Full Bio: Charles Sumner After the Civil War

For this month's installment of Full Bio, we learn about the life of Senator Charles Sumner with Zaakir Tameez, author of the new biography Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation. Sumner was a fierce abolitionist and statesman from Massachusetts who was a pivotal advisor to President Lincoln and an influential force during the Civil War. In today's installment, we learn about Sumner's life after the Civil War.

Alison: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. This is the last installment of Full Bio, our book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. Our guest this week has been Zaakir Tameez, the author of Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation. You know Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner as the fiery speaker who championed abolitionism. He fought for it until his end for a civil rights bill, even if that meant splintering his party, the Republican Party. We'll hear about that today.

We'll also hear about his private life. The author makes the case that Sumner was a gay man who "didn't understand his sexuality." Tameez believes that Sumner harbored a longtime love for Samuel Howe, who was married to Julia Ward Howe, the author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Here's Zaakir Tameez, the author of Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation.

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Alison: Early in the book, you write about Sumner's sexuality. You write, "The evidence suggests that Sumner was probably gay, insofar as modern terms means much when applied retroactively to the past. From the day Howe was married, friends were alarmed by the scale of Sumner's heartbreak. They tried to find a wife who could heal his wounds in the wake of Howe's departure." Would you please explain the relationship between Sumner and Howe?

Zaakir Tameez: In the 1830s, there was a riot in Boston, and Charles Sumner decides to step into the crowd, be a hero, and put down the riot. He's not athletic, but he is 6 foot 4" and he thinks foolishly that he can put this riot down. He fell spectacularly, he's thrown to the ground, and there are people throwing rocks at him. Then an older, strapping young man literally comes into the crowd, pulls Sumner out, and saves possibly his life. That is Samuel Gridley Howe.

Samuel Howe is a doctor by training who had previously gone to Europe and served in the Greek and Polish revolutions against the Ottoman Empire. He's a dashing man, he's a horseback rider, and he later becomes a social reformer. He founds the Perkins School of the Blind, which is still one of the leading institutions in the country for the service of blind people. Howe and Sumner become very, very close very quickly. They used to go on horseback rides into the countryside and then come back, go to a pub, order strawberries and cream, and then go retire at Howe's home and talk all night long, often about their loneliness and shared experience of bachelorhood.

Ultimately, Samuel Howe gets married, and when Howe gets married, Sumner is heartbroken. According to the records, he climbed into his bed in his mother's home, and supposedly, he did not get out for a month. Meanwhile, Howe feels tremendously guilty. He says that he felt like he went to heaven with his wife and left his best friend outside. He spends most of his honeymoon writing letters to Sumner instead of spending time with his new wife. His new wife is so jealous that she says, "Sumner ought to have been a woman and you to have married him."

His wife is Julia Ward Howe, the author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. She wrote a number of books and poems, and she wrote a manuscript that was only discovered in 1970 and published in 2004 called The Hermaphrodite, where she analyzes her husband's sexuality by exploring him as an intersex man who goes back and forth between male and female partners. What that suggests is that Howe may have been bisexual and Sumner may have been gay.

Now, there's a caveat to all this, which is that the term homosexuality was not introduced into the English language until the 1870s. The concept of homosexuality did not exist at this time, as such, and yet Sumner did have this deep love for Howe, whatever that may have meant to them, whatever that may have looked. When Sumner is elected to the US Senate, Howe burns many of their letters and will continue to burn more letters for the rest of their life. He said he burned the letters out of fear they would one day be seen by unfriendly eyes.

What was in those letters? Was it evidence of Sumner's sexuality, or was it bad political opinions that Howe didn't want the world to see? We will never know. I suggest that, looking at this relationship, what we can deduce is that Sumner and Howe really did love each other, whatever that may have meant.

Alison: Was Sumner's bachelorhood ever a liability for him?

