Charles Sumner
Massachusetts abolitionist senator whose caning on the Senate floor shocked the nation in 1856.
Overview
After one of the sharpest antislavery speeches of the decade, his Crime against Kansas address attacking slavery and its defenders, South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks beat Sumner senseless at his desk in May 1856. The attack, and Sumner's three-year absence, radicalized northern opinion. Sumner returned to press emancipation during the war, helped found the Freedmen's Bureau, led the fight for the Civil Rights Bill of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment, and sponsored the Civil Rights Act of 1875. He chaired Foreign Relations for a decade until his death in 1874.
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