I read your speech yesterday morning with great satisfaction, and yet with considerable misgiving as to whether its truths will be acted on.
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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I doubt if the North has been punished enough to induce it to forego the attempt of trying again to circumvent God.
I am under an overwhelming conviction, that, unless the views which you express are substantially adhered to, Despotism will have gained all that Liberty won in our recent war.
God grant it may go into every house and every heart!
You have yet your hardest fight to win; but it is the fight of God and Humanity, and you will win it.
The right word, in the right time, by the right man,--what more should we ask?
For them, and for the heroic spirit with which you take your stand, and determine ‘to fight it out on that line,’ I offer you my most sincere and fervent thanks.
May God preserve your life and health, and enable you to fight it out to a complete victory!
In logic, in illustration, in simplicity of truth, I have never read a state-paper that equals it.
He inspires some of the most vital parts of the Constitution (which heretofore have been a dead letter) with new life and activity.
Washington and Lincoln led in the first and second revolutions, but it was left for Charles Sumner to lead in the third,--a revolution in Constitutional and Republican ideas.
You concede to a mutinous State the power to arrest, it may be, the organization of Congress, or, it may be, amendments to the Constitution important to the general welfare.
To my mind all this seems so plain that I am disposed to ask pardon for arguing it.
It remains that we should provide supplementary safeguards, and complete the good work that has been begun, by taking care that Slavery is abolished in spirit as well as letter, and that the freedmen are protected by further needed…
Without this additional provision, I see small prospect of that peace and reconciliation which are the object so near our hearts.
This cannot die; for it belongs to the history of a race.
It was a joyous and a sad sight to see this new legion, acquired to the national service, promptly marching to its distant and perilous duty, under a commander who, turning away from the blandishments of life, consecrates himself to his…
Massachusetts had sent forth many brave regiments; but here was the first regiment of colored soldiers marshalled at the North.
It was an experiment, destined to be an epoch.
By the success of this regiment a whole race was elevated.
As he went forth, it became less an incident of war than an act of magnanimity and moral grandeur.
This was their Bunker Hill, and Shaw was their martyred Warren.
The country learned to know colored troops, and they learned to know themselves.
From that day of conflict nobody doubted their capacity or courage as soldiers.
But his patriotic sacrifice and the great event deserve commemoration, as well for gratitude as for example.
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