It is my duty now to show its true character as a warning against its author.
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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In this multiform disobedience we behold our President.
This whole business, absolutely indefensible from beginning to end, being wrong at every point, is the special and most characteristic product of the Administration, into which it infused and projected itself more than into anything else.
The Presidential pretension extends everywhere; nor is it easy to measure the arrogance of corruption or the honest indignation it quickens into life.
Here was intolerable tyranny, with demoralization like that of the slave-market.
Offices in the custom-house were openly bartered for votes in the State Convention.
With him a custom-house seems less a place for the collection of revenue than an engine of political influence, through which his dictatorship may be maintained.
In this tyrannical spirit, and in the assumption of his central imperialism, he has interfered with political questions and party movements in distant States, reaching into Missouri, and then into New York, to dictate how the people should…
Better always a government of law than of men.
I could not understand how a Republican President could consent to weaken the limitations upon the Executive, and so I said,--adding, that in my judgment he should rather reach forth his hands and ask to have them tied.
But this beautiful rule, with its lesson to the military of subordination, was suddenly set aside by our President, and the Secretary of War degraded to be a clerk.
The supremacy of the civil power over the military is typified in the Secretary of War, a civilian, from whom Army officers receive orders.
From the Executive Mansion pass now to the War Department, and there we witness the same Presidential pretensions by which law, usage, and correct principle are lost in the will of One Man.
I dismiss this transaction as another instance of Presidential pretension, which, in the interest of Republican Government, should be arrested.
If the President can be justified in his present course, there is no limit to his pretensions in open violation of the statute.
The Presidential pretension, which is continued to the present time, is the more unnatural when it is considered that there are at least three different statutes in which Congress has shown its purpose to limit the employment of military…
Observe the mildness of my language, when I call this Presidential pretension “of doubtful legality.” The law shall speak for itself.
The indecorum of his effort stands out more painfully when it is considered that the merchant for whom he wished to set aside a time-honored safeguard was one of those from whom he had received gifts.
If the statute was anything but one of those cobwebs which catch the weak, but yield to the rich, this was the occasion for it, and the President should have yielded to no temptation against it.
A Cabinet is a national institution and not a Presidential perquisite,--unless our President is allowed to copy the example of Imperial France.
Unquestionably the President has a discretion in the appointment of his Cabinet; but it is a constitutional discretion, regulated by regard for the interests of the country and not by mere personal will, by statesmanship and not by…
Besides undoubted fitness for these exalted responsibilities, as head of a department and as counsellor, a member should have such acknowledged position in the country that his presence inspires confidence and gives strength to the…
Though not named in the Constitution, yet by virtue of unbroken usage among us, and in harmony with constitutional governments everywhere, the Cabinet has become a constitutional body, hardly less than if expressly established by the…
If others were less obscure, the Cabinet as a unit was none the less notable as the creature of Presidential will, where Chance vied with Favoritism as arbiter.
Looking back upon it, we recognize the pretension by which all tradition, usage, and propriety were discarded, by which the just expectations of the party that had elected him were set at nought, and the safeguards of constitutional…
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