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September 28 - October 6, 2025
He was displeased when, in May 1864, a convention of Republican dissidents nominated John C. Frémont for president on a more radical antislavery and equal rights platform. It was a candidacy Sumner normally would have supported philosophically, but other considerations took precedent. First, he was loyal to Lincoln and generally satisfied with the job the President was doing. Plus, he believed a divided Republican ticket would potentially elect a Democrat in November,
Raymond urged Lincoln to send a delegation to meet with CSA President Jefferson Davis to offer peace terms “on the sole condition of acknowledging the supremacy of the Constitution”—leaving the issue of slavery to be resolved at a later date. Raymond’s prediction: Davis would turn it down and insist on Confederate independence, and the country and the world would see that Davis, not Lincoln, was the true implacable obstructionist. For a brief moment, Lincoln went along with Raymond’s idea,
As it was, the extreme position of Democrats handed Lincoln new political life. The party platform, along with the defiant nomination of the anti-war Pendleton, pushed thousands of moderates and conservatives who once considered abandoning Lincoln firmly back into his corner.
If the tide turned in Lincoln’s favor after the Democratic Convention adjourned on August 31, support for the President became a tidal wave when news broke from Atlanta a mere two days later.
By sheer weight of numbers and strength of conviction, federal troops had turned the tide against a courageous and stubborn rebel force whose battlefield commanders were, in the main, more competent and whose will, even amid its last gasps, appeared unbreakable.
Neither the horror nor the pain of war was lost on Sumner, a pacifist by nature.
Sumner and Lincoln agreed on many things regarding reconstruction: both agreed that there could be no peace or readmittance without the end of slavery; both agreed that former slaves—freedmen—and white Southern Unionists needed guarantees of safety before a state could seek readmission; and both agreed that before a state returned to the Union, it must provide its citizens with the constitutional guarantee of a “republican form of government” through free elections and protection from domestic violence. But their differences were real and sharp.
Sumner disagreed—he was firmly committed to almost total congressional jurisdiction over the reorganization of the South. As even Lincoln acknowledged, if Congress alone could admit new states to the Union, then it stood to reason that only Congress had authority to readmit them.
Finally, Lincoln and Sumner differed on the other major component of a republican form of government—universal suffrage. In early 1865, President Lincoln’s stance on voting rights for former slaves was not entirely clear. He favored a slow approach,
Without universal suffrage, Congress would be, de facto, sanctioning a return to power of the previous white slaveholding class.
Sumner was convinced that slaveholders would “never again be loyal to the Union” but would remain “a disaffected element, always ready to intrigue with a foreign enemy.” He was unwilling ever to trust them again. “The only Unionists of the South are black,” he declared, making it essential “to extend the suffrage to the Negroes.”
Within the halls of Congress and in D.C. smoking rooms, the feeling was widespread that Lincoln would soon reorganize his cabinet—Sumner’s deep alignment with the President made him the odds-on favorite to replace Seward as secretary of state.
A battalion of colored troops formed part of the military escort that accompanied President Lincoln along Pennsylvania Avenue, and members of a black Odd Fellows lodge were also part of the procession.
The poet Walt Whitman attended the inaugural and watched as Lincoln passed by, close enough for Whitman to observe that the President looked “very much worn and tired; the lines, indeed, of vast responsibilities, intricate questions, and demands of life and death, cut deeper than ever upon his dark brown face.”
Two audience members were far less impressed with Lincoln’s inaugural address. One was Charles Sumner. He found Lincoln’s final paragraph far too conciliatory to the South, especially on the heels of the President’s Louisiana doctrine.
The President was first recognized by dozens of black workmen, who pushed to the edge of the dock and repeatedly called out: “God Bless our liberator.”
Lincoln calmed the situation. “My poor friends,” he said. “You are free—free as air. You can cast off the name of slave and trample upon it; it will come to you no more. Liberty is your birthright!”
Lincoln was puzzled as to why people believed Seward had been the primary influence in his administration. “I have counselled with you twice as much as I ever did with him,” Lincoln said to Sumner.
