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He was a prophet of judgment, not a practitioner of compromise.

Sumner’s moral clarity was greater than his political wisdom. He had all his life been a peace man in the widest sense….Thus in order to support the government in the Civil War he had to compromise with his own conscience, and he did this on the ground that it was a war for the abolition of that slavery, which, to him, was the sum of all iniquities.” 1 To Sumner’s mind the paramount object of the war was the abolition of slavery. Sumner not seldom quoted such Lincolnisms to me, and asked me with an air of innocent bewilderment, whether I could guess what the President could possible have meant. Sumner frequently – I might say almost always – failed to see the point of the quaint anecdotes or illustration with which Lincoln was fond of elucidating his argument, as with a flashlight. Being entirely devoid of the sense of humor himself, Mr. Lincoln had said, and then again of other sayings which were unintelligible to him and seemed to him inconsistent with a serious appreciation of the tasks before us. He frequently told me of profound and wise things Mr.

Wisconsin Republican Carl Schurz observed that “Mr. Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner was especially humorless and obstinate. Herman Belz, Reconstruction the Union: Theory and Policy during the Civil WarĪs a group, the Republican Radicals in Congress lacked the sense of a humor that Abraham Lincoln had in abundance.