The point is, that the Senator treats the Declaration of Independence as no better than the writings of Washington, of Jefferson, of Madison, “The Federalist,” and everything that pertains to that day.
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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It is the Revolution that I make my stand upon.
The truths of the Declaration are no longer “the generalities of that revolutionary pronunciamento.
If the Senator from Massachusetts says, that in doubtful cases it is the duty of a court, or the duty of the Senate, or the duty of any public officer, to consider the Declaration of Independence, he is right.
Jefferson, when he penned that paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, intended it to embrace the African population?
Of course it proceeded on a wretched misconstruction of the Declaration, which announced equality of rights and not any other equality, physical, intellectual, or moral.
Tell me, Sir, that the slave in the South, who is born a slave, and with but little over one-half the volume of brain that attaches to the northern European race, is his equal, and you tell what is physically a falsehood.
I assert that there shall be no political distinction; and that is my answer to his argument on churches.
The difference between the two is as wide as between the sky and the earth.
Is not the distinction clear as noonday between what is prohibited by the Constitution and what is proposed by my amendment?
Its primal truths, announced as self-evident, are more commanding and more beaming now than when first uttered.
Such is Caste,--odious, impious, accursed, wherever it shows itself.
In Caste, Government is nurturing a tremendous evil,--a noxious plant, by the side of which the Graces cannot flourish,--part and parcel of Idolatry,--a system which, more than anything else the Devil has yet invented, tends to destroy the…
It is an offensive difference between persons founded on birth, not unlike that maintained among us on account of a skin received from birth.
I call that a vindication of Caste, and Caste in one of its most offensive forms.
Here is nothing of religion; it is the political law, the law of justice, the law of Equal Rights.
Whenever a church organization seeks incorporation, it must submit to the great political law of the land.
In a Christian church; and while espousing that cause, he pleads the National Constitution.
The Senator becomes here the representative of Caste; and where, Sir?
The liberty to insult a fellow-man on account of his skin!
Such, Sir, is the argument of the Senator; and he makes it in the name of Religious Liberty!
In the church this outrage may be perpetrated,--because to forbid it would interfere with religion and set up an establishment.
All that I ask is, that, in harmony with the Declaration of Independence, there be complete equality before the law everywhere,--in the inn, on the highway, in the common school, in the church, on juries,--ay, Sir, and in the last…
But the Senator must see that in the case he puts, the proposed law would be the very thing prohibited by the Constitution.
It can make no law respecting an establishment of religion.
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