I am now brought to the practical question, to which I have already alluded: How the public burdens shall be lightened.
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 country must suffer inconceivably under such a dispensation.
Of the twenty-five hundred millions which we now owe, whether in greenbacks or bonds, every dollar must be paid, sooner or later, or be ignobly repudiated.
Oh, yet a nobler task awaits thy hand, (For what can war but endless war still breed?) Till truth and right from violence be freed, And Public Faith cleared from the shameful brand Of public fraud.
It remains now that we should overcome that other enemy, which, hardly less malignant than war itself, would despoil the Nation of its good name and take from it all the might of honesty.
Every loan at that time was a contract of bottomry on the Nation,--like money lent to a ship in a strange port, and conditioned on its arrival safe at home,--so that it failed entirely, if Slavery, by the aid of Foreign Powers, established…
Love of country entered into them, and made them more than money.
It was not in the ordinary spirit of money-lending that those contributions were made.
A national debt shares for the time the exceptional character of war itself.
It is one of the calamities of war, that, while it compels the employment of large means, it blunts the moral sense, and breeds too frequently an insensibility to the obligations incurred.
Slavery was in itself a perpetual repudiation, and slave-masters were unblushing repudiators.
Rejecting all obligations of humanity and justice, it easily rejected the obligations of Public Faith.
It was not unnatural that a State mad with Slavery should dishonor its bonds.
The dishonor of these obligations, whatever form it may assume, and whatever pretext it may adopt, is nothing but Repudiation.
Such an attempt disturbs the reason and shocks the moral sense.
It is dishonest to force inconvertible paper without interest in payment of an interest-bearing obligation.
It is contrary to reason that a bond should be paid in an inferior obligation.
But the obligation in our bonds is to pay “dollars” also, whenever the bonds are paid; it may be after five years, or, in the discretion of the Nation, not till twenty years, but, when paid, it must be in “dollars.” Such is the…
To pay with another promise is to renew, and not to discharge the debt.
The promise in our greenbacks carries with it an ultimate obligation to pay the silver dollar whose chink is so familiar in the commerce of the world.
As well say, that, on a promise to pay so many francs in France, or so many pounds sterling in England, you could honestly acquit yourself by handing over a scrap of printed paper, inconvertible in value.
On its face a greenback is a promise to pay a certain number of dollars.
Therefore do I insist that these representations are a part of the contract by which the Nation is bound.
Until their authority is disowned by Congress, and their representations discarded, it is difficult to see why their language must not be treated as part of the contract, at least in all sales subsequent to its publication.
As testimony to the meaning of the bonds, it is important; but considering that all these persons represented the National Treasury, and that they were the agents of the Nation for the sale of these very bonds, their representations are…
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