The powers of Congress are above any such incident, and nothing has occurred to impair them in any way.
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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They exist now as at the beginning, awaiting the discretion of Congress.
Out of these Congress is authorized to do all that is needed to enforce Emancipation and to protect the rights of the citizen.
You must renounce Reconstruction or recognize this power.
The United States are to guaranty a republican form of government to the States.
But this guaranty can be executed only through Congress.
So long as Slavery prevailed, this mighty power slept; but it was the sleep of a giant.
At last it has awaked, never again to sleep or slumber.
From this time forward the duty of the nation to guaranty a republican government to all its parts will be constant and ever-present; and this duty is reinforced by all needful powers.
The guaranty is continuing and perpetual, and it must be executed at all hazards.
In its execution Congress must fix the definition of a republican government.
To Congress belongs the duty of determining what is a republican government, and then it must see that such a government prevails in every State.
If in any State the existing government fails according to the just standard, or if it is in any way menaced, then must Congress interfere to execute the sleepless guaranty.
And in this interference it may act according to its discretion, determining the occasion and the “means” to be employed.
It may act by repression or by precaution, and it may select any “means” proper for the purpose.
Senators may ignore it; they may not see it; but there it is in the Constitution.
In attempting to belittle this clause Senators only show how little they appreciate the lofty unity of the Republic.
Other clauses are important in the machinery of government; but this guaranty makes the Republic one and indivisible, being One out of Many, and places the rights of all under the protecting power of the nation.
But the habit still continues, and we are still compelled to hear this same pretension, under which States played the turtle, drawing head, legs, and tail all within an impenetrable shell.
With the overthrow of the Rebellion on the bloody field this pretension should have been abandoned and forgotten.
A State is not a turtle, which can shut itself within its shell, and enjoy its own separate animal existence; but it is a component part of this great Republic, with which it is interlaced and interlocked so as to share with every other…
To insist that a State can play the turtle now, as in the days when Slavery ruled, is to dishonor the Constitution, and to abandon the crowning victory over the Rebellion.
To question it is to show an ignorance of language which in this case is clear beyond criticism, and an ignorance also of the true genius of American institutions, where unity of rights is the Alpha and the Omega.
The national motto, E Pluribus Unum, is another expression of that great unity by which the States are lost in the Nation.
And this guaranty I now invoke for the protection of the good people of Georgia, and for the protection hereafter of Human Rights, when imperilled anywhere within the limits of the Republic.
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