Young Charles Sumner and the Legacy of the American Enlightenment, 1811-1851

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Description

An outspoken abolitionist, a founder of the Free Soil and Republican parties, and a leading member of the U. S. Senate for more than twenty years, Charles Sumner (1811–1874) has all the time figured prominently in histories of the American Civil War. For the most part, on the other hand, he has been depicted as a psychologically troubled extremist, a fanatical opponent of slavery whose self-righteousness used to be matched only by his arrogance.

In this book, Anne-Marie Taylor challenges that long-standing view, offering in its stead the portrait of a man animated more by principle than by impulse or ambition. In keeping with Taylor, Sumner’s reform-minded politics, including his fervent commitment to put an end to slavery, will have to be understood in the context of a young nation still struggling to live up to the Enlightenment ideals embraced by its founders and embodied in its Constitution.

Focusing on the first forty years of Sumner’s life, before he took public place of job, Taylor traces the evolution of his character and thought among Boston’s cultural elite. His belief in the virtues of cosmopolitanism, in the dignity of the human intellect and judgment of right and wrong, and in the opportunity of a cultivated and just society, all find their roots in an education steeped in Enlightenment principles. At the same time, as a child of New England Puritanism and Revolutionary republicanism, Sumner used to be raised to consider in the moral obligation of the individual to work for the common good.

As Taylor shows in this richly drawn biography, much of the triumph and tragedy of Sumner’s story―the energy of his idealism in addition to the poignancy of his eventual disappointment― derives from the overpowering sense of duty and national destiny imbued by his upbringing.

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