Zaakir Tameez: Yes. When Sumner was growing up, being a bachelor was considered a little weird, a little different, but it wasn't a big deal. By the 1850s and 1860s, however, Victorian England had influenced the social mores of America, such that bachelors were looked upon with contempt, disgust, and most of all, suspicion, because if you were a middle-aged man, why wouldn't you marry a woman? If you didn't, you probably had some kind of sexual perversity or you were degenerate of some kind or another.

There was a sense that if you were a bachelor, you were gross, you were weird, you were a problem. Sumner then experiences the stigma, not of being gay, but of being a bachelor in the Senate at a time when he was one of only two senators that had never married before. In 1854, one colleague, Andrew Butler of South Carolina, gave this racist, drunken screed while the Senate is full of hoots and hollers, where he says that Sumner should go marry a Black princess because he's chaste and because he's a bachelor.

Sumner experiences a stigma that may have influenced his decision to target Andrew Butler in his speech, The Crime Against Kansas, a couple years later, and that may have influenced Sumner to ultimately get married because he was looking for a stronger social reputation. He gets married to a young widow named Alice. The marriage is a disaster.

Alison: It sounded like she had quite a temper to say.

Zaakir Tameez: Yes, she was hotheaded. She had a temper. She was known to just yell and shout at Sumner. We will never know the full story, but I think part of that arose because after they had separated, Alice started to spread rumors that her husband was sexually impotent. I think a lot of their marital discord arose because they weren't able to conjugate the marital relationship, probably, and Alice was just very angry at Sumner for this.

Sumner is, of course, heartbroken, not so much at losing Alice, a woman that he never missed, but because he had gone from being a bachelor, achieving that status as a married man, then losing that status again. Then he's just so embarrassed because there's newspaper reports about him being sexually impotent.

Alison: This calls from some speculation on your part, but it's something that I thought when I read the book, that he seemed to be a lonely man, but that his passion for civil rights, for integration, maybe that is where his passion went. Once Howe got married, that is where Sumner put all of his attention. What do you think?

Zaakir Tameez: You may be right. I don't make that speculation myself, but southern newspapers were calling him eunuch Sumner. Another paper called him an unsexed creature. There were politicians who described him as effeminate. He is marginalized and stigmatized through his life for his bachelorhood, for maybe his choice of clothing. He was often known to wear lavender checkered trousers.

Alison: Oh my.

Zaakir Tameez: Yes.

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Zaakir Tameez: He was very flashy with his clothing. He stood out, and he may have experienced a social cost for that, and that may have helped him empathize with Black Americans.

Alison: You are listening to Full Bio. My guest is Zaakir Tameez. The name of his book is Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation. It's our choice for Full Bio. Let's talk about Sumner and Lincoln. What did Sumner think of Lincoln and vice versa?

Zaakir Tameez: When Lincoln comes to Washington, he and Sumner have a meeting, and the first thing they discover is that both of them are 6 foot 4". I don't think Lincoln or Sumner-

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Zaakir Tameez: -would be [unintelligible 00:09:56] in someone the same height as him. Lincoln says, "We should match backs and see who is taller." Sumner had no sense of humor. He was mortified by this. This is in 1861. The country is on the verge of a Civil War. South Carolina and other states have already seceded. Sumner is meeting Lincoln for the first time, the man who is supposed to lead the Union in this great question of the future of America. Sumner is horrified that Lincoln is just making jokes.

He responds to Lincoln and says, "Mr. President, this is not a time for us to match backs. We need to present a united front." Then Sumner leaves. Lincoln finds this whole thing hilarious, and he tells another man, "I didn't have many bishops down where I live, but Sumner reminds me of a bishop." I call one of my chapters Lincoln's Bishop, because that's the role Sumner played in Lincoln's life. He would continually and repeatedly insist to Lincoln the necessity of emancipating southern slaves.

He called on Lincoln to see the greater moral dimension to the war and to see God's role in the war, to recognize that this was a war not only to bring the Union back together, but to guarantee freedom for everyone. Lincoln does not agree at first. What is striking is that from the first day, on the day of the Battle of Fort Sumter, Sumner goes to Lincoln and tells him that now he can use his wartime powers to emancipate southern slaves. Lincoln disagrees, but they argue about it until midnight, which is a suggestion that Lincoln took Sumner very seriously.

