Charles Sumner was an abolitionist senator who helped to write the post-Civil War Constitution and give birth to modern civil rights law. Zaakir Tameez, author of the new biography Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation, joins Jeffrey Rosen to discuss Sumner as a moral thinker, political activist, and constitutional visionary.
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Today’s episode was produced by Samson Mostashari and Bill Pollock. It was engineered by Bill Pollock. Research was provided by Samson Mostashari.
Participants
Zaakir Tameez is an emerging scholar of antitrust and constitutional law. A graduate of Yale Law School and the University of Virginia, he has published award-winning scholarship and coauthored amicus briefs before the Texas and United States Supreme Courts. He is a Fulbright Scholar and Humanity in Action Senior Fellow from Houston, Texas. His book Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation was released on June 3, 2025.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources
- Zaakir Tameez, Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation (2025)
- Zaakir Tameez, “What we can learn from the senator who nearly died for democracy,” The Washington Post (June 1, 2025)
- Richard Kreitner, “Charles Sumner Was More Than Just a Guy Who Got Caned on the Senate Floor,” The New York Times (June 2, 2025)
Excerpt from interview: Zaakir Tameez explains the galvanizing effect of Charles’ Sumner’s speech “The Crime Against Kansas and subsequent caning on the Senate floor.
Zaakir Tameez: Like many pro-slavery politicians before him, Preston Brooks thought that by attacking Sumner in this brutal way that he would help to crush abolitionist dissent, that the "vulgar abolitionists" could be "lashed into submission" as one newspaper from the south put it. They were egregiously wrong. Brooks's attack backfired completely, rather than making the North too afraid to speak out, instead, the North was so outraged and galvanized that many people became abolitionists overnight. Across the north, tens of thousands of Northerners gathered in what they called indignation meetings, which were essentially grassroots programs to both lament over Sumner's injuries and and to strategize political responses. Horace Greeley, a newspaperman out of New York, prints as many as three million copies of Charles Sumner's speech, “The Crime Against Kansas.” The Republican National Convention in 1856, which is the first national convention of the party, is chanting Charles Sumner by name even though he's not there. Sumner is suffering while all this is going on. He struggles to recover. He spends years recovering. He has PTSD, but even so, at the opportunities he did have to speak about his injuries, he would often say that what he had suffered is nothing like what the poor slave had suffered.
And so he is connecting his injuries at the hands of a slaveholder, Preston Brooks, to the injuries that slaves across the south were, of course, experiencing daily. And what is so striking about this is that African Americans began to consider Charles Sumner as one of them, so to speak, because he too, had suffered the blows of slavery. And white people across the North are energized because they are seeing a white man being brutalized by slaveholder, as if to say that now not even white people are free from the scourge of slavery.
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