Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Beaten nearly to death, he escalated
A Bostonian in Paris
Sumner grew up poor in Boston, among the city's considerable Black population. On a trip to France in the 1830s, he was astounded to see Black and white students studying together as equals at the Sorbonne. In his diary he concluded that the distance between free Black and white Americans came from education and did not exist in the nature of things.
The caning
He became the most outspoken white abolitionist of his generation, taking positions even his friends thought were crazy: the complete and immediate freeing of all enslaved people, followed by Black suffrage and racially integrated schools. A few days after one of his most inflammatory speeches, Congressman Preston Brooks of the South walked up to Sumner's desk, accused him of libel, and beat him with a cane until it broke. Sumner was tangled up in his desk and could not escape.
Vindication
When he recovered, he turned up the volume. In 1861 he pushed Lincoln to abolish slavery in the Confederacy, and newspapers in his home state of Massachusetts called him a candidate for the insane asylum. Two years later, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
The bills, arguments, and amendments Sumner wrote were often defeated or defanged. They reappeared 100 years later in Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Why did the caning turn Sumner into a martyr?
Brooks attacked Sumner on May 22, 1856, two days after Sumner gave a speech on Kansas that insulted Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, a relative of Brooks. Newspapers across the North treated the assault as proof that slaveholders ruled by violence, while Southern admirers sent Brooks new canes. Sumner needed years to recover, and Massachusetts re-elected him in 1857 while he was still absent. His empty chair stayed in the Senate chamber until he returned in December 1859.
How did Sumner's school fight reach Brown v. Board?
In 1849, Sumner argued Roberts v. City of Boston before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, challenging separate public schools for Black children. Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw ruled against him, holding that school committees could separate students by race. Massachusetts banned school segregation by law in 1855 anyway. In 1896, the US Supreme Court cited the Roberts decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, the ruling that Brown v. Board of Education overturned in 1954.
Why did the Emancipation Proclamation not end slavery?
Lincoln issued it on January 1, 1863, as a war measure under his powers as commander in chief, so it applied only to states in rebellion. It left out the loyal border states and parts of the Confederacy already under Union control. Slavery ended nationwide with the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865.
More from Adam Mastroianni
