Not in plundered provinces or in the cruelties of selfish governors will you find its parallel; and yet there is an ancient instance which may show at least the path of justice.
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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Against this Territory, thus fortunate in position and population, a Crime has been committed which is without example in the records of the Past.
Far otherwise is it with the eminent question now before you, involving, as it does, Liberty in a broad Territory, and also involving the peace of the whole country, with our good name in history forevermore.
You rebuked States and individuals merely as the representatives of that ever-encroaching Slave Power, whose characteristic artifice, arrogance, and despotism it was necessary for you to portray in connection with the subject under debate.
My chief motive in writing is to thank you for your magnificent speech, which met the requirements of the time with so much intellectual strength and moral heroism.
Shame on the country which needed such a wrong to move it to the right!
How could any one, who had not measured all the length and breadth of slaveholding depravity, as I had not, have brought such a thing within the range of imagination or prophecy?
Our ablest, best, and most influential men, men who have been highly conservative, as it is called, have made up their minds on this subject.
I have carefully read your speech; I have read the concluding retort, which some of your friends wish had not been made; and I most fervently thank God for enabling you to say just what you said, and to say it in the very manner you did.
But your position, though more glorious than that of any other living man, has great responsibilities attached to it.
I cannot account for the course of Senator Butler, and of South Carolina, except on the supposition, that, fearing certain charitable persons might think you were too severe in your comments on them, they hastened to prove they were worse…
You have been constantly in my mind and heart since the attempt at your assassination, and I must tell you how much I sympathize with the sentiments of your speech, how I glory in its genius, and how impossible it is for me to find words…
If you had been killed, no man could desire a nobler epitaph than your speech; and you will live to say again, in many a form, and on many a fit occasion, the stinging home truths to which no reply could be found but this.
I think it will stand right alongside with Webster’s reply to Hayne on the Foot resolution, which was his greatest effort in my judgment, and will be considered equal to it in apt classical allusion, strength of argument, bitter irony, and…
I think your speech is far the best one delivered this session, and will confer upon you immortality as a parliamentary debater,--not merely a ‘maker of addresses,’ as your enemies would have it.
In this great city of money-worshippers, thank God, there are none to defend this act of cowardice and meanness.
I pray you may be saved from pain, and soon be brought to your seat in the Senate, and be long spared to defend the right and tell the truth.
Be assured, dear Sir, that you have gained a great many repenting sinners from the ranks of the timid cotton-bound apologists of Southern tyranny.
You still ascend in higher regions with every one of your oratorical efforts.
I wish I could find new words to communicate to you the impression full of charm and joy, reading your speech this morning.
I cannot but hope that the recent occurrence will have a powerful influence in advancing the good cause which you have so zealously and ably defended.
We cannot see as yet the entire results of that speech, but everything now indicates that it has saved the country.
A grand and terrible philippic, worthy of the great occasion; the severe and awful truth which the sharp agony of the national crisis demanded.
For, before he uttered a word, he knew its probable effect; he measured the danger before he struck the blow.
His words go straight to the popular heart, and find there an earnest and immediate response.
Politicians like Charles Sumner
