Charles Sumner

(1811 - 1874)

Born in Boston, Charles Sumner served as a senator and leader of the Radical Republicans from 1851 to 1874. After an 1856 speech in which Sumner castigated slaveholders, South Carolina representative Preston Brooks beat him with a cane on the Senate floor, nearly killing him. After Sumner died of a heart attack he became the fourth person to lie in state at the Capitol Rotunda. His pallbearers included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.