The steamer Star of the West, bearing reinforcements to the small garrison cooped in Fort Sumter, was fired at in the harbor of Charleston, and compelled to put back discomfited.
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 whole pretension is a preposterous absurdity, by which the country has been too much deceived.
To call such a people “cavaliers” is an abuse of terms.
The Essex had made a very successful cruise, and become a terror to British navigation.
For myself, Sir, I am determined not to be caught in any such trap.
And now the question is, Shall this condition of things be readjusted?
They are little better than quicksand, or a deceptive mirage.
There must be a remedy commensurate with the crime.
That is the terrible character of almost all retaliation in war.
I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.
Search judicial annals and you find no perversion of truth more flagrant.
And let it not be said, that, in suppressing Slavery, Government would violate the property of the colonists.
The hardship of the arrest was aggravated by the bail required, which was fixed at half a million of dollars.
Calmly, but unanswerably, it shows two things: first, the usage at the Navy Yard; and, secondly, the good faith of the transaction.
An attempt is made to throw doubt on the integrity of one of these witnesses, by charging complicity; but it does not appear that there is a scrap of evidence in the record to sustain the imputation, and I need not say it is outrageous to…
To charge fraud against the respondents under such circumstances is cruel, irrational, preposterous.
And yet, since enmity to the Union proceeded entirely from enmity to the great ideas of the Declaration, history must record that the question of the Union itself was absorbed in the grander conflict to uphold the primal truths our fathers…
Washington fought for National Independence, and triumphed, making his country an example to mankind.
Lincoln drew a reluctant sword to save those great ideas, essential to the life and character of the Republic, which unhappily the sword of Washington failed to put beyond the reach of assault.
But the pretension of State Rights was a cover for Slavery.
A generous Englishman, the ornament of letters, from whom we learn in memorable lines “what constitutes a State,” has denounced all complicity with Slavery in words which strike directly at this plea of necessity.
His constant thought was his country, and how to serve it.
The people where Slavery once ruled will bless the blow that destroyed it.
It springs from the necessity of the case, as well as from the Rights of Man.
Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.
Politicians like Charles Sumner
