought that he might be just too radical to be entrusted with that power.
21:18 Holly Frey? But this speech was widely praised by abolitionists. Frederick Douglass printed it in his paper, along with the statement, quote, "At last, the right word has been spoken in the chamber of the American Senate. Long and sadly have we waited for an utterance like this, and we're beginning to despair of getting anything of the sort from the present generation of Republican statesmen. But Senator Sumner has exceeded our hopes and filled up the measure of all that we have long desired in the senatorial discussions of slavery."
21:50 Tracy V. Wilson? Of course, Abraham Lincoln was elected president, and soon after that, southern states started seceding from the Union. South Carolina was the first to do so on December 24th, 1860, with its Declaration of Secession citing, quote, "Unincreasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery." Other states followed, with many of them issuing similar statements citing that they were leaving the Union over the issue of slavery.
22:19 Holly Frey? Initially, Sumner thought that if only the most extreme slaveholding states seceded, it might be best for the Union to just let them. He thought those states wouldn't be strong enough to form a functioning national government, and that they'd also be vulnerable to slave uprisings. He envisioned something like the Haitian Revolution taking place in those states. Sumner's late father had been in Haiti during the revolution, and Sumner saw it as evidence that Black people could advocate for and govern themselves.
22:51 Tracy V. Wilson? Sumner's earlier advocacy had included anti-war advocacy, and one of his earliest major speeches that we talked about in Part 1 had been an anti-war speech. But as states were seceding from the Union, he started to conceive of the oncoming Civil War as a just one, and one that could put an end to slavery. And since the South saw enslaved people as property, he thought that, under the rules of war, that property could be confiscated and then freed.
23:22 Holly Frey? President Lincoln made Sumner Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. On May 13, 1861, shortly after the start of the Civil War, Queen Victoria issued a statement of neutrality, and the Confederacy started working to try to get British support for their cause. Although Britain had abolished slavery, the British economy was deeply interconnected with the Southern cotton industry. Sumner had to work to try to keep Britain from becoming involved in the war on the side of the Confederacy.
23:53 Tracy V. Wilson? He also had to try to keep Secretary of State William H. Seward from antagonizing the UK and possibly getting into a war with the United States. At one point, this required him to do something he really didn't want to do. A US Army officer captured two Confederate diplomats from a British mail ship that was headed to London. They were James Mason and John Slidell, who had both served with Sumner in the Senate. They had both been on the opposite side from Sumner. Northerners were delighted by the two men's capture, but the British thought this was a violation of international law and they demanded that the men be released.
24:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Sumner had to convince Seward and the president to release these two men, even though he would have rather them stay in custody. Because if they did not do so, they would wind up at war with Britain and possibly also with France, because France had also condemned the men's capture.
24:52 Holly Frey? When the Civil War started, Lincoln's goal was to preserve the Union. Charles Sumner played a major role in convincing him to make it about putting an end to slavery. This should not be interpreted as friendly, mutually supportive work. The two men had very fierce arguments about it.
25:11 Tracy V. Wilson? Black men at this point had been advocating for themselves to be able to enlist in the US Army, and during the war, Sumner took up that cause as well. He also argued for emancipation to be part of the Republican Party platform, and he worked on getting the United States to recognize the governments of Haiti and Liberia, and to negotiate a treaty with the United Kingdom to try to stop the transatlantic slave trade.
25:37 Holly Frey? Some of the issues Sumner became involved with during these years had to do with the citizenship rights of black men. In 1857, the US Supreme Court had issued its decision in Dred Scott versus Sanford, including that people of African descent were not and were not intended to be US citizens. That meant that they could not petition US courts and that they could not be issued US passports. Robert Morris came to Sumner on behalf of his son, who wanted to go attend a university in France, since he was excluded from most colleges in the US because of his race. Sumner took this matter up with the Secretary of State, who ultimately issued Morris's son a passport.
26:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Similarly, in February of 1865, Sumner helped a black lawyer named John Rock get admitted to the Supreme Court bar. Rock had approached Sumner to ask for his help with this. And in addition to Sumner feeling like it was just the right thing to do, he thought that if the Supreme Court admitted a black lawyer to its bar, that would help undermine that earlier decision in Dred Scott.
