Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War

Hated by his opponents, adored by his friends, fanatical, egotistical, puritanical, and yet somehow sympathetic: such was Charles Sumner, the dedicated Senator from Massachusetts who was one of the most powerful and enduring forces in the government in a time when senators were often more influential than presidents.

David Donald's is the first biography of Charles Sumner to be written in fifty years. But the neglect of Sumner has not been due to any unawareness of his importance in American history. In fact, many historians regard Preston Brook's assault upon him in the Senate chamber in 1856 as the opening blow in the Civil War.

Sumner's life touched upon virtually every movement in his time. He was an advocate if international peace; a leader of educational and prison reform movements; organizer of the antislavery Whigs; a founder of the Republican part; the principal antislavery spokesman in the Senate during the 1850's; chief of the Radical Republicans during the Civil War; and architect of the congressional program for reconstructing the conquered South; and a pioneer in the Liberal Republican movement of 1872.

Sumner's role in American history is a unique one; for there are few, if any, other instances in which a "statesman doctrinaire" — a man inflexibly committed to a set of basic ideas as moral principles — has wielded political power in the United States. He was further distinctive in that he alone of his contemporaries moved with equal in the antithetical worlds of New England letters and of Washington politics. And he was almost the only nineteenth-century American politician who was nearly as widely known in Europe as in his own country.

This volume carries Sumner's stormy career up to the firing on Fort Sumter. But as a prtrait of a man — meticulous in its scholarship, yet continuously fascinating and awfully readable, it is complete in itself.

Allan Nevins has said: "In what promises to be one of the enduring American biographies, Dr. Donald … throws a bright shaft of light down the period of sectional conflict, offering a largely original treatment. … He gives us a picture of the times which is full of new illumination, and a study of the man which presents him as a convincing human being. The scholarship, based on exhaustive study of the sources, is surefooted, the narrative style is supple and vivacious. Here is a rich picture of a period, an interesting and at times absorbing story.