For the next few years, they would argue and argue and argue and argue, but Sumner never stopped going to Lincoln, and Lincoln never stopped hearing him out. That leads to the Emancipation Proclamation, which Sumner helped to write. After Lincoln issues it, he gives the pen that he used to write the proclamation to Sumner.

Alison: You also note that Sumner had a strong relationship with Mary Todd Lincoln. Many people thought her to be a problem. What did she see in Sumner, and what did Sumner see in her?

Zaakir Tameez: They were both, in many ways, social outcasts in Washington, DC. They were at the highest echelons of power: Sumner as a prominent US Senator, Chair of Foreign Relations Committee, Mary Lincoln as First Lady, and yet, they were not welcome at many parties in Washington, DC. They were considered weird and outcast. Sumner and Mary Lincoln become very close very quickly. He would often take Mary Lincoln to the opera and to the theater. He was Mary Lincoln's go-to date whenever her husband, President of the United States, didn't have time.

Sumner helps to inspire a transformation in Mary Lincoln, who had grown up in Kentucky in a slave-holding family, who had several brothers who fought for the Confederacy, and Mary Lincoln, who honestly didn't think much of the slavery question prior to the war, more or less become an abolitionist. Mary Lincoln once bragged that Sumner says that he wishes my husband was as good an abolitionist as me. They were very close for many years.

Long after Lincoln dies, Mary Lincoln is poor and broke. She is struggling to get by, and she is asking Congress for a pension. It was Sumner who pushed and pushed to secure that pension for Mary Lincoln and is ultimately successful. Mary Lincoln would always say that Sumner was her closest friend in Washington.

Alison: When Lincoln was assassinated, President Andrew Johnson proved to be, we'll call him, an inhibitor of civil rights. How did Charles Sumner maneuver around Johnson?

Zaakir Tameez: The day Lincoln died, Sumner is there holding Lincoln's hand. He was there all night long after the assassination at Ford's Theater. He's there until the morning, where he's clutching Lincoln's hand, and the moment Lincoln dies, Sumner leaves the room. He goes back home and he gets to his house. He's slumping over his breakfast. He hasn't slept all night. There are people visiting him to make sure he's alive because nobody knew who had been killed that night.

One of his visitors asks him, "How will the country go on now that Lincoln is gone?" Sumner responds, "Our leaders are gone, but the republic remains." It was this emphasis on the republic that Sumner continues to push through the administration of Andrew Johnson. Johnson is obstinate, he is racist, he's incompetent and arrogant, but Sumner decides to put all of his focus on Congress. He pushes for Congress and for the Republican Party to win a super majority in the primaries, such that by 1866, Sumner is now a dominating force in Washington, DC.

He's pushing for the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, and he's also pushing us through a slate of bills to triumph over Johnson's veto. The bill that he stewarded in particular was the Freedmen's Bureau Act. This is to create a whole new government agency that is going to deal with the most major question of political and economic significance in the history of America. "What do you do with 4 million free people in the South?"

Sumner helps to create this agency and delegate tremendous authority from Congress to this agency without supervision from the President of the United States. He helps to fashion other administrative agencies and to get the executive branch to do things in spite of the President. Then, of course, he's pushing Congress to impeach Andrew Johnson. When that impeachment is unsuccessful, he is just furious with his colleagues.

Alison: I'm curious, during this period around 1866, and he's fighting for civil rights, a civil rights bill, and he believes that integration is possible at this time. What were African American leaders thinking about him? What was Frederick Douglass thinking about him? What was the Black elite in Washington, DC thinking about Charles Sumner?

