BY THIS TIME, Sumner was at the height of his power in Washington. First seen by even his friends and mentors as a foolish youth wasting his brilliance on a hopeless cause, for more than a decade he had been one of the lone voices in Washington agitating for a unified antislavery North to fight the slave oligarchy of the South. Now he emerged a battle-scarred political veteran, proven to have been right all along. In retrospect, the blows that had struck his head were the first blows of the Civil War.
