They wished to secure Slavery without plainly saying so; but such is Slavery that it cannot be secured without plainly saying so.
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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Naturally and inevitably they failed, as if they had attempted to describe black by words which might mean white, or to authorize crime by words which naturally mean something that is not crime.
The clause begins with the descriptive words, “No person held to service or labor in one State under the laws thereof.” Now a slave is not a “person,” with the rights of persons, but a chattel or thing.
He is not “held to service or labor,” but he is held as property.
The slave can owe no “service or labor” to his master.
There is nothing in their relations out of which any such obligation can spring.
The whole condition stands on force and nothing else.
It is robbery tempered by the lash,--not merely robbery of all the fruits of industry, but robbery of wife and child.
To such terrible assumption the language of contract or debt is totally inapplicable.
Nothing can be “due” from slave to master, unless it be that “resistance to tyrants” which is “obedience to God.” It is absurd to say that “labor or service,” in any sense, whether of justice or of law, can be “due” from the slave.
The same power which takes wife and child may exact this further sacrifice, but not because it is “due.
Nobody can doubt that this clause may be interpreted in favor of Freedom, so as to exclude all idea of property in man.
But if it may, then such is the voice of Freedom that it must.
According to the historian, “the servant stood to his master in the relation of a debtor,” which, be it observed, is not the condition of a slave.
Rejecting the odious application involving the support of Slavery, we follow received rules and the undoubted genius of the Common Law.
Against this interpretation, so overpowering in reason and authority, it is no objection that thus far Slavery has prevailed.
There is no statute of limitation and no prescription against the undying claims of Liberty.
As length of time did not prevail against a true interpretation of the British Constitution in the case of Somerset, it ought not to prevail against a true interpretation of our Constitution now.
There is no chemistry in time to transmute wrong into right.
Therefore the whole question on the Constitution is still open, as on the day of its adoption.
The cases of misinterpretation are of no value,--at least they cannot settle the question against Liberty.
Fraud is always odious; but it becomes more so in proportion to the occasion on which it is employed.
Not content with imparting to it a meaning which it cannot bear, the partisans of Slavery have given to this clause an origin and history having no foundation in truth.
But there is no evidence of any such difficulty.
Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.
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