Charles Sumner is mainly known as the abolitionist statesman who suffered a brutal caning on the Senate floor in 1856. This violent episode has obscured Sumner’s status as the most passionate champion of equal rights of his time. A friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, an ally of Frederick Douglass and an adviser to Abraham Lincoln, Sumner helped the Union win the Civil War. In a comprehensive but fast-paced narrative, Zaakir Tameez presents Sumner as one of America’s forgotten founding fathers, a constitutional visionary who helped to rewrite the post-Civil War Constitution and give birth to modern civil rights law. He explores Sumner’s critical partnerships with the nation’s first generation of Black lawyers and civil rights leaders, whose legal contributions to Reconstruction have been overlooked for far too long.