Kindle Notes & Highlights
At least one historian has suggested that Sumner was possibly on the autism spectrum, noting that his “ability to hyperfocus on a specific topic,” among other personality traits, was a classic sign of what some psychologists have categorized as Asperger syndrome. While any attempt to diagnose Sumner retroactively is foolhardy, it is difficult to think that such a diagnosis would be completely unmerited given some of his childhood behaviors. For example, at the age of fourteen, Sumner made an eighty-six-page chronological list of major events in English history—not for school, but for fun.
Afterward, Sumner rushed home and eagerly told his father that Webster had quoted the Agricola by Tacitus. His father went straight to the bookcase, took down the Agricola, and turned to chapter forty-five. He asked Sumner to repeat what he remembered Webster saying. When Sumner recited the sentence exactly right, his father was amazed; Charles had remembered it verbatim. “Then I felt proud,” Charles Sumner recalled. “For I understood the sentence; and I felt that I too belonged to the brotherhood of scholars.”
He also felt that his son was spending far too much time indoors, hunched over texts. “He had no interest in games and athletic sports; never, so far as I know, fished or shot or rowed,” one friend recalled.
Confessing that his son was qualified to attend Harvard, Pinckney Sumner explained that “the life of a scholar would be too sedentary and inactive for him”
Fortunately for Charles Sumner, who almost certainly hated the idea, neither academy accepted him as an admit.
He was fifteen years old, a typical age for a Harvard freshman at the time. There, unlike at the Latin School, Sumner found his place among the thirty-five classmates and fit in well.
Sumner was no longer called “Gawky Sumner.” Now his classmates nicknamed him “the Chatterbox” because he would ramble endlessly to them about all the things he was reading.
Even as he excelled in literature and debate, Sumner struggled in mathematics.
Sumner most likely had a photographic memory.
As Sumner grew acclimated to Harvard, he also grew restless. He was exasperated by the strict schedule Harvard imposed on its students. One of his classmates explained the daily routine in a letter to his parents: “Prayers in the morning about seven o’clock. Breakfast at ½ past eight. Dinner at one. Evening prayers at ½ past four. Tea immediately after. Study bell in the morning at nine o’clock, in the afternoon at two, and in the evening at eight o’clock. All of course attend chapel (on Sundays) except such as are (or feign to be) sick.”
When he grew older, he held the same view. “I am not aware that any one single thing is well taught to the Undergraduates of Harvard College,” he later wrote. “Certainly I left it without knowing anything.”
took place when Prince Abdul Rahman Ibrahima ibn Sori joined the Haitian independence parade. Born to rule a Muslim kingdom among the Fulani people in West Africa, Prince Abdul Rahman had been kidnapped in the late 1780s, forced into slavery, and shipped to the United States. After roughly thirty years of lobbying for himself, he had persuaded Secretary of State Henry Clay to arrange his return trip home with the Moroccan embassy.
To white readers, Walker spared no words. “The whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and blood-thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority,” he declared. He pointed out the hypocrisy of American revolutionaries—men like Job Sumner—for claiming to fight for freedom during the war and then enslaving other human beings afterward.
Believing his own elite education had been mostly worthless, Pinckney Sumner tried to impart to his children moral teachings, rather than academic ones. “Let others to teach their children to abhor naughty words,” he wrote in his diary. “I will try to teach mine to abhor naughty deeds.” He insisted that his children treat everyone, white or Black, with kindness, respect, and justice.
Probably with dread in his eyes, hoping his prescient words wouldn’t turn out to be true, he correctly predicted the future. “Our children’s heads,” he remarked, “will some day be broken on a cannon-ball on this question.”
This was an unconventional choice, given that Harvard Law School, founded in 1817, had hardly any students by the late 1820s. In fact, in the early nineteenth century, professional legal education barely existed. The conventional way to become a lawyer was to be an apprentice who learned on the job.
Sumner had insider knowledge that Harvard Law School would be different, for his father’s college best friend, Joseph Story, had become the school’s lead professor—in part due to Sumner’s father’s advice.
