It was present on the battle-field; it was present in the treatment of Union prisoners; it was present in the piracies of the ocean.
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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If you insist upon counting a rebel State, having no Legislature, you make a concession to rebellion.
Here is a theme for Art, and its elements are youth, beauty, self-sacrifice, death, and a great cause.
Two negroes were tied up and publicly whipped by the sheriff, on the sentence of a magistrate.
To cap the climax of this iniquity, a body of men calling themselves the Legislature, but having small title to be considered a legal body, have undertaken to enact a Black Code, separating the two races, in defiance of every principle of…
And yet these people announce that they accept the existing state of things, and that it is their honest purpose to abide thereby!
If it is intended to follow up the abolition of Slavery by a liberal and enlightened policy, by which I mean bestowing upon them the full rights of other citizens, then I can give this movement my heart and hand.
But if the negro is to be left in a helpless condition, far more miserable than that of Slavery, I would ask, What was the object of taking him from those who claimed his services?
The pretended Governor of Mississippi, like the pretended Governor of Alabama, exults in Rebel victories, and fans the Rebel flame.
Naturally the freedmen are exposed to untold hardships and atrocities.
The whites can meet, if they please, and such a meeting, called under such auspices, may vote to continue their unjust pretensions; but any vote by them will be, under the circumstances, little better than an absurdity.
The death of Henry Winter Davis at this moment is a national calamity.
It was wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that man could hold property in man.
But, having the power, it is your duty to exercise it.
Rarely in history has such an opportunity been offered to the statesman.
They are the natural interpreters of their own Constitution.
In this ministerial outrage they saw the overthrow of their liberties, whether founded on natural rights or on the rights of British subjects.
But it was Locke who gave formal expression to the very principles now assailed.
The cause of Human Liberty, in this great controversy, found voice in James Otis, a young lawyer of eloquence, learning, and courage, whose early words, like the notes of the morning bugle mingling with the dawn, awakened the whole country.
To suppose them surrendered in any other way than by equal rules and general consent was to suppose men idiot or mad, whose acts are not binding.
And thus did our fathers testify to the right of representation without distinction of color.
As Washington, by divine example, gave to mankind a new idea of political greatness, so did the Fathers, by inspired teaching, give to mankind a new idea of Government.
A government where these two things are assured would be a Republic indeed.
Political Liberty consists in the right to participate in public affairs.
Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.
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