Any such offer, whatever its motive, must be an encouragement to the Rebellion.
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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In an age when ideas prevail and even words become things, the simple declarations of statesmen are of incalculable importance.
The imperial proposition tended directly to the dismemberment of the Republic and the substitution of a ghastly Slavemonger nation.
Mexico was invaded for empire, and mediation was proposed to help the plot.
The ambassadorial attorney of Rebel Slavery is received at the Tuileries, members of Parliament on an errand of hostility to our cause are received at Fontainebleau, and the open declaration is made that the Emperor desires to recognize…
The Emperor, for the present, forbears to fling his sword into the scale; but he flings his heavy hand, if not his sword.
The policy of the Holy Alliance, originally organized against the great Napoleon, is adopted by his representative on the throne of France.
I do not think he can; nor am I anxious on account of this new-found Emperor, who will be another King Canute against the rising tide of the American people.
It is with little satisfaction, and only in explanation of our relations with foreign powers, that I accumulate these instances, not one of which, small or great, is without its painful lesson, while they all testify with a single voice to…
It follows that no nation can justly exercise any right which it is not bound to concede under like circumstances.
Therefore, should our cases be reversed, there is nothing England and France now propose, or may hereafter propose, which it will not be our equal right to propose, when Ireland or India once more rebels, or when France is in the throes of…
Generously, and for the sake of that international comity not lightly hazarded, we may reject the precedents they furnish; but it will be difficult for them to complain, if we follow their steps.
Foreign intervention is, on its face, inconsistent with every idea of national independence, which in itself is the natural and acknowledged right of a nation to rest undisturbed so long as it does not disturb others.
If nations stood absolutely alone, dissociated from each other, so that what passed in one had little or no influence in another, only a tyrannical or intermeddling spirit could fail to recognize this right.
But civilization, drawing nations nearer together and into one society, brings them under reciprocal influence, so that no nation can now act or suffer alone.
Out of the relations and suggestions of good neighborhood, involving the admitted right of self-defence, springs the only justification or apology to be found for foreign intervention, which is the general term to signify interposition in…
If peaceable, it must be judged by its motive and tendency; if forcible, it will naturally be resisted by force.
Intervention between nations is only a common form of participation in foreign war, but intervention in a civil war is intermeddling in the domestic concerns of another nation.
But it can never be forgotten, that, where one side is obviously fighting for Barbarism, any intervention, whatever form it takes,--if only by captious criticism, calculated to encourage the wrong side, or to secure for it time or…
Intervention in the spirit of peace and for the sake of peace belongs to the refinements of modern civilization.
But the principle then declared has been sapped on the one side by the conspiracies of tyranny seeking the suppression of liberal institutions, and on the other by a generous sympathy breaking forth from time to time in their support.
Not even in the name of charity could one ruler speak to another on the domestic affairs of his government.
The Pope himself, on another recorded occasion, admitted that it would be a pernicious precedent for a subject to negotiate terms of accommodation through a foreign prince.
On still another occasion, when the King of France, forgetting his own rule, interposed in behalf of the Barberini family, Innocent the Tenth declared, that, having no desire to interfere in the affairs of France, he trusted his Majesty…
Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.
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