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Lectures and conversations with historians, authors, and thinkers.
Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation
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.
Zaakir Tameez is a scholar of antitrust and constitutional law. A graduate of Yale Law School and the University of Virginia, he has published award-winning scholarship and coauthored amicus briefs before the Texas and United States Supreme Courts. He is a Fulbright Scholar and Humanity in Action Senior Fellow from Houston, Texas.
Produced in partnership with The New York Historical.
