Therefore I am in favor of some measure of Reconstruction, the best we can secure, the more thorough the better.
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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President, I would speak frankly of this measure, which has in it so much of good and so much of evil.
Rarely have good and evil been mixed on such a scale.
Look at the good, and you are full of grateful admiration.
Look at the evil, and you are impatient at such an abandonment of duty.
You have done much, but you have not done enough.
All the good of the bill cannot make me forget its evil.
Too strong language cannot be used in characterizing a measure with such fatal defects.
Throughout the bill, in its title, in its preamble, and then again in its body, the States in question are designated as “Rebel States.” I like the designation.
God grant that the time may come when this term may be forgotten! but until then we must not hesitate to call things by their right names.
More important still is the declaration in the preamble, that “no legal State governments” now exist in the enumerated Rebel States.
For a long time, too long, we have hesitated; but at last this point is reached, destined to be “the initial point” of a just Reconstruction.
For a long time, again and again, I have insisted that those governments are illegal.
If the existing governments are “illegal,” you have duties with regard to them which cannot be postponed.
In other words, you must brush away these illegal governments, the spawn of Presidential usurpation, and supply their places.
The illegal must give place to the legal; and Congress must supervise and control the transition.
It is the direct requirement of universal suffrage, without distinction of race or color.
No Rebel State can enjoy representation in Congress, until it has conferred the suffrage upon all its citizens, and fixed this right in its constitution.
Since Runnymede, there has been nothing of greater value to Human Rights.
To this enumeration add that the bill is in its general purposes a measure of protection for loyal fellow-citizens trodden down by Rebels.
There is no helping hand extended to the loyal people seeking to lay anew the foundations of civil order.
It is a failure on the part of Congress, which ought to preside over Reconstruction and lend its helping hand, by securing Education and Equal Rights to begin at once, and by appointing the way and the season in which good citizens should…
I cannot forget, also, that there is no provision by which the freedmen can be secured a freehold for themselves and their families, which has always seemed to me most important in Reconstruction.
But all this, though of the gravest character, is dwarfed by that other objection which springs from the present toleration of Rebels in the copartnership of government.
My precise objection is, that it does not put the government into loyal hands.
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