Give him the ballot, and he will be educated into the principles of government.
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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Deny him the ballot, and he will continue alien in knowledge as in rights.
For generations you have shut him out from all education, making it a crime to teach him to read the Book of Life.
Let not the tyranny of the past be apology for further exclusion.
Prisoners long immured in a dungeon are sometimes blinded, as they come forth into day; but this is no reason for continued imprisonment.
The old master still asserts an inhuman power, and now by positive statutes seeks to bind his victim in new chains.
Serfdom or apprenticeship is slavery in another guise.
To save the freedman from this tyranny, with all its accumulated outrage, is a solemn duty.
For this we are now devising guaranties; but, believe me, the only sufficient guaranty is the ballot.
Let the freedman vote, and he will have in himself under the law a constant, ever-present, self-protecting power.
The armor of citizenship will be his best security.
The ballot will be to him sword and buckler,--sword with which to pierce his enemies, and buckler on which to receive their assault.
Its possession will be a terror and a defence.
The law, which is the highest reason, boasts that every man’s house is his castle; but the freedman can have no castle without the ballot.
When the master knows that he may be voted down, he will know that he must be just, and everything is contained in justice.
The ballot is like charity, which never faileth, and without which man is only as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.
The ballot is the one thing needful, wanting which, rights of testimony and all other rights are no better than cobwebs, which the master will break through with impunity.
To him who has the ballot all other things shall be given,--protection, opportunity, education, a homestead.
The ballot is the Horn of Abundance, out of which overflow rights of every kind, with corn, cotton, rice, and all the fruits of the earth.
Or, better still, it is like the hand of the body, without which, man, who is now only a little lower than the angels, must have continued only a little above the brutes.
We are fearfully and wonderfully made; but as is the hand in the work of civilization, so is the ballot in the work of government.
Give me the ballot and I will move the world” may be the exclamation of the race despoiled of this right.
Though simple in character, there is nothing the ballot may not accomplish,--like the homely household lamp in Arabian story, which, at call of its possessor, evoked a spirit that did all things, from the building of a palace to the…
Ay, Sir, the ballot is the Columbiad of our political life, and every citizen who has it is a full-armed Monitor.
Having pleaded for the freedman, I now plead for the Republic; for to each alike the ballot is a necessity.
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