This volume captures Charles Sumner at the height of his power as the Senate became the battlefield for America's second founding. Beginning in December 1865, Sumner mobilized the full force of his rhetorical mastery against President Johnson's Reconstruction policies and the resistance of former Confederate states. Here are the actual speeches where he argued for universal suffrage, equal protection under law, and the constitutional guarantees that would become the 14th Amendment. The prose crackles with moral certainty. Sumner names the violence done to freedmen, dissects the legal maneuvering of reactionaries, and insists that the nation keep its promises to the four million people it had freed. These are primary documents from a man who believed politics was morality elevated, and who refused to softening his demands for justice even as the country grew tired of his intensity. For anyone seeking to understand how Reconstruction was fought, and why it was lost, these speeches are essential. They preserve the language of the radicals who believed the Constitution's promises belonged to all citizens, and who watched those promises be betrayed in real time.
