A Quarter-Century of CRB

The silver anniversary may be yours, but the lavish gifts are ours!

What a robust expanded issue you put together for the occasion—like an entire semester’s worth of Claremont education between two covers. Truly a journal of political thought and statesmanship.

Congratulations, CRB! Here’s to 25 years, and to many more.

Daniel Helmbold
Pensacola, FL

Charles Sumner’s Flaws

Georgetown University Law Professor Randy Barnett is among America’s most thoughtful legal scholars. Nevertheless, although his review of Zaakir Tameez’s Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation appreciates the new biography’s comprehensiveness and strengths (“Radical Republican,” Fall 2025–Winter 2026), it does not give readers an understanding of Sumner’s fatal weaknesses.

The Massachusetts senator’s self-righteous indignation blinded him to the statesmanship of President Lincoln’s pro-Union strategy. Sumner never understood that the Union couldn’t have won a war fought primarily for the abolition of slavery at all cost. And that defeat would be a moral as well as a political disaster.

As Tameez notes, the tall, handsome fop with great hair became “the Republican party’s mascot and symbolic leader.” But Sumner, as Tameez also illustrates, was a bloviator, whose moralism stemmed from his vanity. He was consumed with himself when basking in the good opinions of others and damning the rest.

Tameez records how Sumner’s racially integrated boyhood Beacon Hill neighborhood in Boston and his activist father gave him the bizarre perspective that the bloody Haitian revolution was a facsimile of the American one. One must wonder, too, how Sumner’s antebellum insistence on integrated schools might have aided in winning the war against slavery. At every turn, he stressed the injustice of racial divisions, which were certainly present, while Lincoln carefully sought an American consensus against slavery, based on it being a form of theft and thus an assault on natural rights. (See, for example, Lincoln’s speech on the Dred Scott decision, June 26, 1857.)

Tameez makes clear that, for all of Sumner’s criticism of Lincoln, Lincoln realized he needed to keep the insufferable Sumner close, so he flattered him and even enlisted Mary Lincoln in the cause. What a disaster an untamed Sumner might have been for Lincoln. “I must do my whole duty…without looking to consequences,” Sumner preened. His outspoken insistence on racially defined “equal rights” might have led to Lincoln’s defeat in 1864. It is entirely fitting that this ex-Harvard Law professor thought that his having taught international law and having been a tourist in Paris qualified him to be chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Later, when President Ulysses S. Grant ran for re-election in 1872, his victory in the Civil War counted for nothing with Sumner, whose arrogance led him to endorse Grant’s Democratic opponent, the odious, anti-Lincoln journalist Horace Greeley. Sumner was especially irate at Grant for wanting to annex Santo Domingo (without Sumner considering that such a new state might allow black Americans to exercise their political rights and thus show they were fully capable of exercising the duties of citizenship and of statesmanship). It is a measure of black Americans’ love for Sumner that Frederick Douglass maintained his friendship with him despite Sumner’s contempt for Grant.

Charles Sumner gave only lip service to the Declaration of Independence and never understood that the equality of natural rights ultimately requires government by consent. Instead, as Tameez notes, Sumner invented the portentous but vacuous phrase “equality before the law.” His vanity, and the Progressive movement he prefigured, undermined the Republican Party’s Reconstruction policy by eschewing natural rights and creating lingering injustices for Americans of all races. His heirs are today’s DEI university demagogues.

Ken Masugi
Rockville, MD

Randy E. Barnett replies:

I thank my old friend Ken Masugi for providing balance to my review of Zaakir Tameez’s biography of Charles Sumner. Because historians, including his own biographers, have so maligned Sumner, I deliberately structured my review to emphasize the not-inconsiderable positive contributions he made to the struggle against, and ultimate victory over, the curse of chattel slavery. Still, in the course of my review, I noted that “Tameez is unstinting in his critical evaluation of Sumner’s personality, and candid about how his character flaws drove potential allies away from him, limiting his effectiveness as a legislator. This is no hagiography.” Masugi is right to say that my review does not “detail” Sumner’s many flaws. My aim was to give skeptical or unaware readers a reason to learn more about Sumner than they currently know, and to show why Tameez’s book is worth reading to that end. The fact that Masugi repeatedly cites this book to support his negative characterizations of Sumner shows that Tameez provides a balanced treatment of his subject.

