SUMNER, Charles (1811-1874), American statesman, was born at Boston, Mass., on 6th January 1811. He graduated at Harvard in 1830, and studied law with Judge Story. His natural powers of mind were great, his habits of study intense, and his success immediate and conspicuous. Everything seems to have been expected of him, and he disappointed nobody. In 1834 he had been admitted to the bar, was editor of the American Jurist, and was reporting the decisions of Judge Story. For the next three years he was a lecturer in the Harvard law school. He then spent three years in Europe, always, however, studying with an intensity that never relaxed. Returning, he began the practice of law, but gradually drifted into politics during the anti-slavery struggle. In 1851 the few “free-soilers” in the Massachusetts legislature offered to vote for Democrats for other officers in return for Democratic votes for Sumner as United States senator. Sumner was thus sent to the Senate, to which he was regularly re-elected for the rest of his life. He at once became a man of mark, though not of popularity, in the Senate. His fine personal presence, his somewhat florid rhetoric, his wealth of citation from learned and foreign tongues, his wide foreign acquaintance, high culture, and social standing, seem to have staggered his Southern colleagues. They could not look down upon him, and they hardly knew what else to do. A long series of speeches brought about an assault upon him, 22d May 1856, by Preston S. Brooks, a representative from South Carolina, in retaliation for Sumner’s criticism of Brooks’s uncle, a senator from his State. Brooks found Sumner writing in the Senate chamber, and beat him so cruelly that he narrowly escaped death. He was absent from his place until 1859, and never ...