This 1877 posthumous portrait of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner (1811-1874) by Darius Cobb was based on a photograph of Sumner by James Wallace Black taken in 1866. The portrait shows Sumner, a gifted orator and ardent reformer, at the hour of the great victory over slavery and at the height of his senatorial powers as chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, but still with cane in hand, having never fully recovered from the severe beating he suffered ten years before when he was attacked by a fellow member of Congress, Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina.