Every argument for making the duty low is equally strong against having any duty on the subject.
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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There is no reason that could have influenced the Committee in favor of reducing the duty which is not equally strong in favor of removing the duty.
You ought not to repeat in the Constitution the tyranny of taxation without representation.
In so many words, you are about to despoil fellow-citizens of representation, and I say, that, not to be inconsistent with your own institutions and with the principles upon which your government is founded, you must exempt them from…
Unquestionably the establishment of the equal rights of colored citizens at the ballot-box was one of the most important events in our political history.
With few supporters at first, the cause grew in interest and strength until final success in the Acts of Reconstruction, and then in the Constitutional Amendment.
It is the most powerful oration of his life,--the crowning glory of his scholarship and statesmanship.
Never yet has any American statesman swept so wide a range of learning, so complete a circle of public law, history, philosophy, and jurisprudence, in support of so noble a principle as the one underlying republican government.
The burden of the whole of it was the absolute political and civil equality of all men, and his peroration was a loftier flight of majestic eloquence than the Senate has heard since the best days of Clay and Webster.
While very few agree with Sumner in the present practicability of his ideas, and still fewer indorse them at all as tenets of political faith, yet there is but one opinion of the speech he has been making for two days,--that, simply as a…
Charles Sumner’s argument for the Rights of Men ought to be printed by the hundred thousand, and scattered like seed-grain throughout the nation.
Sumner has performed a service which no public man of our politics has equalled.
The whole of our history is searched and illumined, and the most overwhelming mass of evidence produced to the point, that a true construction of the Constitution gives all men who pay taxes representation and the ballot, thus basing free…
No such argument for free government has been made in our day.
For learning, cogency of logic, wealth of illustration, felicity and splendor of diction, nobility of tone and sentiment, and genuine eloquence, it will take rank with the highest of forensic efforts.
It will stand for ages, a noble and enduring monument of the highest range and scope of American statesmanship, and will be read with profit and admiration long after the questions of the day have been settled and forgotten, or remembered…
Its immediate effect, however, on public sentiment cannot fail to be vast and beneficial.
As an exposition of the American theory of Republicanism, this speech is unsurpassed in the history of American oratory.
It is not only the great speech of Charles Sumner’s life, but it is the great speech of the age.
It is perfectly exhaustive, free from all personalities, free from all idiosyncrasies, statesmanlike, philosophical, and calculated to become a lasting memorial of its author’s research, patient investigation, power of analysis, and, above…
It is beyond question the greatest effort of our most distinguished New England statesman, and will make his name dear to every friend of freedom and equal rights in all coming time.
Avoiding all mere expedients and controversies concerning details, it fixes the attention upon the great principles of a free republican government; and never in our history have those principles been so clearly and forcibly elucidated.
In the pride inspired by this beautiful and good oratorical plea, the Americans turn in a friendly spirit toward our Old World, and do not dissemble the hope that this speech will do them more honor in Europe than any public act in their…
I have perused your eloquent and unanswerable speech on the Suffrage question, and need not say that it contains the noblest sentiments, to which all the faculties and powers which God has given me thrillingly respond.
What assiduity and perseverance, what courage and determination, what devotion and inflexible purpose you have shown, through fiery trials and at the risk of martyrdom, ‘in season and out of season,’ to effect the downfall of the atrocious…
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