In parts where there are no Union soldiers, I saw colored women treated in the most outrageous manner.
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 are killed, and their bodies thrown into ponds or mud-holes.
I’m whipped, and I’ll own it; but I’m not so fond of a whipping that I’m going to pay a man’s expenses while he gives it to me.
The people will be borne down with taxes for years to come, even if the war debt is repudiated.
Surely there can be no limits to our resistance, when such spirits are seeking to capture the National Government; but beyond that general resistance, which must make us postpone the day of surrender, and invoke the protection of Congress…
As the Rebellion was waged in denial of the Equal Rights of the colored race, it is essential not only that Slavery should be renounced, but also that all men should be hailed as equal before the law; and this enfranchisement must be both…
Unless this is done, the condition of the freedman will be deplorable.
Exposed to every brutality, he will not be heard as a witness against his oppressor.
Compelled to pay taxes, he will be excluded from all representation in the government.
Even if Slavery cease to exist, it will give place to a condition hardly less galling.
There will be serfdom, apprenticeship, peonage, or some other device of Slavery.
As the national debt was incurred for the suppression of the Rebellion, this, too, must be fixed beyond repeal.
Unless this is done, it is evident, from reason as well as from testimony, that the representatives of the Rebel States will coalesce with others for its repudiation.
It will be simply true to its past history, as well as to its present animosities, when this State leads in the repudiation of the national debt.
No Rebel State should be readmitted, unless bound irrevocably to the support of the national debt and the payment of the interest.
The assumption of the Rebel debt must be positively forbidden.
For a State to assume this criminal obligation would be oppressive to the people, and especially to the freedmen.
This debt, whether at home or abroad, has been incurred for the support of the Rebellion, and must be treated accordingly.
As the national peace and tranquillity depend essentially upon the overthrow of monopoly and tyranny, here is another occasion for special guaranty against the whole pretension of color.
Agriculture and business of all kinds will be uncertain, and the country will be handed over to a fearful struggle, with the terrors of San Domingo to darken the prospect.
In shutting out the freedman from his equal rights at the ballot-box, you open the doors of discontent and insurrection.
All these are too important, too transcendent, too essential to the national safety, to be left the prey or sport of Rebel passions; nor can they be abandoned to any vague promise or inference of any kind.
They must be fixed in characters clear as the sky and firm as the earth.
Believe me, that man is dangerous who does not see danger in this Rebel Oligarchy, now conspiring to hoist itself into power.
Therefore I lay down one undeniable, essential principle,--that these guaranties must be established; and I appeal to my fellow-citizens throughout the country to insist upon them.
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