![](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sites/default/files/styles/tall_rectangle_custom_user_small_2x/public/images/contributor/charles_sumner_by_southworth_hawes_c1850.jpg?itok=ubhYMcgd×tamp=1580836519)
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.