26:47 Holly Frey? During the Civil War, Sumner also developed a close relationship with First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. This really started after the death of Lincoln's son, 11-year-old Willie, who died on February 20, 1862. She became depressed in a way that sounds very similar to what Sumner experienced after the marriages of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Samuel Gridley Howe. Sumner had also been through a whole series of personal tragedies, including the death of his twin sister, the loss of his brother Albert, and Albert's whole family in a shipwreck, and the death of another brother, Horace, in another shipwreck. Sumner's brother George had been injured in an accident and was paralyzed, and he was slowly dying.
27:32 Holly Frey? Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's wife, Fanny, had also died, and Sumner had not only lost her as a friend, but was also watching Longfellow, who dearly loved her, grieve for her. Sumner became Mary Todd Lincoln's closest male friend as their losses seemed to bring them together. He also talked to her a lot about slavery, and she credited him with convincing her to be an abolitionist.
27:58 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1862, Sumner started trying to build an argument in the Senate that the states that had seceded from the Union no longer existed as states, but the land those states had occupied was still US territory.
28:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Territories were controlled by Congress, which had extremely broad authority to pass laws to govern them. So Sumner believed that the Constitution allowed for Congress to simply rewrite the constitutions of the seceded states so that those constitutions would outlaw slavery. I feel like this is a really good argument. The Senate, of course, did not go for this plan.
28:38 Holly Frey? However, more and more Republicans started describing themselves as radicals and pushing for legislation that would free people. This included the Second Confiscation Act, which freed enslaved persons who were able to reach territory that was held by the US Army. Congress also abolished slavery in Washington DC and in US territories with provisions to compensate enslavers for the loss of their alleged property.
29:05 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, that's another thing, yet another thing that we've talked about on the show before. And we talked about the contraband camps and other episodes. After months of negotiations and discussions, Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22nd, 1862. This was something that Sumner had been advocating for, and it gave the rebelling states 100 days to either return to the Union or have their enslaved population freed. We have an episode on this document that's from August of 2016. Of course, the rebelling states did not return to the Union, and on January 1st, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which proclaimed that all persons being held as slaves
29:49 Tracy V. Wilson? in the rebelling states were now free. This was exactly the kind of emancipating people that Sumner had been arguing for, but he also felt this did not go far enough. There were a lot of people who were still enslaved.
30:03 Holly Frey? The Civil War would go on for more than a year after this, but Sumner was already thinking about what would need to happen during Reconstruction. He argued that by seceding from the Union, the Southern states had lost the protections that are given to the states under the Constitution, and that to return to the Union, they would have to form a republican government that would give equal franchise to black men. He also started proposing bills that would redistribute land to freed people, understanding that freed people would need some way to support themselves.
30:37 Tracy V. Wilson? The United States won the Civil War, which ended in the spring of 1865. We will talk about Sumner's work during Reconstruction after another sponsor break.
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31:22 Speaker 08 Livright, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, "The Gales of November", a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. "The Gales of November", now in paperback.
31:51 Holly Frey? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends. Not to cancel them, not to hype them more,
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33:59 Tracy V. Wilson? After the Civil War, Charles Sumner was a huge advocate for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. Among other things, he worked with the Women's National Loyal League founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. He submitted the League's petition on the subject nicknamed "The Mammoth Petition" to Congress. It had about 100,000 signatures, two-thirds of them women and one-third of them men. This amendment would ultimately become the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. Sumner argued for it to include equality under the law and not to include involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime, neither of which happened.
34:43 Tracy V. Wilson? While he supported the amendment, he wasn't a huge part of getting it drafted, passed, and ratified. As should be obvious by now, Sumner often just was not a very diplomatic person, and even people who agreed with him could find him relentless and almost zealous and hard to work with. And even though he worked with Stanton and Anthony on "The Mammoth Petition," he was never a public advocate for women's rights.