In 1811, Story was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States—the very year that Pinckney Sumner was poor and living in a small wood-frame house raising two tiny twins. Four years later, in 1815, Pinckney Sumner waited outside a courthouse in Boston to try to catch up with Story, with whom he had been gradually falling out of touch. But Judge Story (who preferred to be called “Judge” rather than “Justice”) was so engrossed in a conversation with a few lawyers that he didn’t notice Pinckney Sumner standing nearby waiting to talk to him.
Apologizing for his “cowardly bashfulness,” he then made Judge Story a proposal: come back to Boston to teach law.
Judge Story had a transformative vision for Harvard Law, seeing the program as a lever to impact American politics, legal studies, and society at large. After joining the Supreme Court, Story had been quickly persuaded by his Federalist friend and mentor Chief Justice John Marshall that the U.S. Constitution had established a strong national government and a strong judicial branch.
The basic premise, as Story explained it in one opinion, is that the Constitution “was ordained and established, not by the United States in their sovereign capacities, but emphatically, as the preamble of the Constitution declares, by ‘the people of the United States.’” Marshall and Story hoped to protect this vision of a strong national government during the Jacksonian era,
Story would continue serving on the Supreme Court and would author a prodigious number of legal treatises, many of which are still studied today. “He was in himself a whole triumvirate,” Charles Sumner later recalled, explaining that Story treated his students “as if they were all members of one family with him.” This fatherly professor, like many parents who would never admit it, had a favorite child.
Story and his colleagues invented the system of cold calling, and Sumner was among the first students to benefit from it.
By the end of his time at Harvard Law, he was “universally acknowledged to be the best scholar in the school,” according to the diary of another student, “& was by many said to be the most learned in legal literature of any man that ever left the school.”
Sumner scoffed at those who knew less than he. He saw them as lazy.
Story wrote to Sumner to ask him to review a draft of his new treatise, The Conflict of Laws, and to verify all quotes and citations for him. Over time, Judge Story began to treat Sumner as far more than just his student. “I feel proud to think that … I have, in some sort, as the Scotch would say, a heritable right to your friendship,” the judge wrote to his disciple.
One classmate described Sumner in law school as a “tall, thin, bent, ungainly law-student; his eyes were inflamed by late reading, and his complexion showed that he was careless of exercise.”
When Sumner approached graduation, Story encouraged him to stay at Harvard. His colleague, Professor Simon Greenleaf, agreed. They offered Sumner the honor of serving as the law school’s first librarian.
Sheriff Sumner had a keen sense of right and wrong—which he applied with absolute, unbending justice to himself and others. For example, he conducted his own executions. When asked why he didn’t delegate such a disagreeable task, he replied, “Simply because it is disagreeable.”
But Pinckney Sumner also believed firmly in the biblical teaching of human equality. He usually attended King’s Chapel, a magnificent Unitarian church near the old Massachusetts State House.
Noting that he would be “entirely willing to sit on the bench with a negro judge,” Sheriff Sumner did his best to ensure fair trials for Black prisoners and to reduce his complicity in the system of racial injustice. Once, during his tenure, two Black women were put on trial for allegedly being fugitives from slavery. Some free Black citizens stormed the courtroom and prematurely helped the women escape before the conclusion of their trial. When Sheriff Sumner was accused of tacitly allowing the women to take flight, he did not deny the charge. “I should be ashamed of myself if I did not wish
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Sheriff Sumner’s relationship with his eldest son was rocky at best. While he was principled and polite, the sheriff was quiet, melancholy, and rarely known to smile. He was a stern, harsh father who expected far more from his children than he had achieved in his own life. Accordingly, Charles kept his distance from him and preferred not to live at home. He also assiduously avoided discussing his father in writing, both now and for the rest of his life, leaving only a few traces behind about their relationship.
Sumner later told another friend that his “childhood & youth passed in unhappiness, such as I pray may not be the lot of others.”
From the moment he started, his heart was not in the work. “I had rather be a toad and live upon a dungeon’s vapor,” he once wrote to a friend, “than one of those lumps of flesh that are christened lawyers.”
