With these observations I quit this question, anxious only that the recent Usurpation of the Senate may not be drawn into a precedent hereafter.
Charles Sumner
The Public Record
Charles Sumner was an American lawyer and statesman who represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate from 1851 until his death in 1874. Before and during the American Civil War, he was a leading American advocate for the abolition of slavery, and after the war he was a key figure in the Reconstruction era, during which he and other Radical Republicans successfully fought to end slavery and ensure basic rights for Black Americans. He continued advocating for racial equality until his death, lobbying in his final days for a civil rights bill that served as a model for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Historians credit Sumner with coining the phrase "equality before the law," which he first used as part of an early attempt to integrate Boston's public school system.
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Sumner remarked that he had visited the jail, and found it neither more nor less than a mere human sty; and since the Senate had undertaken to send a fellow-creature there, he thought that the least it could do was to see that something…
A wise forecast, if not able at once to provide all the means needful for its salubrity and adornment, will at least avoid embarrassing the future, when half a million of souls have built their homes about the ancient Trimountain.
I wish much to see there, among other things, an arboretum, where every tree that can bear our climate shall find its classified place,--pleasing the eye by its beauty, protecting the body by its shade, and speaking to all by the voice of…
President, this act, it seems to me, is conspicuous, both from the person against whom it was directed and the place where it was attempted.
Sanborn, having suffered this outrage at the hands of persons claiming to act in the name of the Senate, has a right to redress in this body: and I assert, still further, that this body owes something to its own character; it ought to wash…
It was a mob of kidnappers, who went there in the name of the Senate of the United States to seize a citizen of Massachusetts.
Sanborn from him.… The arrest was as brutal, cowardly, and outrageous a proceeding as I ever knew in seven years’ experience as sheriff of that county.
He has thrown the challenge down to that committee and this Senate, before the whole country, refusing openly to testify; and yet that committee make no motion to bring Ex-Governor Wise before the Senate, and compel him to testify.
Sanborn by an attempt which I characterize here as simply an act of kidnapping.
President, I think that I ought not to listen to such a proposition as has been made by the Senator from Virginia with reference to this memorial, without one word in reply.
Here is a memorial from a gentleman of perfect respectability, charged with no crime, presumed to be innocent, complaining of gross outrage at the hands of certain persons pretending to act in the name of the Senate.
I feel it my duty to establish a precedent also in this case, by entering an open, unequivocal protest against such attempt.
But such a state of things would be monstrous; and any interpretation of the Constitution is monstrous which thus ties his hands.
Mercy and justice would be rendered not merely by halves, but, owing to the inability of prisoners, from poverty, to pay the other half of the fine, they would be entirely arrested.
The power of pardon, which is attached by the Constitution to offences generally, should not be curtailed.
It is a generous prerogative, and should be exercised generously.
But if it be the duty of a good judge to extend his jurisdiction, how much more is it the duty of a good President to extend the field of his clemency!
Under the Constitution of the United States, and according to its true spirit, the pardoning power of the President is coextensive with the power to punish, except in the solitary case of impeachment.
Why should the President hesitate to exercise it?
But where the imprisonment, as in the present case, is not a specific part of the sentence, but simply an alternative in the nature of a remedy, to secure the payment of the fine, the power of the President cannot be less than in the…
Nature has made the weak in mind or body for slaves.” In the same vein, a Democratic paper of South Carolina has said, “Slavery is the natural and normal condition of the laboring man, black or white.
So far as all private parties are concerned, the imprisonment is a mere matter of remedy, which can be discharged without divesting the beneficiaries of any rights; and since imprisonment for debt has been abolished, it is reasonable…
President,--I hold in my hand, and desire to present, a memorial from the representatives of the Society of Friends in New England, formally adopted at a public meeting, and authenticated by their clerk, in which they ask for the repeal of…
Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.
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