35:08 Tracy V. Wilson? Sumner was made Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Slavery and Freedom, and he introduced bills to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, to give black people the right to testify in federal court, to hire black postal workers, to desegregate streetcars, and to get equal pay for black soldiers. He also introduced a bill to try to create an independent federal agency specifically to assist the freed people. This was a proposal that was controversial, including among some Republicans, because some legislators did not think white people should be excluded from getting that kind of aid. While Sumner's bill on this did not pass, a different bill establishing the Freedmen's Bureau did later on.
35:54 Holly Frey? As all of this was happening, the federal government was trying to figure out how the states that had rebelled could be readmitted to the Union. A proposal to readmit Louisiana allowed it to have a constitution that did not give black men the right to vote. Sumner saw voting rights as critically necessary to achieving racial equality, and he was afraid of the precedent it would set if Louisiana were readmitted under these terms. He said he would, quote, "employ every parliamentary device which is allowable to stop Louisiana from being admitted." And then he did, introducing all kinds of amendments to the bill, filibustering, and just on and on. He did this knowing that he was running
36:35 Holly Frey? the risk of destroying his relationship to the president, since the readmission of states was part of Lincoln's Reconstruction Plan.
36:43 Tracy V. Wilson? Sumner and Lincoln were still on reasonably good terms, though, when Lincoln was inaugurated for a second term on March 4, 1865, and Sumner escorted the First Lady to the inaugural ball. But a little more than a month later, Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. Sumner rushed to Lincoln's side when he heard that the president had been shot, reportedly sitting by Lincoln's bedside for hours as he died, weeping and holding his hand.
37:13 Holly Frey? Sumner helped plan Lincoln's funeral and he had meetings with his successor, Andrew Johnson, to discuss Reconstruction plans. Sumner was optimistic after these initial meetings because Johnson gave him the impression that he was in favor of black suffrage. But of course, this was not at all the case. When Sumner saw Johnson's actual Reconstruction proposals, which included things like a blanket amnesty for most Confederate soldiers and the readmission of states without black suffrage, he described them as madness.
37:45 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1866, Congress was working on what would become the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which finally incorporated the idea of equal protection under the law, something that Sumner had been talking about, going all the way back to Roberts versus the City of Boston. This amendment also included language about how representatives were apportioned among the states based on their population. The Constitution originally counted three-fifths of the number of enslaved people in each state, known of course as the three-fifths compromise. The 14th Amendment instead counted the whole number of persons in each state, quote, "excluding Indians not taxed."
38:30 Tracy V. Wilson? But if a state denied any male inhabitant under the age of 21 the right to vote, under the 14th Amendment, unless that person had participated in a rebellion or other crime, that state's representation would be reduced in proportion to the number of men who were excluded. In other words, under the 14th Amendment, states could exclude black men from the vote if they were willing to also exclude their black population from that apportionment equation.
39:01 Holly Frey? Sumner was opposed to this language. He gave a speech on the subject called "The Equal Rights of All" on February 5th and 6th, 1866, in which he said the time had come in which, quote, "all compromise of human rights should cease." He also laid out an argument based on Article 4, Section 4 of the Constitution, known as the Republican Guarantee Clause, which says in part, quote, "The United States shall guarantee to every state in this Union a republican form of government." In Sumner's opinion, any state that did not give black men the right to vote did not have a republican form of government. So the Constitution empowered the federal government to force the issue.
39:44 Holly Frey? As happened with so many of Sumner's Senate speeches, he was applauded from the gallery, but he didn't get much of a response from the other senators.
39:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Sumner's mother died in June of 1866. And by September of that year, he was engaged to a young woman named Alice Hooper. She was 26 and he was 55 and they got married on October 17th. They were not well matched at all. Among other things, she wanted an active social life and he wanted to stay at home. She started a very flirty friendship with a diplomat who was closer to her age and her temperament. And even though this seems to have been platonic, there were rumors that it was not. She and Sumner quickly separated and eventually divorced, and she spread rumors that Sumner was impotent.
40:35 Tracy V. Wilson? We already talked about Sumner being mocked and facing suspicion for being a bachelor. Now he faced the same for his failed relationship and the rumors about both him and his ex-wife.
40:48 Holly Frey? Sumner continued to introduce ambitious bills and amendments in the Senate. He tried to expand the Homestead Act to explicitly apply to the land claims of freed people. The Homestead Act didn't technically mention race, but most of the people who were able to claim land through it were white. He also tried to introduce an amendment to establish free, integrated public schools across the country. These efforts failed.
