They teach us to regard “the nature of the case” and “the subject-matter.” But the case is an impeachment, and the subject-matter is misbehavior in high office.
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.
gutenberg.org
Before us is no common delinquent, whose offence is against a neighbor, but the Chief Magistrate, who has done wrong to his country.
One has injured an individual, the other has injured all.
The abuses stated in our impeachment are not those of mere individual, natural faculties, but the abuses of civil and political authority.
Its motive is not punishment, not vengeance, but the public safety.
The Senate considers only how the safety of the people, which is the supreme law, can be best preserved; and to this end the ordinary rule of evidence is reversed.
If on any point you entertain doubts, the benefit of those doubts must be given to your country; and this is the supreme law.
Better the escape of many guilty than that one innocent should suffer.
This rule, so proper in its place, is not applicable to a proceeding for expulsion from office; and who will undertake to say that any claim of office can be set against the public safety?
Therefore should we now, in the name of the law, “catch at anything” to save the Republic.
Its object is the Public Safety; and therefore no aid for the arrival at truth can be rejected, no gate can be closed.
But here is a gate opened by the sages of the law, and standing open always, to the end that justice may not fail.
It was in this Chamber, in the face of the Senate and the ministers of foreign powers, and surrounded by the gaze of thronged galleries, that Andrew Johnson exhibited himself in beastly intoxication while he took his oath of office as…
It is because they are a prolongation of that wickedness under which the country has so long suffered, and spring from the same bloody fountain, that they are now presented for judgment.
Andrew Johnson is our god Thor, and these latter acts for which he stands impeached are the drinking-horn whose depths are unfathomable.
I have already called it one of the last great battles with Slavery.
Slavery in all its pretensions is a defiance of law; for it can have no law in its support.
Plainly he should have been impeached and expelled at that early day.
But this waiting has cost the country more than can be told.
There is nothing of usurpation he has not attempted.
Beginning with assumption of all power in the Rebel States, he has shrunk from nothing in maintenance of this unparalleled assumption.
No monarch, no despot, no sultan, could claim more than an American President; for he claimed all.
By his edict alone governments were organized, taxes levied, and even the franchises of the citizen determined.
Beginning and continuing in usurpation, it was hateful beyond pardon, because it sacrificed Unionists, white and black, and was in the interest of the Rebellion, and of Rebels who had been in arms against their country.
They were in the nature of notice to Rebels everywhere, that participation in the Rebellion was no bar to office.
Politicians like Charles Sumner
