[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 7 (Wednesday, January 19, 2011)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E75]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            TRIBUTE TO CHARLES SUMNER, BORN JANUARY 6, 1811

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                        HON. MICHAEL E. CAPUANO

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, January 19, 2011

  Mr. CAPUANO. Mr. Speaker, I rise to pay tribute to Charles Sumner and 
I join with many of my constituents in celebrating the bicentennial of 
his birth, January 6, 2011. Commemorations are sponsored by the 
Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Site, the Boston 
African American National Historic Site, the Museum of African American 
History, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and other learned 
societies and civic groups.
  Charles Sumner was born in Boston and educated at Boston Latin 
School, Harvard College and Harvard Law School. Like many educated 
Bostonians of his time, he was interested in events in Europe, where he 
travelled extensively between 1837 and 1840. Later, he and his friend 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would compare slaveholders in the American 
south to aristocrats whose privileges were swept away by revolution on 
the continent. Sumner returned to help found the Free Soil Party but he 
did not succeed in election to this House in 1848. He was elected to 
the Senate two years later on the Free Soil Ticket. In 1856, Sumner, 
who refused to compromise on the issue of slavery, was savagely beaten 
on the floor of the Senate. Interests might be conciliated but about 
rights he was adamant. Massachusetts re-elected him, as a Republican, 
while his recovery was still in doubt, so that his empty seat would 
serve as a reproach to slave-holders. He returned to serve until his 
death in 1874.
  I am grateful to John Stauffer, chair of the History of American 
Civilization and professor of English and African and African American 
Studies at Harvard University, for suggesting Ralph Waldo Emerson's 
tribute: Sumner's moral instinct and character are so exceptionally 
pure that he must have perpetual magnetism for honest men; his ability 
and working energy such, that every good friend of the Republic must 
stand by him.

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