Like many of his Republican colleagues, Sumner revised his views and called for immediate emancipation during the Civil War. Unlike most of them, he steadfastly promoted far- reaching postwar Reconstruction policies. Throughout his many years in the Senate his goal, said Sumner, was "absolute human equality, secured, assured, and invulnerable."
Charles Sumner was born in Boston to a couple whose seventeenth-century New England lineages were impeccable, but who were far from prosperous "Boston Brahmins." His mother, Relief Jacob Sumner, supported herself as a seamstress until she married Charles Pinckney Sumner, a Harvard-educated attorney whose interests lay more with history and literature than with the law. He did not become financially secure until he was appointed Suffolk County sheriff in 1826--just in time to afford a university education for his precocious son. Young Sumner graduated from Harvard in 1830. A year later, after considerable indecision, he entered Harvard Law School and completed its two-year professional-training program in 1833.
Sumner's brilliance at Harvard Law School earned him the patronage of its most distinguished teacher, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, and Sumner was groomed as Story's eventual replacement on the faculty.
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