Its creed ceases to be Republicanism and becomes Grantism; its members cease to be Republicans and become Grant-men.
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.
gutenberg.org
With me, the party was country and mankind; but with the adoption of all these Presidential pretensions the party loses its distinctive character and drops from its sphere.
I put these questions solemnly, as a member of the Republican Party, with all the earnestness of a life devoted to the triumph of this party, but which I served always with the conviction that I gave up nothing that was meant for country…
It will be for impartial History to determine if our Quarreller, who treated his great office as a personal perquisite, and all his life long was against that Enfranchisement to which he put his name, does not fall into the same category.
The flattery of life is then superseded by the truthful record, and rulers do not escape judgment.
Men take their places in history according to their deeds.
The President can always choose his relations with any citizen.
Evidently our President has never read the Eleventh Commandment: “A President of the United States shall never quarrel.” At least he lives in perpetual violation of it, listening to stories from horse-cars, gobbling the gossip of his…
Any presentment of the President would be imperfect which did not show how this ungovernable personality breaks forth in quarrel, making him the great Presidential quarreller of our history.
And here is a new manifestation of that sovereign egotism which no taciturnity can cover up, and a new motive for inquiry into its pernicious influence.
If his partisans are exacting, vindictive, and unjust, they act only in harmony with his nature, too truly represented in them.
As a candidate for reëlection he invites judgment, while partisans acting in his behalf make it absolutely necessary by the brutality of their assault on faithful Republicans unwilling to see their party, like the Presidential office, a…
With sorrow unspeakable have I made this exposure of pretensions, which, for the sake of republican institutions, every good citizen should wish expunged from history; but I had no alternative.
Alas, that he did not see the infinite debt of friendship, kindness, and protection due to that people, so that instead of monitors and war-ships, breathing violence, he had sent a messenger of peace and good-will!
Alas, that our President should be willing to wield the giant strength of the Great Republic in trampling upon the representative government of the African race!
As one who for years has stood by the side of this much-oppressed people, sympathizing always in their woes and struggling for them, I felt the blow which the President dealt, and it became the more intolerable from the heartless attempts…
Do I err in any way, am I not entirely right, when I say that here was unpardonable outrage to the African race?
For more than two generations Hayti had been independent, entitled under International Law to equality among nations, and since Emancipation in our country commended to us as an example of self-government, being the first in the history of…
How a Chief Magistrate with four millions of colored fellow-citizens could have done this thing passes comprehension.
In obedience to irrepressible sentiments, and according to the logic of my life, I felt it my duty to speak; but the President would not forgive me, and his peculiar representatives found me disloyal to the party which I had served so long…
The American people rose against the undertaking and insisted upon its abandonment.
To one who had defied the Constitution, on which depends the liberty of all, and then defied International Law, on which depends the peace of the world, a single citizen immured in a distant dungeon was of small moment.
What was the liberty of an American citizen compared with the Presidential prerogative?
Naturally force was needed to keep the usurper in power while he sold his country, and naturally such a transaction required a Presidential Aide-de-Camp unknown to Constitution or Law, rather than a civilian duly appointed according to…
Such was the strange beginning, illegal, unconstitutional, and offensive in every particular, but showing the Presidential character.
Politicians like Charles Sumner