I am skeptical of Masugi’s final polemical claims that Sumner “gave only lip service to the Declaration of Independence” and that his “vanity, and the Progressive movement he prefigured, undermined the Republican Party’s Reconstruction policy by eschewing natural rights and creating lingering injustices for Americans of all races. His heirs are today’s DEI university demagogues.” These claims require more evidence to substantiate than Masugi could present in his letter, or I can in this reply. I will merely offer this quote from Sumner’s “No Property in Man” speech to the Senate in April 1864:

But no American need be at a loss to designate some of the distinctive elements of a republic according to the idea of American institutions. These will be found, first, in the Declaration of Independence, by which it is solemnly announced “that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And they will be found, secondly, in that other guarantee and prohibition of the Constitution, in harmony with the Declaration of Independence; “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” Such are some of the essential elements of a “republican form of government,” which cannot be disowned by us without disowning the very muniments of our liberties.

Or as Sumner put it in an 1867 speech to the Cooper Institute about the importance of the nation: “In one word, the Declaration of Independence must be recognized as a fundamental law.”

I urge readers not to let the final paragraph of Ken Masugi’s letter deter them from reading Tameez’s book. They will learn much from this fair, well-written, and deeply researched examination of the life and times of Charles Sumner. Readers can then make up their own minds about the flamboyant and controversial senator from Massachusetts.

Escape from New York

In his superb, if depressing, profile of Zohran Mamdani (“Mayor Mamdani’s New York,” Fall 2025–Winter 2026), Christopher Caldwell notes in passing that the new mayor’s “particular connection to Islam has not been much examined. His mother is a Hindu. His father is not conspicuously religious.” Though Hizzoner’s relationship to religious faith may be purely transactional, it is the voters of New York that seem to be in the grip of a monomaniacal zeal—for liberal pieties. Caldwell astutely observes important demographic changes in the City’s makeup over the past three decades. But what besides Jonestown-level fanaticism could lead New Yorkers to seek a return to the 1970s dystopia from which they had, in the ’90s, briefly escaped?

Santiago Lopez
Union City, NJ

The Ancient City

Your reviewer found it hard to understand the main points in my book Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity (“Lost in the City,” Fall 2025–Winter 2026). So let me summarize them.

During its history, the polis turned its back on lordly power, single rule, and government by the rich, in favor of institutionalized direct democracy. The process took from 350 BCE to 150 BCE. It proved irreversible, and constitutes a major phenomenon in world history. I call this the “Great Convergence.” Aristotle lived to witness its beginning, writing about it within his own ideological frameworks and constraints.

As regimes of popular power, democratic poleis laid heavy burdens on the rich, in the form of taxation, semi-voluntary contributions (leitourgiai), and gifts (euergesiai). The proceeds paid for state services, infrastructure, and the costs of participation by the less well-off. Democratic control of institutions incentivized the rich toward intra-elite competition rather than collaboration. I call this the “tragedy of the elites.” The rich, however, received symbolic compensation in the form of honors and protection for property rights. The polis bargain brought robust economic prosperity and constitutes another major historical phenomenon.

In other words, the polis offers a historical case of participatory democracy in action. It matters to show this thoroughly across its whole history. Hence, my close attention to a mass of detail, documentary and archaeological. Aristotle reveled in the detailed history of many city-states, big and small, and I follow his lead, extending his vision geographically and chronologically to offer an Aristotelian analysis applied to several hundred years of polis history after Aristotle’s time, down to 400 CE.

Finally, since the polis liked to define itself by civic virtue, solidarity, and social justice, my final point is: Was the polis also constituted by exclusion and exploitation? Or were such phenomena contingent and mitigated in practice? The answers to these questions concern the possibility of creating, in our world, the Greek polis without slavery which Max Horkheimer thought the reasonable outcome of politics. Polis history matters very much.

John Ma
Columbia University
New York, NY