But any system by which the freedmen may be annexed to the soil, like the old adscripti glebæ, will be in direct conflict with their newly acquired rights.
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 can be properly bound only by contract; and considering how easily they may be induced to enter into engagements ignorantly or heedlessly, and thus become the legal victims of designing men, it is evident that no precautions in their…
You have gone too far, if you stop here and go no farther; you are in imminent hazard, if, having loosened the fetters, you do not strike them off,--if, leaving them ineffectual to restrain, you let them remain to gall and to irritate and…
Beware of that state, yet more unnatural than slavery itself, liberty bestowed by halves.
The time has come, the trial has been made, the hour is striking; you have no longer a pretext for hesitation or faltering or delay.
The slave has shown, by four years’ blameless behavior and devotion to the pursuits of peaceful industry, that he is as fit for his freedom as any English peasant, ay, or any lord whom I now address.
But surely there is no need of eloquence or persuasion to induce you to set your faces like flint against any such half-way system.
It provides positively against any system of enforced labor or apprenticeship, by requiring contracts between the freedmen and their employers to be carefully attested before local officers.
It is Liberty that will conduct the freedman to the fields, protect him in his toil, and secure to him all its fruits.
For a time we need a Freedmen’s Bureau,--but not because these people are negroes, only because they are men who have been for generations despoiled of their rights.
The opportunity must not be lost of helping so many persons now helpless, and of aiding the cause of reconciliation, without which peace cannot be assured.
But the Senator should take into consideration that at this moment we are acting provisionally, and not permanently,--under suggestions growing out of the present state of the country, and not as if we were in a condition of permanent…
Congress, by previous legislation, has practically placed the bureau in the Treasury Department,--or rather it has rendered it necessary that it should be placed there, unless we are willing by legislation to create a conflict between two…
He said: “In my opinion, after as close and careful an examination of this bill as I have been able to give to it, its proper title would be ‘A bill to reënslave freedmen.’ … Sir, in the name of Liberty and Emancipation I protest against…
It is their vocation to oppose every such measure, and to give it, if possible, a bad name.
They believe in Slavery more or less, and will not do anything to remove it or to mitigate its terrible curse.
That this Senator should attack a bill for a Bureau of Freedmen is perfectly natural; nor am I astonished that he should misrepresent its character.
But I cannot conceal my surprise at the course of the Senator from Iowa, who I know has no love for Slavery, and no congenital, persistent, and rooted prejudices against the colored race.
Suffice it to say that there is no bureau of the Government constituted with more care, or surrounded with more safeguards against abuse.
Can anybody under this bill exercise any power or control over Robert Small?
The Senator forgets that the bill assumes that all are free, and in every respect entitled to all the privileges of freemen,--that they are invested with every right the Senator himself possesses, and, if these rights are violated, they…
On the contrary, the officers under the bill are charged to see that the freedmen are secure in their rights; so that Robert Small himself, if the occasion required, might find aid and protection under it.
The bill gives no power to take away or limit existing rights; but it provides additional means for their safeguard, that emancipation may be perfect, so far as possible.
I might remind them again of the large numbers of freedmen--free, thank God, by legislative and executive acts of the United States, but not yet introduced into the new condition appointed for them--unemployed, suffering, starving, and…
I might remind them of the inability of private charity, or any effort organized by private individuals, to meet all the exigencies of this unprecedented case, although the generosity of our people is overflowing.
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