At this moment, while the country is pained by the heartless conspiracy against Freedom in Kansas, we are startled by another effort, which contemplates not merely the political subjugation of the National Government, but the actual…
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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As men are murdered for the sake of their money, so is this Territory blasted in peace and prosperity in order to wrest its political influence to the side of Slavery.
It is not merely to provide new markets for slaves, or even to guard Slavery in Missouri, but to build another Slave State, and thus, by the presence of two additional Slaveholding Senators, to give increased preponderance to the Slave…
Would you know the secret of this unprecedented endeavor, beginning with the repeal of the Prohibition of Slavery, down to the latest atrocity?
And this overthrow of all popular rights is done in the name of Popular Sovereignty.
Yes, fellow-citizens, should any person there presume to print or circulate the speech in which I now express my abhorrence of Slavery, and deny its constitutional existence anywhere within the national jurisdiction, he would become liable…
The Legislature, which was constituted by the overthrow of the electoral franchise, proceeded to overthrow every safeguard of Freedom.
The same Northern President, who did not shrink from unblushing complicity in the original outrage, now assumed another complicity.
Violently, ruthlessly, the polls were possessed by these invaders.
On the day of election, when this vaunted popular sovereignty was first invoked, hirelings from Missouri, having no home in the Territory, entered it in bands of fifties and hundreds, and, assuming an electoral franchise to which they had…
In the race of emigration the Freedom-loving citizens of the North promised to obtain the ascendency, and, in the exercise of the conceded sovereignty of the settlers, to prohibit Slavery.
A power which Heaven never gave can be maintained only by means which Heaven can never sanction.
As the less is contained in the greater, so there is no vileness of dishonesty, no denial of human rights, that is not plainly involved in the support of an enormity which begins by changing man, created in the image of God, into a…
It is vain to expect that men who have brought themselves to become propagandists of this enormity will be constrained by any compromise, compact, bargain, or plighted faith.
An oligarchy seeking to maintain an outrage like Slavery, and drawing its inspirations from this fountain of wickedness, is naturally base, false, and heedless of justice.
Passing strange it is that here in Massachusetts, in this nineteenth century, we should be constrained to put this question; passing strange, that, when it is put, there should be any hesitation to answer it, by voice and vote, in such way…
To be doubtful on this is to be wrong, and to be wrong on this is to be wholly wrong.
So transcendent, so exclusive, so all-absorbing at the present juncture is this question, that it is vain to speak of the position of candidates on other things.
If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?” The distant emigrant, the whole country, awaits the voice of our beloved Commonwealth in answer to the question, Are you for Freedom, or are you for Slavery?
There are honorable responsibilities belonging to Massachusetts, as an early and constant vindicator of Freedom, which she cannot renounce.
There are men, who, while professing candor, yet show that the bitterness of party has entered into their whole character and lives, as the bitterness of the soil in Sardinia is said to appear even in its honey.
It has been my fortune latterly to see Slavery face to face in its own home, in the Slave States; and I take this early opportunity to offer my testimony to the open barbarism which it sanctions.
Fellow-Citizens, I speak plainly; nor can words exhibiting the enormity of Slavery be too plain, whether it be regarded simply in the legislative and judicial decisions by which it is upheld, or in the unquestionable facts by which its…
Speak or die!” Are you for Freedom, with its priceless blessings, or are you for Slavery, with its countless wrongs and woes?
But above all these is heard the great question, which will not be postponed, Are you for Freedom, or are you for Slavery?
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