The victory of the war is vain without the grander victory through which the Republic is dedicated to the axiomatic, self-evident truth declared by our fathers, and reasserted by Abraham Lincoln.
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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This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
I have said nothing but what I am willing to live by, and, if it be the pleasure of Almighty God, to die by.
But if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.
It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.
The Nation insisted that all men are created equal; the Rebellion insisted that all men are created unequal.
Behind the embattled armies were ideas, and the idea on our side was Equality in Rights, which on the other side was denied.
The asserted limitation destroys the original Declaration, making it a ridiculous sham, instead of that sublime Magna Charta before which kings, nobles, and all inequalities of birth must disappear as ghosts of night at the dawn.
Nor is it a self-evident truth, as declared; for no truth is self-evident which is not universal.
Therefore it is not stating an axiom to announce grandly that only white men are equal in rights; nor is it stating an axiom to announce with the same grandeur that all persons are equal in rights, but that colored persons have no rights…
Equality in rights is not only the first of rights, it is an axiom of political truth.
Call it a Republic, if you will, but it is in reality a soulless mockery.
Such is the soul of republican institutions, without which the Republic is a failure, a name and nothing more.
Not because it declares separation from a distant kingly power; but because it announces the lofty truth that all are equal in rights, and, as a natural consequence, that just government stands only on the consent of the governed,--all of…
I do not use too strong language, when I expose this tyranny as a degradation to republican institutions,--ay, Sir, in their fundamental principle.
Who that rejoices in republican institutions will not help to overthrow the tyranny by which they are degraded?
Who with a spark of justice to illumine his soul can hesitate to denounce the wrong?
Who that has a heart can listen to the story without indignation and shame?
And there is other evidence, already presented by me, showing how individuals have suffered from this plain denial of equal rights.
The evidence is on your table in numerous petitions.
Do you doubt this constant, wide-spread outrage, extending in uncounted ramifications throughout the whole land?
If Frederick Douglass and Oscar James Dunn could be made to suffer, how much must others be called to endure!
Only in his coffin was the ban of color lifted, and the dead statesman admitted to that equality which is the right of all.
He was poor, but could not be bought or bribed.
Of blameless life, he was an example of integrity.
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