Hereafter, when one desires to prove Slavery irrational and unconstitutional, he will go to that speech as to an arsenal.
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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It is time that the Republican party pursued its own course, without asking the counsel or permission of its adversaries.
Sumner stands forth the personification of a great and a free State, and the representative man of a great and powerful political party in fifteen of the sovereign States of this Union.
His is the tongue to the Abolition lyre, giving it utterance, bringing out its genuine tones.
They dare not let the conservative portion of the people at the North know that it is the design of the party with which they are associated to make uncompromising war upon the South,--to destroy its institutions at any cost of blood, to…
The South ought to feel obliged to Sumner for betraying the designs of the party.
It is manifestly the revenge of the orator on the institution that through Brooks’s arm struck him down so brutally.
It is what it professes to be, an examination of the institution of Slavery itself,--and we venture to say a more acute, comprehensive, exhaustive, and powerful exposition of the whole subject never was made.
Whoever wants to understand what American Slavery is must read this speech; whoever wants to make headway against the ripening public feeling by defending Slavery must first try to answer the arguments of this speech.
Offensive as that speech proved to the Slave-Masters, this one is ten times worse.
This speech, for the first time in the history of Congressional speeches, sets forth, without the slightest veil or mincing of the matter, the deformities, obliquities, and immoralities of the Slavery system.
Sumner give to all his speeches an attraction difficult to resist, even by those who dislike the doctrines he proclaims.
His last speech is characterized not only by his usual brilliancy of style, but contains a striking array of facts and statistics which must have cost much patient toil in collecting.
It boldly sets itself up as divine in origin, Christian in practice, the best form of civilized society, and challenges our scrutiny and approbation.
In this day of compromise and timidity, of bated breath and base concession, when it is the loathsome fashion to say that the Slavery Question should be discussed only as a matter of profit and loss, it is refreshing to hear a Senator…
Do they not deliver long arguments to prove that Slavery is right, just, benign, civilizing, and necessary,--that it is the proper condition of the negro and the working-man?
And is any free Northern man so poor a poltroon as to say that these men shall not be replied to?
What! shall all the South be privileged to praise and applaud Human Slavery, and not even Charles Sumner be allowed to describe it as it really is?
It paints American Slavery as it is, and as it has never been painted before.
No Republican can look upon the picture which Charles Sumner draws of this Barbarism without feeling his heart swell with hatred against it, and without recording a new vow to labor unceasingly for its extinction.
He has dared to grapple directly with the Hell-born monster itself.
The whole slaveholding Propaganda of the Senate might dash themselves against it in a compact body, without breaking the smallest fibre of any of its various parts.
Throughout, its spirit was lofty, dignified, and bold, indicative of high moral intrepidity and a noble purpose.
The Massachusetts Senator has led a column into this fortress, which, in the name of God and Humanity, must eventually silence all its guns and level its last stone to the ground.
Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.
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