The discussion of Slavery will proceed, wherever two or three are gathered together,--by the fireside, on the highway, at the public meeting, in the church.
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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The movement against Slavery is from the Everlasting Arm.
It may not be felt yet in the high places of office and power, but all who can put their ears humbly to the ground will hear and comprehend its incessant and advancing tread.
A popular belief at this moment makes Slavery a national institution, and of course renders its support a national duty.
As Slavery assumes to be national, so, by an equally strange perversion, Freedom is degraded to be sectional, and all who uphold it, under the National Constitution, are made to share this same epithet.
Honest efforts to secure its blessings everywhere within the jurisdiction of Congress are scouted as sectional; and this cause, which the founders of our National Government had so much at heart, is called Sectionalism.
On this unanswerable proposition I take my stand, and here commences my argument.
If Slavery be national, if there be any power in the National Government to uphold this institution,--as in the recent Slave Act,--it must be by virtue of the Constitution.
According to the uniform admission of courts and jurists in Europe, again and again promulgated in our country, Slavery can be derived only from clear and special recognition.
Slavery is condemned by reason and the Laws of Nature.
Of course every power to uphold Slavery must have an origin as distinct as that of Slavery itself.
Every presumption must be as strong against such a power as against Slavery.
It must be declared by unambiguous words, incapable of a double sense.
Slavery, I repeat, is not mentioned in the Constitution.
The name Slave does not pollute this Charter of our Liberties.
With electric might for Freedom, they send a pervasive influence through every provision, clause, and word of the Constitution.
Each and all make Slavery impossible as a national institution.
They shut off from the Constitution every fountain out of which it can be derived.
By the Preamble the Constitution speaks for Freedom.
By these declarations the Fathers speak as the Constitution speaks.
But Slavery cannot be national, unless this idea is distinctly and unequivocally admitted into the Constitution.
Two questions naturally arise: If we ratify the Constitution, shall we do anything by our act to hold the blacks in slavery? or shall we become partakers of other men's sins?
Thus distinctly and constantly, from the very lips of the framers of the Constitution, we learn the falsehood of recent assumptions in favor of Slavery and in derogation of Freedom.
Earlier than the Constitution was the Declaration of Independence, embodying, in immortal words, those primal truths to which our country pledged itself with baptismal vows as a Nation.
Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.
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