Zaakir Tameez: Frederick Douglass once said, "There is now a man at Washington who represents the future and is a majority in himself." That man is Charles Sumner. Douglass and Lincoln and Sumner were very close. There is one report that Douglass and Sumner would often walk hand in hand on Capitol Hill. Sumner takes pains to become close to both Douglass and to a number of Black businessmen, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and other middle-class members of society in Washington, DC.

For example, by early 1870s, Sumner's closest friend in Washington is a man named George Downing. George Downing operates the mess hall for the House of Representatives. He's the top chef in Congress, an African American man who has a restaurant business. He and Sumner are not only friends, Sumner is going to Downing for political advice. He would talk to Downing and to others about his own theories and what bills he's trying to work on, how he should approach different political questions. They would advise him. They were often at his home giving him advice. They were all very close.

They helped to teach Sumner that even after the passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, the 14th Amendment guaranteeing birthright citizenship, the 15th Amendment granting Black men the right to vote, that even then, Black members of the middle class are still relegated to a second class status because their children are shut out of common schools, because they themselves often cannot get on white-only streetcars, because they can't get on the train together, the bus together. Sumner recognizes that even now, there needs to be an additional civil rights push, a push for racial integration in order to fulfill the promises of the Civil War.

Alison: Your book goes deep into the annexation of Santo Domingo, also known as the Dominican Republic, about Grant and Sumner not getting along that much. What I want to focus on, though, is the division within the Republican Party that happens at this time and Sumner's role in that division. How would you describe it?

Zaakir Tameez: By 1872, Sumner is very, very angry with his colleagues. He had helped to write a civil rights bill. He had introduced a civil rights bill that would have created a right of public accommodation for anyone, regardless of race, to enter a common carrier, a restaurant, a hotel, and sue for damages if they are denied and discriminated against. He wrote that bill with the help of John Mercer Langston, the dean of Howard Law School, the first Black law professor to have that title.

Sumner and Langston helped to push for this bill, and Howard University directly gets involved. The university itself lobbies for this bill and calls on the Republican Party to pass this integration bill, and the Republicans are just not interested. Grant, often considered a champion of Black rights and Black voting rights in particular, was not interested in this civil rights bill either. When Langston and other Black leaders visited Grant and asked him about this bill, he responded by saying he wasn't a lawyer and couldn't comment on it.

Sumner is just outraged at the failure of Republicans to advance integration. That, along with outrage over Grant's foreign policy, he decides in 1872 to not endorse Grant for re-election. Instead, he endorses Horace Greeley, a media mogul and huckster who kept changing his views about a variety of things, had once been an abolitionist, but is now just screeching racist remarks and is calling for the end of Reconstruction.

Many people, including many African Americans, are just startled by Sumner, this great champion of equality, endorsing Greeley, an enemy of equality, but Sumner tells an audience of Black voters, "Never vote for a man who is not true to you." He was more interested in punishing Grant, a man of his own party, than in supporting Greeley necessarily. He feared that if Black voters only voted for one political party, that political party would ultimately take them for granted. He wanted there to be electoral consequences against his own political party for its failure to sufficiently advance the cause of racial equality.

Alison: You are listening to Full Bio. My guest is Zaakir Tameez. The name of his book is Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation. It's our choice for Full Bio. Toward the end of his life, Sumner's life, you note that people were worried that he was sick, possibly losing his mind, he was lonely. At this point, was he?

Zaakir Tameez: Yes and no. He was lonely in the sense that very few of his white colleagues would spend any time with him. He was no longer being invited to parties in Washington, DC. He loses his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, gets stripped of all of his committee appointments, and basically becomes a pariah in the Senate. On top of all this, he is now separated from his wife, he has no family left, more or less, his mother had died, he lives in Washington, DC. He doesn't even have a residence in his home base in Boston.

When he returned to Black Boston for an election, he actually said that he wasn't sure where he was going to vote, or if he could vote, because he no longer had a residency in Massachusetts, even though he's a US Senator. Yet, at the same time that he's very lonely from white America, he's not from Black America. There's a number of Black friends that he has who are taking care of him. His neighbor was James Wormley, the operator of a famous Wormley Hotel, the largest Black-owned hotel in the country.

