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

This biography of Charles Sumner, up to his election as antislavery senator from Massachusetts, refutes David Donald's "revisionist"-tinged volumes. Anne-Marie Taylor sets out to remedy what she believes to be a basic lack in Donald's work, his failure to place Sumner in the context of New England's, especially Harvard's, intellectual and artistic life at the time of his maturing. Sumner learned from his father, and later his teachers at Harvard, to believe that human society could be perfected, and that the individual was obligated to work toward this ideal. In Sumner, belief in a natural law philosophy, which stressed service to a society based on virtue and duty, was balanced by a commitment to natural rights, which stressed individual freedoms and moral and political equality.

Taylor insistently argues that Sumner understood these Enlightenment values as America's basic legacy from the Revolution and that they shaped his entire career as a writer, orator, reformer, and politician. Disdaining ambition for power and applause, Sumner held himself, his friends, and his social ambient up to the stern necessity of promoting public good, and reluctantly abandoned mentors and benefactors (even Boston's Whiggish elite) when they failed to meet his standards, increasingly isolating himself. He gave up hopes for a literary career, social advancement, a traditional family, and success in his legal practice to embrace reform and politics as the best ways to perfect America. The democratic, natural rights portion of his creed led him toward the peace movement and, especially, abolition, and these reform interests in turn led him into political opposition to the war with Mexico and finally to the Free Soil coalition that ultimately placed him in public office.

Taylor elucidates how Sumner's belief in the inherent, equal ability for self-improvement affected his attitudes toward race and class. This made it possible for him to abandon the class snobbery of his Boston Whig peers and to approach potential Free Soil coalition partners, Democratic politicians, and self-made men like Henry Wilson, on a basis of equal trust and respect—an ability that put him into the Senate. His corresponding sense of the obligation to promote a free society led him to condemn elites who used their knowledge of law and politics to defend their material status at the expense of others, damning the Lords of the Loom and the Lords of the Lash alike.

Taylor also notes how practical elements in his makeup connected to his need to do good: he wanted to prove that universal peace was possible as well as desirable, and he was willing to yoke his abolition ideals to antislavery reality, as in his support of the Wilmot Proviso. If compromise and practical politics created progress toward his ideal, then Sumner would accept them, regardless of objections from abolition purists like Wendell Phillips or class-bound Conscience Whigs like Richard Henry Dana.

In sum, Taylor's Sumner, a paragon of self-abnegation and consistency, is the exact opposite of Donald's. Indeed, in her introduction Taylor argues that Donald's work is fatally flawed by an anti-abolitionist, anti-New England bias, and that to achieve his portrait of Sumner as shallow, ambitious, and hypocritical he has to misuse sources consistently by, inter alia, taking quotes out of context or editing or adding to them to support his interpretations. Taylor attacks Donald's interpretations in footnote after footnote; twice the note itself produces direct evidence suggesting that Donald had misused Sumner's writings, but neither case involved major issues in Sumner's career. Without access to Sumner's correspondence, Taylor's main source, I cannot say whose reading is correct. Given the pervasive contemporary accusations that Sumner was self-righteous and opportunistic, it is hard to believe entirely in Taylor's Sumner. Still, overall...