In pursuit of a liberal and cultivated mind, Sumner preferred reading books in Rand’s library over helping his master with his practice. Rand and his colleagues, amused by Sumner’s earnestness, did not seem to mind.
Staying up late, until “that witching hour when ghosts and goblins walk,”
For the next three years, Sumner’s legal career would fail to take off and achieve the high expectations everybody placed on him. “I cannot disguise from my self the sense of weakness, inferiority, & incompetence which I feel,” he wrote to Greenleaf.
Most other lawyers lacked his big-brain sensibilities.
In 1837, at the age of twenty-six, Sumner was the sole professor at Harvard Law School because both Story and Greenleaf had to take absences.
The first major formative experience for him was a trip to Washington, D.C., in March 1834, when he was twenty-three, upon the invitation of Judge Story. Currently in the country’s capital to hear arguments at the Supreme Court, Story wanted his protégé to see firsthand the happenings of the U.S. government and to groom Sumner for his future as a leading scholar of American law. Almost as soon as he arrived, Sumner hated the city.
“He is no orator,” he complained about John Calhoun, South Carolina’s rabid proslavery senator. “Very rugged in his language, unstudied in style, marching directly to the main points of his subject without stopping for parley or introduction.” Sumner was equally unimpressed with President Jackson, whom he met in a brief visit to the White House that Story probably arranged.
“I have seen General Jackson (the old tyrant),” he wrote to one of his younger sisters. “He seemed to have hardly nerve enough to keep his bones together.”
As if the universe were designed to inflate his ego, Sumner found himself being assigned one of the most important jobs in the Supreme Court after just a few days of sitting in the back of the courtroom. During every case, an official reporter was tasked with taking notes on each lawyer’s arguments and each judge’s oral decisions. Those notes were privately published in reports that became the official record. Recently, the previous reporter, Henry Wheaton, had sued the current reporter, Richard Peters, for copyright infringement. When the case was heard at the Court, Peters asked Sumner to
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At the time, the justices lived together in the same boardinghouse—a practice put into place by Chief Justice John Marshall, who believed that an intimate, shared living environment would foster comradery between the team of seven justices who didn’t always agree with one another.
Most of all, Sumner enjoyed spending time with Chief Justice Marshall, a good-humored, jovial old man who still boasted a thick head of hair and a tall, thin, athletic body. Marshall took a liking to Sumner from the start, inviting the young man to join him on his morning walks from the boardinghouse to the Court.
Marshall’s most formative wartime experience was spending a cold, dreary winter with the general at Valley Forge, where many soldiers nearly starved to death because the Continental Army couldn’t afford to buy much food. That winter taught Marshall a valuable lesson: if the United States was going to succeed, its government needed to be big, strong, and financially sustainable.
The idea that “the Constitution created a national government,” William Story later wrote about his father, “was the keystone to all his constitutional opinions.”
Some southern states, especially South Carolina, regularly threatened to secede from the Union if the national government interfered with their practice of slavery. The threat of disunion was so serious that many Americans who disliked slavery were willing to tolerate it. “Great as the evil of slavery is,” one of the Founding Fathers had said, “a dismemberment of the Union would be worse.” Judge Story agreed with this view. In decisions like Prigg v. Pennsylvania, he ruled that states—even states that had internally abolished slavery—had a legal obligation to return fugitives back into
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Story wanted to ensure that whoever succeeded him as the main professor at Harvard Law School would vigorously defend constitutional nationalism and all constitutional provisions, including the Fugitive Slave Clause. He believed that man was Sumner—with whom he had often chatted in the classroom and at home while writing the Commentaries. “I shall die content, so far as my professorship is concerned,” Story once said, “if Charles Sumner is to succeed me.”
Sumner also took to heart Judge Story’s passion for equity jurisprudence, a branch of law that would inspire the rest of his intellectual life. Equity jurists were concerned about ethics, fairness, and justice in the law. They believed that the law had an underlying moral core that wasn’t always reflected in precedents or statutes.
