Charles Sumner - Historical Interpretations

Historical Interpretations

Contemporaries and historians have explored Sumner's personality at length. Sumner's friend Senator Carl Schurz praised Sumner's integrity, his "moral courage", the "sincerity of his convictions", and the "disinterestedness of his motives". However, Sumner's Pulitzer-prize-winning biographer, David Donald, presents Sumner in his first volume, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (1960), as an insufferably arrogant moralist; an egoist bloated with pride; pontifical and Olympian, and unable to distinguish between large issues and small ones. What's more, concludes Donald, Sumner was a coward who avoided confrontations with his many enemies, whom he routinely insulted in prepared speeches.

Biographers have varied in their appraisal of Sumner. The Pulitzer Prize went to biographer David Donald whose two-volume biography points up Sumner's troubles in dealing with his colleagues:

Distrusted by friends and allies, and reciprocating their distrust, a man of "ostentatious culture", "unvarnished egotism", and "'a specimen of prolonged and morbid juvenility,'" Sumner combined a passionate conviction in his own moral purity with a command of 19th-century "rhetorical flourishes" and a "remarkable talent for rationalization". Stumbling "into politics largely by accident", elevated to the United States Senate largely by chance, willing to indulge in "Jacksonian demagoguery" for the sake of political expediency, Sumner became a bitter and potent agitator of sectional conflict. Carving out a reputation as the South's most hated foe and the Negro's bravest friend, he inflamed sectional differences, advanced his personal fortunes, and helped bring about national tragedy."

Moorfield Storey, Sumner's private secretary for two years and subsequent biographer, seeing some of the same qualities, interprets them more kindly:

Charles Sumner was a great man in his absolute fidelity to principle, his clear perception of what his country needed, his unflinching courage, his perfect sincerity, his persistent devotion to duty, his indifference to selfish considerations, his high scorn of anything petty or mean. He was essentially simple to the end, brave, kind, and pure.... Originally modest and not self-confident, the result of his long contest was to make him egotistical and dogmatic. There are few successful men who escape these penalties of success, the common accompaniment of increasing years....Sumner's naively simple nature, his confidence in his fellows, and his lack of humor combined to prevent his concealing what many feel but are better able to hide. From the time he entered public life till he died he was a strong force constantly working for righteousness....To Sumner more than to any single man, except possibly Lincoln, the colored race owes its emancipation and such measure of equal rights as it now enjoys.

Sumner's reputation among historians in the first half of the 20th century was largely negative—he was blamed especially for the excesses or Radical Reconstruction. Both the Dunning School and the anti-Dunning revisionists were especially negative regarding his performance during Reconstruction.

However, in recent years scholars have emphasized his role as a foremost champions of black rights before, during and after the Civil War; one historian says he was "perhaps the least racist man in America in his day".

Sumner's previously critical biographer David Herbert Donald, in the second volume of his biography, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (1970), was much more favorable to Sumner. It has been noted that events in the Civil Rights movement between 1960, when Donald's first volume was published, and 1970, when the second volume was published, likely swayed Donald toward Sumner.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, a man not prone to false flattery, wrote of Sumner:

Mr. Sumner's position is exceptional in its honor.... In Congress, he did not rush into party position. He sat long silent and studious. His friends, I remember, were told that they would find Sumner a man of the world like the rest; ‘'it is quite impossible to be at Washington and not bend; he will bend as the rest have done.’ Well, he did not bend. He took his position and kept it.... I think I may borrow the language which Bishop Burnet applied to Sir Isaac Newton, and say that Charles Sumner “has the whitest soul I ever knew.”... Let him hear that every man of worth in New England loves his virtues.

In the 2012 film Saving Lincoln, Sumner was portrayed by Creed Bratton, best known for also playing a character of the same name on the American TV series The Office.