This Day in History - Reflecting on Sen. Charles SumnerSmital Mind

This Day in History - Reflecting on Sen. Charles Sumner

ARRA editorial: Today is the start of daylight savings time. As if man could save daylight! So let's look at something that happened today in history: Senator Charles Sumner died this day, March 11, 1874. Who was Charles Sumner?

A former member of the Democrat party, Charles Sumner became one of the founders founder of the Republican Party. Charles Sumner declared: “That great story of redemption, when God raised up the slaveborn Moses to deliver His chosen people from bondage, and... that sublimer story where our Saviour died a cruel death that all men, without distinction of race, might be saved, makes slavery impossible.” Sumner became part of a group identified as those Radical Republicans.

After one speech Sumner made against pro-slavery groups in Kansas in 1856, he was beaten unconscious, on the head with a cane, while he at his desk on the Senate Floor by Preston Brooks, a South Carolina congressman. Sumner's injuries stopped him from attending the Senate for the next three years. He never fully recovered. Sumner did return to the Senate. Although a friend of Abraham Lincoln, he did not agree with Lincoln's limited stance on immancipation.

In 1866, Sumner and other Radical Republicans led the effort for passing of the first Civil Rights Act over the veto of Andrew Johnson, that was designed to protect freed slaves from Southern Black Codes (laws that placed severe restrictions on freed slaves such as prohibiting their right to vote, forbidding them to sit on juries, limiting their right to testify against white men, carrying weapons in public places and working in certain occupations).