Wormley would visit him almost on the daily, had a pair of keys into Sumner's home. Then there's George Downing. Then there's John Mercer Langston. There's another man named Joshua Smith. These are all Black friends of his, Frederick Douglass even, who would spend time with him, who would almost try to take care of his health, and who became, in many ways, his family, which is really striking to think that you've got Black leaders in Washington, DC, also a few Black politicians in Washington by this time, and also Black students at Howard University who are all comfortable guests at Sumner's home, and they would actually take care of him when he was sick. They became his family.

Alison: He died on March 11th, 1874. 40,000 people paid their respects to him at the State House. First of all, what happened to his civil rights bill?

Zaakir Tameez: When Sumner is dying, he's high on morphine. He just had a heart attack. A crowd of people comes to visit him. The Speaker of the House is there. Many senators are there. Many congressmen are there. Frederick Douglass is there, all in his home, as he lay dying. Sumner kept trying to get up, and they thought he was delusional and tried to hold him down. Then he says to his secretary, "Take care of my bill, my bill." His secretary responds and says, "Don't worry, I'll take care of your household bills. You won't die in debt."

Then Sumner gets angry, and he gets alert all of a sudden. He says, "No, you don't understand me. My civil rights bill. Take care of my civil rights bill." Then they realized that Sumner was trying to get up because he was trying to go to the Senate, as he's high on morphine, as he's dying from a heart attack, to keep pushing for the civil rights bill. In fact, just a few days earlier, he had told George Downing that prostrate as I am, if I could crawl to the Senate and pass the civil rights bill, I'd be content to die.

He dies without passing this bill, of course, but people are so moved by this moment. The Speaker of the House, many other members of Congress are crying in Sumner's library right after he dies. The papers publish Sumner's final words, "Take care of the civil rights bill. Don't let the civil rights bill fail." Frederick Douglass helps to lead a campaign in Washington, DC to pass the bill in Sumner's honor. The Senate does pass the bill three months later, but the House does not until the following year, whittling it down to the extreme, making it basically unenforceable.

The bill gets passed. Grant signs it into law. Grant does not enforce the civil rights bill for racial integration. Eight years later, the Supreme Court overturns the bill in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, and the bill becomes a dead letter. What is amazing is that if you fast forward to 1964, when Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, the first two provisions are almost verbatim what Charles Sumner had written nearly 100 years earlier.

Alison: If you go into a Black neighborhood, you'll find a Thaddeus Stevens school, and you'll find Charles Sumner schools. How would you like people to remember him?

Zaakir Tameez: I think we need to do a lot more to remember Sumner as one of America's founding fathers. Let me explain why. Sumner is one of the architects of the 13th Amendment, the 14th Amendment, and the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution. He's one of the leading constitutional lawyers of the century. Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, she said that Sumner was the "great defender of the Constitution." Black lawyers for generations considered Sumner to be their hero and to be their ideal legal statesman.

In 1954, when the NAACP is filing the brief in Brown v. Board of Education, Thurgood Marshall says that Sumner was the founder of the Equal Protection Clause to the US Constitution. He says that the Declaration of Independence established the principle that all men are equal, but it was none other than Charles Sumner who concretized that principle into American law.

Generations of Black lawyers and thinkers have regarded Sumner as one of America's founding fathers, in effect, a second founder, coming from that second generation of founders during the 1860s with the Reconstruction Amendments. I think that is something we all ought to remember today. We need to put Charles Sumner into the center of America's constitutional story.

Alison: Thank you so much to Zaakir Tameez for joining us. The name of the book is Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation.

Zaakir Tameez: Thank you for having me.

Alison: Once again, thanks to Zaakir Tameez for his time. Full Bio was engineered by Shayna Sengstock, post-production by Luke Green, and written by me. The full conversation about Charles Sumner: A Conscience of a Nation will be available on our website on Saturday, July 5th.