Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Mount Auburn and The Civil War | Page 5

Lincoln himself more than
once credited the Massachusetts
contingent for their crucial role
in ending slavery and winning
the war.
He not only joined the ranks
of the abolitionists in his outlook;
he worked with them to end
slavery and to champion some
form of legal equality. Shortly
before he died, he endorsed
limited black suffrage and began
to envision racial equality.
Charles Sumner, the abolitionist
senator from Massachusetts,
assumed such high stature in the
North that his fellow congress-
men passed a version of his Civil
Rights bill in 1875, a year after
he died, “mainly as a gesture
to his departed spirit.” Harper’s
Weekly, perhaps the most popular
northern newspaper of its day,
devoted two full issues to Sumner’s death and funeral at
Mount Auburn, and declared tha t his passing “more deeply
touched the heart of the American people” than any event
since Lincoln’s assassination. 6
John Stauffer is a leading authority on antislavery, social protest
movements and interracial friendship. He is a Harvard University
professor of English and American Literature and African Ameri-
can Studies, and Chair of the History of American Civilization
program at Harvard. He is the author of eight books and more
than 50 articles, on topics ranging from the Civil War era to visual
culture. His essays have appeared in Time, the New York Times,
the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, Raritan, and the New
York Sun.
“The Funeral of Charles
Sumner” sketches by
L. Hollis for Harper’s
Weekly, April 4, 1874.
Above, right: “At the
Gate of Mount Auburn
Cemetery”
Left: “Dust to Dust”
Congress had passed the Thirteenth Amendment in January 1865, and by April 1865 nearly three-
quarters of the states had ratified it. See “Banquet in Charleston,” The Liberator, May 12, 1865; and
especially Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth
Amendment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chap. 6.
1
“Banquet in Charleston,” The Liberator, May 12, 1865; Thomas E. Schneider, Lincoln’s Defense of
Politics: The Public Man and His Opponents in the Slavery Crisis (Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 2006), 105
2
On the distinctions between antislavery advocates and abolitionists, see David Brion Davis, “The
Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Antislavery Thought,” From Homicide to Slavery
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 238–57; John Stauffer, “Fighting the Devil With His
Own Fire,” The Abolitionist Imagination, Andrew Delbanco et al., The Abolitionist Imagination
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 57–80. “Emancipationist” was coined in 1862
by the Continental Monthly. See Continental Monthly, 1 (January–February 1862): 97–98, 113–14;
James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality (1964; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1992), 90–93
3
John Stauffer, GIANTS: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (New York:
Twelve, 2008); James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln,
and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007
4
Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–
1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 5; McPherson, Struggle for Equality,
81–90, 99–133, 229–32, 341–66, 417–32; McPherson, “Abolitionists and the Civil Rights Act of
1875,” The Journal of American History 52 (December 1965): 493–510; Vorenberg, Final Freedom,
chapters 3–7; Garrett Epps, Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal
Rights in Post-Civil War America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), chapters 6–11; Philip Dray, Capital
Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen (Boston:
Mariner Books, 2010); Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During
Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); Foner, Reconstruction: America’s
Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), chapters 1–2, 6–10.
5
On the significance of the Reconstruction Amendments, see Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights:
Creation and Reconstruction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), part II; and Amar,
America’s Constitution: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2006), chap. 10.
James M. McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1975), 14 (quoted); McPherson, “Abolitionists and the Civil Rights Act
of 1875,” The Journal of American History 52 (December 1965): 506; “Charles Sumner,” Harper’s
Weekly, April 4, 1874, Front Page (quoted); Harper’s Weekly, June 20, 1874; Henry James, William
Wetmore Story and His Friends: From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton,
Mifflin & Co., 1903), 1:30–31, 234, 2:31; David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner (1960, 1970;
repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1996); Stauffer, “Fighting the Devil with His Own Fire,” 64.
6
The first full biography of Sumner, exhaustive in scope and magisterial in style, remains the best. See
Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, 4 vols. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893).
On 19th-century memories of the abolitionists, see James M. McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy:
From Reconstruction to the NAACP (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 3–142; Tulloch,
Debate, 71–74; Blight, Race and Reunion, 231–37; Julie Roy Jeffrey, Abolitionists Remember: Anti-
slavery Autobiographies and the Unfinished Work of Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2008).
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