I speak of the separation of your colonies from the mother country, WHICH WILL SOON BE FOLLOWED BY THAT OF ALL AMERICA FROM EUROPE.
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 is impossible not to feel in this passage the sure grasp of our American destiny.
Among the evils to be overcome are, in the Southern Colonies, too great an inequality of fortunes, and especially the large number of black slaves, whose slavery is incompatible with a good political constitution, and who, even when…
In all the Colonies he deprecates prejudice, attachment to established forms, a habit of certain taxes, fear of those which it might be necessary to substitute, the vanity of the Colonies who deem themselves most powerful, and the wretched…
It is impossible not to desire earnestly that this people may attain to all the prosperity of which they are capable.
They are to prove to the world, by the fact, that men can be free and tranquil, and can dispense with the chains of all kinds which the tyrants and charlatans of every cloth have pretended to impose under the pretext of the public good.
They are to give the example of political liberty, of religious liberty, of commercial and industrial liberty.
On the contrary, your troubles will perhaps have the effect of a necessary amputation; they are perhaps the only means of saving you from the gangrene of luxury and corruption.
Government inspired by such a spirit would become divine, nations would live at peace together, and people everywhere be happy.
We have no news, public or private; but there is an ostrich-egg laid in America, where the Bostonians have canted three hundred chests of tea into the ocean; for they will not drink tea with our Parliament.… Lord Chatham talked of…
I think this country undone almost beyond redemption.
Would America laid waste, deluged with blood, plundered, enslaved, replace America flourishing, rich, and free?
Do we want to reign over it, as the Spaniards over Peru, depopulated?
Perhaps this apparently trivial incident may transfer the great seat of empire into America.
It looks likely to me: for, if we can remove the turbulent Gallics, our people, according to the exactest computations, will in another century become more numerous than England itself.
The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us.
How true it is that the mission of this Republic is “the illumination of the ignorant,” and, still further, “the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth”!
Yesterday the greatest question was decided which ever was debated in America; and a greater, perhaps, never was nor will be decided among men.… I am surprised at the suddenness as well as greatness of this revolution.
Britain has been filled with folly, and America with wisdom.
It is the will of Heaven that the two countries should be sundered forever.… The day is passed.
The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America.
It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward, forevermore.
I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States.
Yet, through all the gloom, I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory.
For a long time its great premises, that all men are equal, and that rightful government stands only on the consent of the governed, were disowned by our country.
Politicians like Charles Sumner
