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.