Charles Sumner: His Complete Works, Volume 06 (of 20)

This is Charles Sumner in his own words: raw, furious, and unrepentant. Volume Six gathers letters and speeches from the Massachusetts senator at the height of the Bleeding Kansas crisis, when the nation teetered toward civil war over whether slavery would spread westward. Sumner writes from a sickbed, yearning for the Senate floor, rallying Massachusetts youth to the antislavery cause, and coordinating with fellow Republicans against the Kansas-Nebraska Act's betrayal. Here is the moral absolutist who called slavery a "crime" and "the sum of all villainies," the man so uncompromising that fellow senator Preston Brooks beat him nearly to death on the Senate floor in 1856. These pages crackle with the righteous certainty that made Sumner both a hero in the North and anathema in the South. For anyone seeking to understand the ideological engine that drove the Union toward war, there is no substitute for hearing the abolitionist movement's most unyielding voice speak directly across the centuries.