Why, Sir, to make this confession is to confess our Government a practical failure, which I will never do,--except, indeed, as it is administered now.
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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And now the intelligence of the country is insulted by the Apology, that the President had no power to interfere.
But during long months of menace suspended over the Free Soil of Kansas, breaking forth in successive invasions, the President folds his hands in complete listlessness, or, if he moves at all, it is only to encourage the robber…
The whole community was aroused, while Bunker Hill and Faneuil Hall quaked with responsive indignation.
Therefore it is that Kansas is left a prey to the Propagandists of Slavery, while the whole Treasury, the Army, and Navy of the United States are lavished to hunt a single slave through the streets of Boston.
Thus, where the Slave Power is indifferent, the President will see that the laws are faithfully executed; but in other cases, where the interests of Slavery are at stake, he is controlled absolutely by this tyranny, ready at all times to…
But no person of ordinary intelligence will pretend that American citizens in the Pacific have received wrongs from these cannibals comparable in atrocity to those suffered by American citizens in Kansas.
Such is the broad statement, which, even if correct, furnishes no Apology for any proposed ratification of the Crime, but which is in reality untrue; and this I call the Apology of imbecility.
It was said of certain Roman Emperors, who did infinite mischief in their beginnings and infinite good towards their end, that they should never have been born or never died; and I would apply the same to the official life of this Kansas…
Grievously did he err in yielding to the Legislature any act of authentication; but in some measure he has answered for this error by determined effort since to expose the utter illegality of that body, which he now repudiates entirely.
In denying these principles, you place the certificate above the thing certified, and give a perpetual lease to violence and fraud, merely because at an ephemeral moment they are unquestioned.
Tyranny, imbecility, absurdity, and infamy all unite to dance, like the weird sisters, about this Crime.
In essential heartlessness they identify their authors with the great iniquity.
But the Apologies for the Crime are worse than the efforts at denial.
Great crimes of history have never been without apologies.
The profession with which you began, of All by the People, is lost in the wretched reality of Nothing for the People.
Popular Sovereignty, which, when truly understood, is a fountain of just power, has ended in Popular Slavery,--not in the subjection of the unhappy African race merely, but of this proud Caucasian blood which you boast.
Even now the black flag of the land pirates from Missouri waves at the mast-head; in their laws you hear the pirate yell and see the flash of the pirate knife; while, incredible to relate, the President, gathering the Slave Power at his…
As the gallant ship, voyaging on pleasant summer seas, is assailed by a pirate crew, and plundered of its doubloons and dollars, so is this beautiful Territory now assailed in peace and prosperity, and robbed of its political power for the…
Slavery stands erect, clanking its chains on the Territory of Kansas, surrounded by a code of death, and trampling upon all cherished liberties, whether of speech, the press, the bar, the trial by jury, or the electoral franchise.
By tyrannical forethought, the Usurpation not only fortified all that it did, but assumed a self-perpetuating energy.
To such extent are the great liberties of speech and of the press subverted!
And this could not be, except by the entire prostration of all the safeguards of Human Rights.
Thus is Liberty sacrificed to Slavery, and Death summoned to sit at the gates as guardian of the Wrong.
The columns of the public press are daily filled with testimony solemnly taken before the Committee of Congress in Kansas, which attests, in awful light, the violence ending in the Usurpation.
Politicians like Charles Sumner
