It is vain to think that one can be advanced without the other.
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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Whoever is against one is against the other, and whoever is lukewarm for one is lukewarm for the other.
This is not the time for doubt or hesitation.
We must act at once and constantly, so that the Republic may be saved, while Slavery is scourged from this temple consecrated to Freedom.
In its crop are school-houses and churches, cities and states.
Capitalists, bankers, merchants, engineers, mechanics, miners, laborers, all must enlist.
But I see not why emigrants should not be invited from Europe to take part in this honorable service, and share the prosperity it will surely organize.
Let them quit poverty, dependence, and wretchedness in their own country, for good wages here, with independence, and a piece of ground which each man can call his own.
Emigration will hasten the work; but, with or without emigration, it must proceed.
Everywhere, from sunrise to sunset, the Rail and Wheel, which an eminent English engineer has pronounced “man and wife,” will yet be welcomed, sure to become the parents of a mighty progeny.
The proposition to unite the greatest navigable river of the world with the greatest inland sea is characteristic of the West.
It is for the West to consider well the conditions of this enterprise, and the advantages it will secure.
Let its practicability be demonstrated, and the country will command it to be done, as it has already commanded the opening of the Mississippi.
Triumphant over the wickedness of an accursed Rebellion, we shall achieve another triumph, to take its place among the victories of Peace.
But there is something needed even to quicken and inspire science: it is the unconquerable will, which does not yield to difficulties, but presses forward to overcome them.
No word is used with more levity than the word “impossible.” A scientific professor, in a public address, declared the navigation of the Atlantic by steam “impossible.” Within a few weeks it was done.
The British Prime-Minister declared the construction of a canal between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea “impossible.” The Pacha of Egypt, with French engineers, is now doing it.
Mirabeau was right, when he protested against the use of this word as simple stupidity.
It is now more than three years since I deemed it my duty, in the Senate, to expose the Barbarism of Slavery.
The inordinate assumptions for Slavery naturally ripened in Rebellion and War.
Lincoln was a judgment against Slavery, and its representatives were aroused.
Meanwhile, for more than a generation, an assumption of Constitutional Law, hardly less baleful, had become rooted side by side with Slavery, so that the two shot up in rank luxuriance together.
It was assumed, that, under the Constitution, a State was privileged at any time, in the exercise of its own discretion, to withdraw from the Union.
To say that two and two make five could not be more irrational.
Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.
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