Kindle Notes & Highlights
He possessed a towering presence and intellectual prowess, even as he dealt with childhood poverty, suicidal thoughts, depression, and heartbreak.
Sumner was the most famous civil rights leader of the nineteenth century, much like Martin Luther King Jr. in the twentieth century.
In this forgotten case, Roberts v. City of Boston, Sumner coined a phrase that had never before been heard in American jurisprudence: “equality before the law.”
While in Washington, he missed the kinship of a male friend back home in Boston. He was likely a gay man who didn’t understand his sexuality.
The caning shattered the false image that many white northerners had of southern enslavers as gentlemen who treated their slaves kindly.
Across the South, enslavers had already banned abolitionist speech and criminalized dissent against their rule. Just as Sumner had warned, slavery seemed to be a threat to the republic: so long as there was slavery, there was no freedom, not even for whites.
“The man speaks like a prophet,” Tocqueville recalled with amazement. “He says that slavery will soon entirely disappear in the United States. He does not know how, he does not know when, but he feels it, he is perfectly sure of it.”7
When Lincoln was shot, he held Sumner’s hand as he died.8
Sumner was the first major political leader to realize that the Civil War could lead to abolition and equal rights.
He often debated with Sumner about the prospect of redistributing land to freedpeople and granting them the right to vote after the war.
Sumner grew up in a Black neighborhood in Boston, an astonishing and critical fact overlooked by almost every past biography of Sumner’s life.
He longed to die for the abolitionist cause, rather than live in what he called the “dreary world.”
In the 1872 election, Sumner shocked the nation by endorsing the candidate Horace Greeley, a known racist, to punish President Grant for failing to support the civil rights bill. He asked the Black community to adopt the same strategy of bullish realpolitik.
While Grant’s actions were more complicated than Sumner construed them, his dogged advocacy for Caribbean independence made him a role model for future anti-imperialist activists.
Sumner had blind spots. After helping to ratify a treaty to buy a Russian territory in 1867, Sumner popularized the term “Alaska” and wrote a book about the region. His book failed to acknowledge the ongoing slaughter of Native people that was taking place in Alaska and across the American West.
Also, in 1864, Sumner collaborated with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in a petition movement for abolishing slavery. But he ignored these women’s suffrage activists afterward.
“I wish I could do more,” Sumner confessed to a group of Black activists. “I wish I was stronger. I wish I had more influence.”
According to an entry in an 1886 encyclopedia, “no American, unless Washington and Lincoln, ever received such respect as was paid Mr. Sumner’s memory.”
In his famous 1935 book Black Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois decried that Sumner’s “magnificent figure” has “been besmirched almost beyond recognition.”
Expertly written and researched, Donald’s biography of Sumner was an impressive scholarly work that historians should still read. But it was also a character assassination of a monumental figure in the history of civil rights.
Sumner often noted that proslavery senator John Pettit once ridiculed the Declaration’s promise of equality as “a self-evident lie.”
After the Civil War, “human rights” was Sumner’s watchword whenever he discussed the Declaration or the Constitution. The term “human rights” captured Sumner’s sweeping vision of equality,
In the NAACP’s brief, Marshall cited Sumner more than forty times by name.
Job Sumner played an important role in the American Revolution, serving alongside the revolutionary heroes who would come to shape his grandson’s views on freedom and equality.
After the Battle of Lexington, Massachusetts militiamen converged upon Cambridge with hopes to lay siege to Boston, which was held by the British. Needing somewhere to sleep, they demanded that Harvard College dismiss its students and hand over its dormitories to the revolutionaries. By May, Harvard obliged the rebels, sending its students into the countryside to continue their studies, while the militias formed an encampment on the college campus.5 For adventure, for glory, for freedom, Job Sumner told Harvard he wouldn’t keep studying amid a great revolution, and he enlisted in what became
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As each officer came forward, Washington embraced them one at a time, kissed them on the cheek, and bade them a tearful farewell. After getting his kiss, Job led his infantry in escorting General Washington to his barge. He saluted Washington as the general waved his hat to say goodbye.
