In the consciousness of strength, and with an irresistible navy, this power has put chains upon the sea.
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 commerce of the United States, as it began to whiten the ocean, was cruelly decimated.
American ships and cargoes, while, in the language of Earl Russell, “pursuing a lawful and innocent voyage,” suffered from British Prize Courts more than from rock or tempest.
This outrage, insolently vindicated by the municipal claim of Great Britain to the services of her subjects, was enforced arrogantly and perpetually on the high seas, where Municipal Law is silent and International Law alone prevails.
From the beginning of this Rebellion, Slavery has been constantly manifest in the conduct of the masters, and even here in the national capital it is the traitorous power encouraging and strengthening the enemy.
This power must be suppressed at every cost; and if its suppression here endangers Slavery elsewhere, there will be new motive for determined action.
At the national capital Slavery will give way to Freedom.
What God and Nature decree Rebellion cannot arrest.
The belligerent right of search, derived from International Law, and justly applicable to enemy property or contraband only, and not to men, was employed for this purpose, and the quarter-deck of every English cruiser became a floating…
Unwelcome as the truth may be, it is nevertheless a truth, that we have ourselves established a system of International Law which now tells against us.
In high-handed and almost despotic manner, we have, in former days, claimed privileges over neutrals which have at different times banded all the maritime powers of the world against us.
If a pretension so intrinsically lawless could be sanctioned by precedent, Great Britain would have succeeded in interpolating it into the Law of Nations.
From that fraction of their case we may, however, form some opinion on the extent to which freemen, who would be a scandal to their English ancestry, unless liberty was as dear as life, must have writhed under our practice of impressment.
Protest, argument, negotiation, correspondence, and war itself--unhappily the last reason of republics, as of kings--were all employed by the United States in vain to procure renunciation of the intolerable pretension.
The ablest papers in our diplomatic history are devoted to this purpose; and the only serious war in which we have been engaged, until summoned to subdue the Rebellion, was to overcome by arms this very tyranny, which would not yield to…
The long continued occasion of conflict is now happily removed, and the pretension disappears forever,--to take its place among the barbaric curiosities of the past.
But it will be an important point gained, if, on the high seas, our flag can protect those, of whatever nation, who shall sail under it.
Instead of those honorable rites which in all ages generous soldiers have been glad to bestow upon enemies fallen in battle, we are disgusted by barbarities reminding us of savage life.
The impressment of our seamen is an injury of very serious magnitude, which deeply affects the feelings and the honor of the nation.… Alien seamen, not British subjects, engaged in our merchant service, ought to be equally exempt with…
To tear them, then, from our possession is at the same time an insult and an injury.
At last all redress through negotiation was found impossible; and this pretension, aggravated into multitudinous tyranny, was openly announced to be one of the principal reasons for the declaration of war against Great Britain in 1812.
Such was the American ground, occupied from the beginning without interruption, and from the beginning most persistently contested by Great Britain.
If this question were argued on English authorities, it might be otherwise; but according to American principles, the ship was legally innocent.
On this question British policy may change with circumstances, and British precedents may be uncertain, but the original American policy is unchangeable, and the American precedents which illustrate it are solemn treaties.
Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.
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