[
180]
Charles Pinckney Sumner, the father of
Charles Sumner, was a man of an essentially veracious nature.
He was high sheriff of
Suffolk County, Massachusetts, and when there was a criminal to be executed he always performed the office himself.
Once when some one inquired why he did not delegate such a disagreeable task to one of his deputies, he is said to have replied, “Simply because it is disagreeable.”
It was this elevated sense of moral responsibility which formed the keynote of his son's character.
Charles Sumner's mother was
Miss Relief Jacobs, a name in which we distinguish at once a mixture of the Hebrew and the
Puritan.
She belonged in fact to a Christianized
Jewish family, but how long since her ancestors became Christianized remains in doubt.
Yet it is easy to recognize the Hebrew element in
Sumner's nature; the inflexibility of purpose, the absolute self-devotion, and even the prophetic forecast.
Sumner was an old Hebrew prophet in the guise of an American statesman.
True to his mother's name, he was at once a Puritan and an Israelite in whom there was no guile; for he was wholly exempt from covetousness and other meaner qualities of the Hebrew nature.
In such