The Great Abolitionist: Charles Sumner and the Fight for a More Perfect Union
TUESDAY, MAY 21, 2024 | 7:00 PM
TICKETS: $20 GENERAL ADMISSION | $10 STUDENT
*A LIMITED NUMBER OF FREE TICKETS FOR SENIORS ARE AVAILABLE, COURTESY OF THE CORDELIA FAMILY FOUNDATION.
SPONSORED BY THE NORWELL HISTORICAL SOCIETY, THE EDWARD AND ESTELLE MOSHER FUND, AND NAPIER FINANCIAL.
ALSO SUPPORTED IN PART BY THE NORWELL AND SCITUATE CULTURAL COUNCILS, LOCAL AGENCIES SUPPORTED BY THE MASS CULTURAL COUNCIL, A STATE AGENCY.
The Conscience of the North
For a quarter of a century, including twenty-three consecutive years in the Senate from 1851 until his death (which encompassed a three-year absence as he recovered from his caning injuries), it was Charles Sumner–not Lincoln, not William Lloyd Garrison, not Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, or anyone else–who was the nation’s most passionate, vociferous, unrelenting, and inexhaustible anti-slavery and equal rights champion.
Before and during the Civil War, at a great personal sacrifice, he was the conscience of the North and the strongest and most influential voice in favor of abolition. Throughout Reconstruction, no one championed the rights of the emancipated Freedmen more than Charles Sumner. Through the force of his words and his will, he first moved his state, and then the nation, toward the twin goals of abolitionism – which he achieved in his lifetime – and equal rights, which eluded him and the country, but for which he fought literally until the day he died.
In so doing, he laid the cornerstone arguments that civil rights advocates would build upon over the next century as the country strove to achieve equality among the races. To Sumner, the two concepts of abolitionism and equal rights were inseparable and could not be untethered. Freedom and equality embodied the founding principles of the United States as stated in the Declaration of Independence, and in the Constitution’s guarantee of a republican form of government; only by enshrining these rights forever could the United States survive. This view was first considered radical and unworkable, dismissed as the ranting of rabble-rousers on the fringe – positions at first not held even by Lincoln and other anti-slavery Republicans.
But Sumner’s influence gradually took hold, permeated the party’s dogma, and finally became the prevalent and official view of Lincoln and the nation.