However, for the first time, he publicly reiterated what he had said to his closest confidants—that he could support suffrage for blacks who were “very intelligent, and [for] those who serve our cause as soldiers.” With those words, he became the first American President to publicly announce his willingness to confer voting rights, albeit selectively, upon black men.
Lincoln’s speech fell short in Charles Sumner’s eyes, it went unacceptably too far for twenty-six-year-old John Wilkes Booth, who was again in the audience.
Sumner would never see her again—although both the secretary of state and his son ultimately recovered from their attacks, Frances Seward did not. Distraught and disoriented after the violent intrusion into her home, she died within a few weeks.
afterward they talked with somber reverence of General Ulysses S. Grant, sitting alone at the head of the catafalque in full uniform, “the hero on a pedestal, his face glistening with tears.”
Sumner accepted and convinced municipal authorities to choose Reverend Leonard Grimes, “the colored preacher” of the Twelfth Baptist Church—an abolitionist and a conductor on the Underground Railroad—to deliver the benediction at the funeral.
“Liberty has been won,” Sumner proclaimed to his audience at the Boston Music Hall. “The battle for Equality is still pending.”
Johnson refused to call Congress into special session; by mid-September, the President had granted 13,500 pardons to rebel leaders and functionaries.
Rabid abolitionist congressman Thaddeus Stevens—Sumner’s counterpart in the House—asked Sumner whether there was a way “to arrest the insane course of the President.” He worried that without intervention, Johnson would “be crowned king” before Congress met.
For the majority of the country, the faster reunification occurred the better, and it appeared Johnson was moving swiftly to accomplish this goal.
he quickly grew smitten with the strikingly beautiful, graceful, and intelligent Alice,
One of Sumner’s favorite evenings was a dinner with Stanton and British novelist Charles Dickens, who was in the United States promoting A Christmas Carol.
For Sumner, impeachment was “a political proceeding before a political body with political purposes,” aimed at “expulsion from office,” not a criminal trial whose prosecutorial goal was conviction and imprisonment.
The Third Reconstruction Act had required that a majority of registered voters approve ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. Southern whites responded by registering in large numbers and then refusing to vote, making it nearly impossible to ratify. Frustrated with such obstructionism, Congress closed the loophole and passed the Fourth Reconstruction Act, which became law automatically on March 11, 1868, after President Johnson refused to sign it. It stipulated that a majority of voters casting ballots, rather than a majority of registered voters, would determine the outcome of the
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He demanded that the amendment contain language mandating fines against anyone hindering any citizen from voting—by imposing poll taxes, for example—and granting citizens of all races the right to sue for damages if their rights were threatened or deprived in any way. He and other Radical Republicans wanted the amendment to make voting requirements “uniform throughout the land,”
However, the issue of granting suffrage to ethnically Chinese citizens led California to reject the amendment, and, for the same reason, the Oregon legislature did not even consider it.
Democrats immediately challenged Revels’s right to sit in the Senate, which set off a full-fledged and fascinating debate on many of the issues the nation had grappled with in the past two decades: slavery, the Dred Scott decision, secession, the Civil War, Reconstruction, constitutional law, and the legal and citizenship status of African Americans.
Vice President of the United States Henry Wilson stood beside an open grave in the dusky shadow of a large oak tree in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Next to him, heads bowed in prayer, stood Boston luminaries Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Greenleaf Whittier, all longtime friends of the deceased.
Sumner’s last phrases were, “Tell Emerson I love and revere him,” and “Don’t let the civil rights bill fail.”
Eighteen years after he was caned on the floor of the Senate by South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks, Sumner was honored by the reconstructed government of South Carolina, which lowered the state flag in Columbia to half-staff upon his death.
If Sumner could speak from the dead to both sides, Lamar declared, he would say: “My countrymen! Know one another and you will love one another.” When Lamar finished, the House sat for a moment in shocked silence, and then a loud and spontaneous burst of sustained applause rolled across the floor.
