The Great Abolitionist with Stephen Puleo

Join The West End Museum for an author talk with Stephen Puleo on his book, The Great Abolitionist: Charles Sumner and the Fight for a More Perfect Union.

Trident Booksellers will be at the event, if you would like to purchase a copy.

About the Book

is the first major biography of Charles Sumner to be published in over fifty years. It tells the story of one of the most influential non-presidents in American history (included in this exclusive club were Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King, Jr.) – and far more influential than many presidents – a leader who exhibited true courage and authenticity.

In the tempestuous mid-nineteenth century, as slavery consumed congressional debate and America careened toward civil war and split apart – when the very future of the nation hung in the balance – Charles Sumner’s voice rang strongest, bravest, and most unwavering.

Where others preached compromise and moderation, he denounced slavery’s evils to all who would listen and demanded that it be wiped out of existence. More than any other person of his era, he blazed the trail on the country’s long, uneven, and ongoing journey toward realizing its full promise to become a more perfect union.

Before and during the Civil War, at great personal sacrifice – which included enduring a vicious beating that nearly killed him – Sumner was the conscience of the North and the most influential politician fighting for abolition. Throughout Reconstruction, no one championed the rights of emancipated people more than he did.

To Sumner, the two concepts of abolitionism and equal rights were inseparable and could not be untethered. Freedom and equality embodied the founding principles of the United States as stated in the Declaration of Independence, and in the Constitution’s guarantee of a republican form of government. Only by enshrining these rights forever could the United States survive.

This view was first considered radical and unworkable, dismissed as the ranting of rabble-rousers on the fringe – positions at first not held even by Lincoln and other anti-slavery Republicans. But Sumner’s influence gradually took hold, permeated the party’s dogma, and finally became the prevalent and official view of Lincoln and the nation.

Through the force of his words and his will, he moved America toward the twin goals of abolitionism and equal rights, which he fought for literally until the day he died. He laid the cornerstone arguments that civil rights advocates would build upon over the next century as the country strove to achieve equality among the races.

This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Host or Publisher The West End Museum