Require free schools as an essential condition of Reconstruction.
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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It contains no compact, no promise, no vested right, nothing which may not be changed, if the public interests require.
On the contrary, this very bill asserts in positive terms “the paramount authority of the United States.” Surely this is enough.
This argument forgets the paramount power of Congress over the Rebel States, which you have already exercised in ordaining universal suffrage.
Who can doubt, that, with equal reason, you may ordain universal education also?
We have the power, assured by reason and precedent.
I would do as much as possible, believing that all we do in the nature of safeguard must redound to the good of all and to the national fame.
It is in this spirit that I now move to require a system of free schools, open to all without distinction of caste.
Electors by the hundred thousand will exercise the franchise for the first time, without delay or preparation.
Without education your beneficent legislation may be a failure.
I was unwilling to make education the condition of suffrage; but I ask that it shall accompany and sustain suffrage.
Education decorates life, while it increases all our powers.
It is the charm of society, the solace of solitude, and the multiple of every faculty.
It adds incalculably to the capacity of the individual and to the resources of the community.
Careful inquiry establishes what reason declares, that labor is productive in proportion to its education.
A republic without education is like the creature of imagination, a human being without a soul, living and moving blindly, with no just sense of the present or the future.
In this prevailing ignorance we may trace the Rebellion.
A population that could not read and write naturally failed to comprehend and appreciate a republican government.
It is as if a savage rudely drove an angel from his tent.
You are to fix the securities of the future, and especially to see that a republican government is guarantied in an the Rebel States.
I call them “Rebel,” for such they are in spirit still, and such is their designation in your recent statute.
All that I propose is for their good, with which is intertwined the good of all.
I would not impose any new penalty or bear hard upon an erring people.
I simply ask a new safeguard for the future, that these States, through which so much trouble has come, may be a strength and a blessing to our common country, with prosperity and happiness everywhere within their borders.
I would not impose any new burden; but I seek a new triumph for civilization.
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