Sumner

Sumner, CHARLES (1811-74), an American statesman, born at Boston, studied at Harvard, and was called to the bar in 1834. After a three years' visit to Enrope he settled in Boston, and in 1845 produced a deep impression by his speech against war entitled The True Grandeur of Nations. He helped to found the Free Soil Party (1848), and in 1851 was elected to the Senate, where his powerful speeches on the anti-slavery side excited so much animosity that he was brutally attacked by Preston Brooks, a Senator for South Carolina, receiving injuries which disabled him for three years. He was re-elected in 1859, and in 1860 delivered his speech, The Barbarism of Slavery, occasioned by the claim of Kansas to be admitted as a free state. From 1861 to 1871 he was chairman of the committee on foreign affairs in the Senate.