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Podcast: Commonwealth Club of California Podcast
Episode: Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation
Description: Charles Sumner is mainly known as the abolitionist statesman who suffered a brutal caning on the Senate floor by the proslavery congressman Preston Brooks in 1856. This violent episode has obscured Sumner’s status as the most passionate champion of equal rights and multiracial democracy of his time. A friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, an ally of Frederick Douglass, and an adviser to Abraham Lincoln, Sumner helped the Union win the Civil War and pass into law the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
In his new book Charles Sumn...