CHARLES SUMNER AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN

by David Donald ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 30, 1970

The second and final volume of Donald's biography finds the Massachusetts Senator in 1861 reconciled to war but, as ""a sectarian leader,"" discomfited by his party's accession to power. The war years feature Sumner's odd friendship with Lincoln and the start of his ten-year influence as Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman. The postwar years were of course years of defeat as the ""old"" faction of the Radical Republicans lost ground: Sumner fought with Johnson and Grant, found himself ""a political outsider"" in the Senate anterooms and slipping in Springfield. Finally removed from his chairmanship, he opposed the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and pressed a civil rights bill which, as Donald notes, lacked enforcement machinery or constitutional streamlining. In his ""personal life"" Sumner continued to be tactless, overbearing, condescending and self-righteous; Donald reconstructs his very late, very brief marriage, and argues against the theory that Sumner suffered permanent mental disability from Brooks' Senate-floor attack. This is in fact the closest Donald comes to a polemical position on anything. The first volume, which won a Pulitzer Prize, was praised and blamed for its extreme ""detachment."" Here detachment disintegrates into dullness on the one hand, and heedlessness of true objectivity on the other: apart from translations of ""he said"" into ""he thought"" worthy of an Irving Stone, we get such interpretive scraps as ""High nationalism served as a solace for his domestic woes."" Donald not only eschews controversial theses, his analytic level remains far too low to provide perspective on foreign-policy stakes or the socio-economic pressures conditioning Reconstruction. In the first volume, Donald deliberately refrained from discussing ""the cause"" of the Civil War; there is something to be said for the issues-don't-belong-in-a-biography approach; but in this case scholarly diligence and smooth exposition simply don't suffice for rib-sticking intellectual stature. However, both the first volume's success and Donald's very well-deserved reputation as one of our best American historians ensure demand and deferential attention.

Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1970

Categories: NONFICTION