Once a freedom fighter, now he owned at least one slave, bought a horse, lived on an estate, and hobnobbed with the state’s wealthy enslavers.
While on board, he ate the meat of a dolphin caught in the Outer Banks, which gave him food poisoning.
unbeknownst to the press and to the public and to the planters with whom he was so popular in New York and Georgia, Job Sumner wasn’t just a soldier, citizen, and friend. He was a father. A blemished father.
Job Senior didn’t want this bastard son carrying his first name, so he renamed him Charles Pinckney, after the prominent South Carolina enslaver and Founding Father who had helped draft the U.S. Constitution. To Job Senior, being named after this rich southern planter (who believed God had “probably intended” to make Africans serve “the whites”) was a high honor.11
he devoted only two lines to his grandfather, whom he never talked about. “My father’s father, Major Job Sumner, [was] of the army of the Revolution,” he wrote. “It seems to me better to leave it all unsaid.”
Eliphalet Pearson.
To most white Americans, the Haitian Revolution was an appalling, grotesque outpouring of violence that scared them out of their wits. Few white Americans connected the dots between their revolution against the British and the Haitians’ quest for freedom from European empires. But Pinckney Sumner recognized that these two revolutions had much in common.
“The day the negroes in british West Indies are all free,” Pinckney Sumner wrote in his diary, “[they] stand a good chance for social equality & happiness.”17
Despite his credentials as a graduate of Phillips Academy and Harvard, Pinckney Sumner lacked an interest in the daily routine of law
Pinckney Sumner grew both proud and resentful as he watched his younger friend Joseph Story also pursue law and become a wild success.
Relief Jacobs—the
But in 1799, at the age of fourteen, she lost her father, mother, and younger sister to a typhus-like disease. Afterward, she and her older sister, Hannah, moved to Boston to fend for themselves.
According to one contemporary, the family was “a mixture of the Hebrew and the Puritan,” who “belonged in fact to a Christianized Jewish family.”
After deciding to marry Relief, Pinckney Sumner picked out a home across the street from the boardinghouse. This modest wood-frame house was in the heart of Black Boston.
Pinckney Sumner chose instead to live deep within this Black neighborhood—on South Russell Street, only a block away from the African Meeting House. Other whites had qualms about living here; he apparently did not.
Preferring to call his neighbors “people of color” rather than “negroes,” he was known to tip his hat whenever he passed a Black person.
From an early age, Charles was bullied.
On one occasion, a group of boys tried to grab a stick he was holding. They kept pulling on the stick while Charles tightened his fists around it, refusing to let go. One boy then picked up a rock. Bashing the rock against Charles’s clenched fists, the boy pounded and pounded. But Charles wouldn’t give in. Alarmed by Charles’s sheer sense of will, the bully fled the scene.
Blood had spattered all over Charles’s white knuckles. But he didn’t care:...
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Pinckney Sumner resented the system of private schools and the Latin School. A graduate of Phillips Academy, he saw firsthand how elite schools created class divisions in the young republic, undermining the egalitarian values of the American Revolution. He also remembered being kicked out of Phillips briefly because his father had missed tuition payments.
BY THE TIME Charles started at the Latin School in the fall of 1821, he was going by his last name “Sumner” rather than “Charles.” He preferred being called “Sumner” for the rest of his life. But the rich boys at the Latin School had a better idea. They called him “Gawky Sumner.”
One classmate, Wendell Phillips, refused even to speak to Sumner because he came from the Black side of Beacon Hill.
Unlike Wendell Phillips, Sumner was no Brahmin. At the Latin School, where so many Brahmins attended, he was like Holmes’s “country-boy”: a skinny kid who got bullied for coming from the Black part of town.
By the time of his graduation at the age of fifteen, Sumner was regarded by his teachers as one of their smartest students. “I used to look at him with wonder as I heard him talk on subjects I knew nothing of,” a classmate recalled with astonishment. Although Sumner did not receive particularly high grades—probably because he was focused on reading what he wanted to read, rather than his assignments—he was honored along with a classmate to deliver the closing speech at commencement to several notable guests, which included President John Quincy Adams.
