Charles Sumner

"Zaakir Tameez’s magnificent and definitive biography of Charles Sumner restores him to his rightful place at the center of America’s Second Founding. Combining sweeping narrative history with vivid biography and close textual analysis of primary sources, Tameez shows how Sumner read the Constitution in light of the Declaration of Independence and championed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 nearly a hundred years before Congress and the Supreme Court finally fulfilled his broad vision. 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

"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

“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 writes of a Harvard educated White New Englander who marshalled erudition and eloquence against rank racism like Martin Luther King and James Baldwin—a century before. Tameez’s powerful biography also 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 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 — both learning from the goals and principles that animated him, and imagining how to make them our own."

—Samuel Moyn, Yale University, author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

"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. Well before Lincoln arrived in Washington in 1861, Sumner denounced slavery unwaveringly -- a courageous stand for which he paid a terrible personal price. Sumner saw clearly that the United States had done little to affirm the human rights implied by its founding charters. With his constant advocacy, these 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: Thirteen Days to Washington