The people were against war with England, and they were glad to learn that by surrender of the Rebels Maritime Rights had obtained new safeguard, while the British pretext for war was removed.
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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Senator Sumner’s speech was felt to be exhaustive of the Law of Nations which governed the case of the Trent, and is already ranked in Washington as a state paper upon the question of seizure and search worthy to be placed side by side…
But in his master speech on the Trent affair and its relation to Maritime and International Law he has proved himself to be something more than the accomplished scholar, the eloquent speech-maker, forcing the recognition of his…
This exposition of the triumph of American principles, necessarily less ornate than his more literary productions, is marked by all his usual fastidious strength of style.
Vibrating through his voice, every word seemed a live nerve quivering with electric meaning.
Sumner, from the beginning of his political career, showed himself the decided enemy of Slavery, and was marked by the opposite party as an Abolitionist, which was equivalent to subverter of public order, robber, and worse.
In the midst of the greatest difficulties he kept himself constant always.… Now that the movement has commenced, Sumner, instead of throwing wood on the fire, which already burns too much, shows all the prudence and sagacity of a true…
The error of these writers has consisted in an undue deference to the British admiralty decisions,--decisions against whose validity on the points involved in this controversy our Government has always protested.
He performs this duty in a temperate, lucid, and convincing manner, rising above all asperity or excitement, and viewing the question as it affects the best interests of the human race.
It should rather be an occasion for national congratulation than humiliation, that Great Britain has, de facto, abandoned her old ground, and planted herself on doctrines and practice strictly, and for a time almost exclusively, American.
He goes beyond all the precedents of the conservative lawyers of New England, and all the arguments of the Secretary of State, to the essential principles of International Law, as recognized by the great thinkers and statesmen of the…
Public opinion has already stamped it as one of the great speeches of the present generation of American statesmen.
No man can more truly be said to be the man for the hour than can Senator Sumner.
The excellence of any such effort is to be measured now in this country only by the amount of attack it calls out, and I was therefore much pleased to see that the Times lost its temper in criticizing you.
The case of the Trent has not made any new precedent whatever, nor can it clash with any precedent upon which in modern times we ever did or could have intended to rely.
The forcible removal of those four men from under the British flag was a rude outrage, redeemed neither by precedent nor principle, and it has been resented and repaired.
But here is strange and total oblivion of the fact, that, in every case of taking, whether the victim was American or not, whether two or two hundred were seized, there was an exercise of the very prerogative it condemned in Captain…
We demanded the restoration of the prisoners, not in order to mortify the American people, but for the purpose of vindicating the honor of our flag and asserting the established principles of Maritime Law.
Yet men of less pretensions than the ‘Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Relations’ ought to be aware that the cases are not only not the same, but not even similar.
Their resemblance, at most, extends to the proverbial identity of chalk and cheese.
In all the symptoms of decadence which the recent history of the American Republic exhibits, there is none more conspicuous and apparently more irreparable than the decline in capacity and character of her public men.
Sumner’s oration, we see nothing on every side but a melancholy spectacle of impotent violence and furious incapacity.
It will make you feel to the quick--what you did not seem to feel, or refused to admit--the insolent tone of the British press and public men towards us in our struggle for life, and the false manner in which they have tried to turn this…
Those few semi-republican, semi-abolition, liberally inclined men in England, whom you respect, and who command, perhaps, one paper and one monthly, are a drop in the bucket.
Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.
Politicians like Charles Sumner
