In the press, in daily conversation, wherever two or three are gathered together, there the indignant utterance finds vent.
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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Already Public Opinion gathers unwonted forces to scourge the aggressors.
Let it now take stand between the living and dead, and cause this plague to be stayed.
Let its power be stretched forth into this distant Territory, not to bind, but to release,--not for oppression of the weak, but for subversion of the tyrannical,--not for prop and maintenance of revolting Usurpation, but for confirmation…
Especially must it turn from that Slave Oligarchy now controlling the Republic, and refuse to be its tool.
To overthrow this Usurpation is now the special, importunate duty of Congress, admitting of no hesitation or postponement.
Such a cause can be maintained only by the practical subversion of all rights.
What are trial by jury, Habeas Corpus, ballot-box, right of petition, liberty in Kansas, your liberty, Sir, or mine, to one who lends himself, not merely to the support at home, but to propagandism abroad, of that preposterous wrong which…
To such, indeed, time-honored safeguards of popular rights can be a name and nothing more.
Out of death comes life, and the “traitor” whom he blindly executes will live immortal in the cause.
Not the first time in history will a scaffold become the pedestal of honor.
And if we glance at special achievement, it will be difficult to find anything in the history of South Carolina which presents so much of heroic spirit in an heroic cause as shines in that repulse of the Missouri invaders by the…
In the one is the long wail of Slavery; in the other, the hymn of Freedom.
South Carolina counts by centuries, where Kansas counts by years.
He cannot forget its wretched persistence in the slave-trade, as the very apple of its eye, and the condition of its participation in the Union.
He cannot, surely, forget its shameful imbecility from Slavery, confessed throughout the Revolution, followed by its more shameful assumptions for Slavery since.
He cannot ope his mouth, but out there flies a blunder.
But the Senator touches nothing which he does not disfigure--with error, sometimes of principle, sometimes of fact.
As the tyranny of the British King is all renewed in the President, so are renewed on this floor the old indignities which embittered and fomented the troubles of our fathers.
He has done that which he ought not to have done, and has left undone that which he ought to have done.
Read the Declaration of Independence, and there is hardly an accusation against the British Monarch which may not now be hurled with increased force against the American President.
At every stage the similitude between the wrongs of Kansas and those other wrongs against which our fathers rose becomes more apparent.
Will you cast them again into the den of Tyranny, or will you help their despairing efforts to escape?
Will you push them back to renew their struggle with a deadly foe, or will you preserve them in security and peace?
If, forgetting the origin of the Republic, you turn away from this principle, then, in the name of human nature, trampled down and oppressed, but aroused to just self-defence, do I plead for the exercise of this power.
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