41:14 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1867, the Reconstruction Act finally set the requirements for states to be readmitted into the Union. States had to draft new constitutions, which had to be approved by a majority of the voters, which included black men, and they had to ratify the 14th Amendment. Johnson vetoed this bill, but Congress overrode his veto.
41:38 Holly Frey? Also, in 1867, Sumner helped ratify the treaty that had been secretly drafted for the United States to purchase Alaska from the Russian Empire. Finding that there wasn't a lot of widely available information about the area, Sumner also drafted a whole treatise on it based on everything he could find at the Library of Congress. Sumner's writing about Alaska simultaneously acknowledged the harm that the indigenous population had faced while living under the Russian Empire, while also implying that the best course of action for the United States would be to establish mission schools to civilize them. Somewhat similarly to how Sumner never really advocated for women's rights, his comments on the rights of indigenous peoples
42:23 Holly Frey? were largely limited to condemning specific massacres or acts of violence.
42:29 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1868, President Johnson unilaterally fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, which violated the Tenure of Office Act of 1867. So Johnson was impeached, and Sumner was strongly in favor of that impeachment. Beyond just the violation of the Tenure of Office Act, Sumner thought the impeachment might pave the way for a president who was actually committed to equal rights for black people. This was the first presidential impeachment in US history, and Johnson was acquitted.
43:02 Holly Frey? Just before the end of Johnson's term, Congress passed the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing black men the right to vote. While this sounds like exactly the sort of thing Sumner would have supported, he abstained from voting on it. He didn't think the amendment was doing anything more than an ordinary law would do, and it didn't prohibit tactics that could be used to keep black men from voting, like expensive poll taxes and unfair literacy tests.
43:31 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, he had a lot of foresight on this issue. Ulysses S. Grant had been elected as the next president, and after his inauguration that March, he and Sumner frequently butted heads. In the words of Secretary of State Hamilton Fish in 1871, quote, "No wild bull ever dashed more violently at a red flag than he goes at anything he thinks the president is interested in."
43:58 Holly Frey? One big issue was Grant's proposed annexation of the Dominican Republic, then known as Santo Domingo, which Grant worked on secretly. Getting into all the details of this would have turned this into a four-part podcast, but the short version is that Sumner was strongly opposed. In addition to the fact that it had intentionally been kept secret from him, even though he was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sumner thought Dominican President Buena Ventura Baez was a corrupt dictator who was being enabled by the United States. He was also furious that the US had dispatched warships to Haiti to deter Haitian retaliation against the plan. This conflict ultimately led Sumner to being removed
44:43 Holly Frey? as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
44:46 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1870, Sumner started working with Black attorney John Mercer Langston to draft a civil rights bill, which included the right to access public accommodations, including theaters, regardless of a person's race, as well as the integration of schools and hospitals. Republicans had a majority in Congress, and Sumner thought this bill would easily pass. But a lot of these ideas and the intensity of Sumner's devotion to them were considered so radical that he started losing the support of his party. He would reintroduce this civil rights bill every congressional session for the rest of his life.
45:27 Holly Frey? In 1872, Congress started working on the Amnesty Act, which removed restrictions that prohibited most former Confederates from holding state or federal office. Sumner tried to append his civil rights bill to it. This is a move that biographer Zacher Tames describes in his 2025 book, Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation, as, quote, "extraordinary in its prescience and moral clarity." It forced Congress to have a debate on the issue of civil rights for Black people. Because the Amnesty Act was written to override a portion of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, it had to have a two-thirds majority to pass. It didn't get that majority with Sumner's civil rights bill attached,
46:11 Holly Frey? but a standalone version of just the amnesty bill was passed later.
46:17 Tracy V. Wilson? By this point, Sumner was frequently ill. He had started to wonder if it was time to retire. He made another trip to France for more treatment by Charles Edward Brown Secard. After returning to the Senate, Sumner proposed a constitutional amendment that would limit the presidency to a single term and one that would have elected the president through a popular vote. If no candidate won a majority of votes in this popular vote he proposed, a runoff would be held. Obviously, neither of those constitutional amendments passed.
