Search history, and I am sure you will find no elected ruler who, during the same short time, has done so much mischief to his country.
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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Alone in the evil he has done, he is also alone in the maudlin and frantic manner he has adopted.
And now I ask, Can Congress quietly vote to go home and leave such a man without hindrance?
It can never be forgotten, if you keep your seats and meet the usurper face to face,--as it can never be forgotten, if, leaving your seats, you let him remain master to do as he pleases.
They know by instinct that so long as you remain in your seats they are not without protection.
They have suffered through the President, who, when they needed bread, has given them a stone, and when they needed peace, has given them strife.
They have seen him offer encouragement to Rebels, and even set the Rebellion on its legs.
Their souls have been wrung as they beheld fellow-citizens brutally sacrificed, whose only crime was that they loved the Union.
With a Presidential usurper menacing the Republic, and with a large population, counted by millions, looking to Congress for protection, I dare not vote to go home.
I am sure that our presence here will be an encouragement and a comfort to loyal people throughout these troubled States.
They will feel that they are not left alone with their deadly enemy.
But duty is more than home or any escape from care.
There is the President: he must be watched and opposed.
There is an oppressed people: it must be protected.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Never was there more need for this vigilance than now.
The massacre proceeds under patronage of the President.
Wherever in the Rebel States there is a truly loyal citizen, loving the Union, there is a victim who may be called to suffer at any moment from the distempered spirit which now rules.
To my mind, there is no duty more urgent than to guard against this despot, and be ready to throw the shield of Congress over loyal citizens whom he delivers to sacrifice.
It is an extraordinary occasion, big with the fate of this Republic.
Here is another measure, which I once characterized as an effort to cut the Gordian knot of the suffrage question.
That is a great point gained for the peace and welfare of the country.
Without it you will leave the country a prey to the President; you will leave our Union friends throughout the South a sacrifice to the same malignant usurper.
Congress ought not to go home leaving this question unsettled.
Will you leave Washington subject to such discord?
Will you consent that the votes of the colored people shall be thus neutralized the first time they are called into exercise?
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