Charles Sumner

It will be for you to determine if there shall be peace between the two races, and if American citizens shall enjoy everywhere within the jurisdiction of the Republic all the rights of citizenship, free from harm or menace, and with the…

Here permit me to say, that, if anybody is driven from anywhere, it will not be the loyal citizen, whether old or new.

The carpet-bag is the symbol of our whole population: there is nobody who is not a “carpet-bagger,” or at least the descendant of one.

Not less wicked is the loud-mouthed attack on immigrants, whom Rebels choose to call “carpet-baggers,”--that is, American citizens, who, in the exercise of the rights of citizenship, carry to the South the blood, the capital, and the ideas…

The whole pretension of a “war of races” is an invention to cover the brutality of the oppressors.

If there be a “war of races,” as is the apologetic defence of the murderers, then it is war declared and carried on by whites.

Persecution in all its untold cruelties, ending in martyrdom, rages over a wide-spread land.

If the victim is black, then it is a “war of races”; if white, then he is nothing but a “carpet-bagger”; and so, whether black or white, he is a victim.

The terrible atrocity of these acts is aggravated by the rallying cries of the murderers.

It is enough that a man is a patriot for Rebels to make war upon him.

Outrage in every form is directed against loyal persons, without distinction of color.

The opposition to the Reconstruction Acts manifests itself in an inconceivable brutality, kindred to that of Slavery, and fit prelude to the revival of this odious wrong.

He needs the rights of an American citizen; and you are to declare by your votes if he shall have them.

Beginning with a caste as offensive and irreligious as that of Hindostan, and adding to it the pretensions of an oligarchy in government, the representatives of the old system were preparing to trample upon an oppressed race.

If not a slave of the old type, the freedman was a slave of a new type, invented by his unrepentant master as the substitute for what he had surrendered to the power of the Nation.

To call such a condition Liberty is preposterous.

In the face of this unanswerable evidence, who will say that it was not proposed to revive Slavery?

Behind all these was violence, assassination, murder, with the Ku-Klux-Klan constituting the lawless police of this new system.

In Mississippi he could not “rent or lease any lands or tenements except in incorporated towns or cities,” thus keeping him a serf attached to the soil of his master.

The emancipated African, shut out from all participation in the Government, despoiled of the ballot, was enmeshed in a web of laws which left him no better than a fly in the toils of a spider.

Not to speak of peonage, as it existed in Mexico, there is a denial of rights, with exclusion from all participation in the Government and subjection to oppressive restraints, which of itself is a most direful slavery, under which the…

The original type, as received from Africa and perpetuated here, might not appear; but this is not the only form of the hateful wrong.

Let these be overthrown or abandoned, and I know no adequate safeguard against an outrageous oppression of the freedman, which will be Slavery under another name.

The common man may counterbalance the vote of the great statesman or great judge, but he cannot counterbalance this influence.

At the ballot-box the humblest citizen is the equal of the great statesman or the great judge.