These things I mention that you may see in what foulness the present Crime was engendered.
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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The measure, thus upheld in defiance of reason, was carried through Congress in defiance of all securities of legislation.
With some it was openly the extension of Slavery; and with others it was openly the establishment of Freedom, under the guise of Popular Sovereignty.
Little did they dream that the prohibition of Slavery in the territory, which was stipulated as the price of their fatal capitulation, would also, at the very moment of its maturity, be wrested from them.
It was the work of slaveholders, and by their concurring votes was crowded upon a reluctant North.
In total disregard of history, the President, in his annual message, tells us that this compromise “was reluctantly acquiesced in by Southern States.” Just the contrary is true.
The whole subject has become a twice-told tale, and its renewed recital will be a renewal of sorrow and shame; but I shall not hesitate.
I do not go too far, when I call it the Crime against Nature, from which the soul recoils, and which language refuses to describe.
It is the Crime of Crimes,--surpassing far the old Crimen Majestatis, pursued with vengeance by the laws of Rome, and containing all other crimes, as the greater contains the less.
I say Crime, and deliberately adopt this strongest term, as better than any other denoting the consummate transgression.
I undertake, in the first place, to expose the CRIME AGAINST KANSAS, in origin and extent.
Against him are stronger battalions than any marshalled by mortal arm,--the inborn, ineradicable, invincible sentiments of the human heart; against him is Nature with all her subtile forces; against him is God.
With finite power he wrestles with the infinite, and he must fall.
He is but mortal man; against him is immortal principle.
How little that Senator knows himself, or the strength of the cause which he persecutes!
The Senator dreams that he can subdue the North.
Like the ancient madman, he may set fire to this Temple of Constitutional Liberty, grander than Ephesian dome; but he cannot enforce obedience to that tyrannical Usurpation.
The Senator copies the British officer who with boastful swagger said that with the end of his sword he would cram the “stamps” down the throats of the American people; and he will meet a similar failure.
Like Danton, he may cry, “De l’audace! encore de l’audace! et toujours de l’audace!” but even his audacity cannot compass this work.
The Senator, with the Slave Power at his back, is strong; but he is not strong enough for this purpose.
Let us not follow the Senator from South Carolina to do the very evil which in another generation we condemn.
It is true, too true, alas! that our fathers were engaged in this traffic; but that is no apology for it.
Pray, Sir, is acknowledged turpitude in a departed generation to become the example for us?
If the Senator wishes to see fanatics, let him look round among his own associates,--let him look at himself.
And in this same dreary catalogue faithful History must record all who now, in an enlightened age, and in a land of boasted Freedom, stand up, in perversion of the Constitution, and in denial of immortal truth, to fasten a new shackle upon…
Politicians like Charles Sumner
