A time traveler to the quarter-century of Charles Sumner’s service in the U.S. Senate—from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s—would return to the 21st century with good news and bad news. The good news is that America experienced politics more bitter than anything we witness today, and survived. The bad news is that the surviving entailed a civil war. Sumner is one of those historical figures who looks better from the safe distance of knowing how things turned out. He was the Senate’s counterpart