46:50 Holly Frey? In December of 1872, Sumner was censured after he proposed a bill that would prohibit regimental flags from celebrating Union victories in the Civil War. His belief was that victories over fellow citizens should not be celebrated, even in the context of a civil war. But people interpreted the whole thing as anti-veteran. After ongoing petitions for his censure to be rescinded, it finally was in January of 1874.
47:21 Tracy V. Wilson? A few months later, on March 11th, 1874, Charles Sumner died at the age of 63 after a heart attack. As he was dying, Sumner repeatedly talked about his civil rights bill, saying over and over that it should not be allowed to fail.
47:39 Holly Frey? A congressional delegation escorted his body to the Capitol, flanked by 300 black men, including Frederick Douglass. After his body lay in state in the rotunda, it was transported to Boston by rail, where he lay in state in the State House. His funeral was held at King's Chapel, and afterward, tens of thousands of people, including thousands of black Massachusetts residents and a uniformed black honor guard, were part of the five-mile procession to Mount Auburn Cemetery where he was buried. There were flowers everywhere at his services, including a shield made of white carnations and blue violets. The violets spelling out the words, "Do not let the Civil Rights Bill fail."
48:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Henry Ward Beecher said of Sumner, quote, "He was a man of courage and of fidelity to his convictions. He never meanly calculated. He never asked the question whether it was dangerous to speak. He was one of those heroic spirits that carried the fight further than it needed to be carried. He erred by an excess of bravery. He was a self-sacrificing man, giving up every prospect of life for the sake of doing his duty and establishing rectitude."
48:51 Holly Frey? The executor of Sumner's estate was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who tried to gather and preserve his correspondence. Samuel Gridley Howe sent only the letters he thought were appropriate.
49:04 Tracy V. Wilson? In the wake of Sumner's death, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which was not nearly as broad as what Sumner had been striving for. It did say that, quote, "All persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement, subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude." This act was not widely enforced, and the Supreme Court struck it down
49:47 Tracy V. Wilson? as unconstitutional in 1883. A lot of Sumner's proposed provisions, though, did become law under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, almost 100 years later.
50:02 Tracy V. Wilson? That is our three parts on Charles Sumner.
50:05 Holly Frey? Do you have a single part listener mail?
50:07 Tracy V. Wilson? I do. It is from Krista. Krista wrote, "Hi, Holly and Tracy. I learned a few years ago that the most common animal that causes deaths is mosquitoes, so I join Tracy in disliking mosquitoes for that alone. I know they're good for the ecosystem, but it's a shame they spread so many diseases. I also hate ticks. Ticks do not occur where I lived when I was a kid, which was in Ontario. The idea of ticks is so vile, and now my area of the world is a hotspot of Lyme disease. Something like half of ticks test positive for Lyme where I am. Some test positive for anaplasmosis and babesiosis. Very rude. So I appreciated Tracy saying she is on the
50:49 Tracy V. Wilson? same page as me. I would also get a Lyme vaccine with 75% reduction. Yay, science.
50:56 Tracy V. Wilson? I'm looking forward to spooky season podcasts, and I'm looking forward to December holiday slash Christmasy podcasts. I love baking podcasts and the eponymous foods, sowing history, anything and everything science-related, and as many whimsical themes as you can come up with. And I miss Krampus and Friends. But of course, the reason you don't do them every year is because how many can possibly be left? So I was trying to find new friends and research to help. I don't think I found enough for one episode, but I found a few things, so I'm passing them along in case others help you out. And between all this, you can cobble together an episode. La Bifana is still my favorite, but I've enjoyed them all." And then there is just a list of possible ideas for maybe future Krampus and Friends.
51:39 Tracy V. Wilson? So I'll be making sure that Holly has this, since Krampus and Friends has been Holly's holiday winter season tradition.
51:49 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, I just was, I also just wanted to say yes. Ticks, mosquitoes, still not a fan.
51:57 Tracy V. Wilson? So thank you so much for this email, Krista, and these ideas. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcasts, we're at [email protected] . And you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to get your podcasts.
52:19 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
52:33 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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