By incorporation with the body-politic he becomes a partner in that transcendent unity, so that there can be no injury to him without injury to all.
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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No longer an African, he is an American; no longer a slave, he is a common part of the Republic, owing to it patriotic allegiance in return for the protection of equal laws.
As man he is entitled to all the rights of man, and as citizen he becomes a member of our common household, with Equality as the prevailing law.
Ceasing to be a slave, the former victim has become not only a man, but a Citizen, admitted alike within the pale of humanity and within the pale of citizenship.
That this should continue to flaunt, now that Slavery is condemned, increases the inconsistency.
Strange indeed, if an odious discrimination, without support in the original Common Law or the Constitution, and openly condemned by the Declaration of Independence, can escape judgment by skulking within State lines!
Every statute and all legislation, whether National or State, must be in complete conformity with the two title-deeds.
Nor, again, did it find place in the Constitutional Amendment expressly defining a “citizen.” How, then, can it become a limitation upon the citizen?
The word “white” found no place in the original Common Law; nor did it find any place afterward in our two title-deeds of Constitutional Liberty, each interpreting the other, and being the fountain out of which are derived the rights and…
Nor can any shade of color be an apology for interference with that consideration to which character is justly entitled.
Such decisions are a discredit to Republican Government; and so also is the existing practice of public institutions harmonizing with them.
To what meanness of inquiry has not the judicial mind descended in the enforcement of an odious prejudice?
Such learned debate on the rights of man dependent on complexion would excite a smile, if it did not awaken indignation.
In melancholy contrast with the monumental judgment of the English Chief-Justice are judicial decisions in our own country, especially that masterpiece of elaborate inhumanity, the judgment of our late Chief-Justice in the Dred Scott case.
This judgment is a torch to illumine the Constitution, while it shows how naturally our fathers in the great Declaration said, “All men,” and not “All white men,” and in the Constitution said, “We the people,” and not “We the white people.
There is also, antedating and interpreting the Constitution, the original Common Law, which knew no distinction of color.
This conclusion is reinforced by the several Constitutional Amendments; but I prefer to dwell on the original text of the Constitution, in presence of which you might as well undertake to make a king as to degrade a fellow-citizen on…
It cannot be invented, imagined, or implied; it must be found in the very text: and this I assert according to fixed principles of jurisprudence.
The fountain failing, and the word non-existent, the whole pretension is a disgusting usurpation, which is more utterly irrational when it is considered that authority for such an outrage can be found only in positive words, plain and…
The Declaration speaks of “all men,” and not of “all white men”; and the Constitution says, “We the people,” and not “We the white people.” Where, then, is authority for any such discrimination, whether by the nation or any component part?
In those two title-deeds, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, there are no words of color, whether white, yellow, red, or black; but here is the fountain out of which all is derived.
Observe, if you please, how little the word “white” is authorized to play the great part it performs, and how much of an intruder it is in all its appearances.
There are white, yellow, red, and black, with intermediate shades; but no matter what their hue, they are always MEN, gifted with a common manhood and entitled to common rights.
But it has been reserved for our Republic, dedicated to the rights of human nature, to adopt the color of the skin as the sign of separation, and to organize it in law.
At present nobody dares say, “I can sell them”; but the inn, the common conveyance, the theatre, the school, the scientific institute, the church, and the cemetery deny them the equal rights of Freedom.
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