Charles Sumner

Known mainly as the abolitionist senator brutally caned within an inch of his life by slaveholder Preston Brooks on the Senate floor in 1856, Charles Sumner also played a pivotal role in advancing democracy and shaping the Constitution during Reconstruction, America's "Second Founding." During the Civil War, Sumner convinced Lincoln to emancipate the South's slaves; stopped England from joining the conflict; and created the Freedmen's Bureau. After the war, Sumner transformed America by authoring the Fourteenth Amendment and thereby embedding his slogan-"equality before the law"-into the Constitution. Sumner was a martyr-like senator who put principles above politics at every turn.In Charles Sumner, Zaakir Tameez shows how this overlooked luminary is one of the most significant figures in the history of civil rights, as well as a visionary progenitor of modern progressive politics. He focuses on Sumner's passionate struggle to end slavery, promote civil rights, and redeem the Constitution, and considers how his emphasis on the Constitution as a vehicle for the promotion of human rights-rather than simply the protection of individual liberty-was a radical interpretation that anticipated much contemporary progressive jurisprudence. The book also looks at Sumner's social milieu, which included an extraordinary range of prominent thinkers and writers, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Henry Longfellow to Frederick Douglass. Finally, it is the first biography to identify Sumner as a gay man who struggled with his sexuality, and as a committed white ally who had deep relationships with Black community leaders.Eminently readable and meticulously researched, Charles Sumner promises to be a groundbreaking new portrait of this pivotal figure in American history.

"In this welcome new biography, Zaakir Tameez offers unique insight into Charles Sumner as a pathbreaking constitutional theorist as well as a committed advocate for racial justice and equality under the law. At the same time, Tameez paints a vivid and affecting portrait of a lonely and often tormented man. The book is an all-too-timely reminder of the origins of the freedoms we now have the responsibility to preserve and defend."
--Drew Gilpin Faust, former president of Harvard University, author of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

"Zaakir Tameez's magnificent and definitive biography of Charles Sumner restores him to his rightful place at the center of America's Second Founding. A towering achievement that will change our understanding of the shining promise, and brutal backlash inspired by Sumner's vision of an America founded on what he called 'equal rights for all.'"
--Jeffrey Rosen, President & CEO, National Constitution Center

"Zaakir Tameez's compelling portrait of the great radical abolitionist politician, Charles Sumner, a man for all seasons, is a timeless lesson for our fraught present. Sumner's principled commitment to human rights, the American republic, and its constitutional order, are retold here with the flair of a novelist and the astuteness of a scholar. This is biography at its best."
--Manisha Sinha, author of The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920

"We have dozens of great biographies of Abraham Lincoln, and now, at long last, we have a great biography of Lincoln's partner and prod in the crusade for liberty and equality, Charles Sumner. What Chernow did for Hamilton, Tameez now does for Sumner. Musical, anyone?"
--Akhil Reed Amar, Yale University, author of America's Constitution: A Biography

"With this insightful and original work, Zaakir Tameez gives us a Charles Sumner for our time and for all time, an inspiring fighter for racial justice and a brilliant constitutional theorist. This is a book worthy of its towering subject."
--Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of King: A Life

"Zaakir Tameez paints a vivid, layered, textured, compelling, timeless, and topical portrait of Charles Sumner. With the rigor of a historian, the prose of a poet, and the sensitivity of an essayist, Tameez reminds us of the price Sumner paid for the hope of a multiracial democracy, at the hands of white supremacy, on the eve of the Civil War, and reminds us of the price to be paid today."
--Cornell William Brooks, Harvard Kennedy School, former president and CEO of the NAACP

"Few American lives from the past speak to our present as self-evidently as Charles Sumner's, which makes Zaakir Tameez's choice to retrieve him from forgetfulness and misinterpretation so inspired and inspirational. By placing Sumner in its own time, this illuminating portrait is a reminder of the need to grapple with the Constitution and its meaning in our own era."
--Samuel Moyn, Yale University, author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

"The American antislavery movement wrought this country's greatest political and social revolution. Thanks to Zaakir Tameez, we are reacquainted with one of its leading revolutionaries. This vivid and absorbing biography gives us a Charles Sumner who helped transform his time -- and who remains vital to ours."
--Matthew Karp, Princeton University, author of This Vast Southern Empire

"This is a biography for our time. Zaakir Tameez's smart, well-crafted story of Charles Sumner brings the crux of the American project to life. Sumner battled to advance the radical idea that the Constitution belonged to everyone, and that aggressive federal enforcement of that equality was the only just path forward for the United States. This study of one of the most consequential figures in American history is a masterfully rendered exploration of American constitutional promise and limits."
--Jefferson Cowie, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power

"In this masterful and sympathetic account, Zaakir Tameez vividly brings to life one of the greatest champions of civil rights in American history, the great abolitionist Charles Sumner. Far ahead of his time, Sumner was both morally heroic and emotionally fragile, a gifted orator but often deaf to political realities, beloved by countless activists both Black and white, yet deeply, almost cripplingly lonely. He has long deserved a definitive new biography: Tameez has written it."
--Fergus Bordewich, author of Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction

"As Zaakir Tameez shows in this compelling biography, Charles Sumner was one of our great speakers of inconvenient truths. Sumner denounced slavery unwaveringly, and with his constant advocacy, human rights began to come into focus, so clearly that many 20th century breakthroughs--the founding of the NAACP, and the Civil Rights movement--owe much to Sumner's example. Thanks to Zaakir Tameez, this powerful story can again be read with the close attention it deserves."
--Ted Widmer, author of Lincoln on the Verge

"In this courageous new book, Zaakir Tameez finally addresses Charles Sumner's sexuality. Derided for his intimacy in the past but then ignored by historians in the present, Sumner's queer identity haunts the detritus of Civil War archives. Tameez reconstructs the untold heartbreaking love story between Sumner and Samuel Gridley Howe with pulsating emotional verve that turns history into cinema. This book foregrounds how a queer person was not hiding in the shadows during one of the most pivotal turning points in U.S. history but was the 'conscience of the nation.'"
--Jim Downs, author of Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation

Zaakir Tameez is an emerging scholar of antitrust and constitutional law. He is currently a third-year student at Yale Law School, where he is an editor on the Yale Law Journal and has published multiple law review articles. He also holds degrees from the University of Virginia, where he was a Lawn Resident and Posse Scholar, and Queen Mary University of London, where he studied on a Fulbright Scholarship. In 2025, he will be clerking for Judge Jill Pryor of the 11th Circuit. He is from Houston, Texas.

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