Charles Sumner

When this is done, I know not what other trials may be in wait for the unhappy African; but this I do know, that the Antislavery Enterprise will then have triumphed, and the institution of Slavery, as defined by existing law, will no…

But, Sir, it does confidently assume, against all question, contradiction, or assault whatever, that every man is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and, with equal confidence, it asserts that every individual who…

If to any timid soul the Enterprise seems impossible because it is too beautiful, then do I say at once that it is too beautiful not to be possible.

Here is no impossibility; nor is there any difficulty which will not yield to faithful, well-directed endeavor.

I know well the little faith of the world in the triumph of principles, and I readily imagine the despair with which our object is regarded; but not on this account am I disheartened.

Besides, the Antislavery Enterprise is right; and the right is always practicable.

By a decree which is a proverb of tyranny, the Israelites were compelled to make bricks without straw; but it is not according to the ways of a benevolent Providence that man should be constrained to do what cannot be done.

Certainly I am right in stripping from Slavery the apology of Christianity, which it has tenaciously hugged; and here I leave the first part of my subject, asserting, against every objection, the Necessity of our Enterprise.

In support of Slavery, it is the habit to pervert texts and to invent authority.

With regret, though not with astonishment, I learn that a Boston divine has sought to throw the seamless garment of Christ over this shocking wrong.

And I--who am no theologian, but only a simple layman--make bold to say, that whoever finds in the Gospel any sanction of Slavery finds there merely a reflection of himself.

If to any one these things seem to have the license of Christianity, it is only because they have first secured a license in his own soul.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which you proudly declare to be your own inalienable, God-given rights, and to the support of which your fathers pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, are his by the same immortal…

You can claim nothing for yourself, as man, which you must not accord to him.

And as a man he stands before you an unquestionable member of the Human Family, entitled to all the rights of man.

But by no reach of learning, no torture of fact, no effrontery of dogma, can any science show that he is not a man.

It may be that the different races of men proceeded from different stocks; but there is but one great Human Family, in which Caucasian and African, Chinese and Indian, are all brothers, children of one Father, and heirs to one…

That is all; and I need only read these words in order to expose the whole--transpicuous humbug.

Freedom and Slavery can hold no divided empire; nor can there be any true repose, until Freedom is everywhere established.

A wrong so transcendent, so loathsome, so direful, must be encountered, wherever it can be reached; and the battle must be continued without truce or compromise, until the field is entirely won.

It is, then, on the testimony of slave-masters, solemnly, legislatively, judicially attested in the very law itself, that I now arraign this institution as an outrage upon man and his Creator.

Power divorced from right is devilish; power without the check of responsibility is tyrannical; and I need not go back to the authority of Plato, when I assert that the most complete injustice is that erected into the form of law.

Slavery, which it defines and upholds, continues to outrage Public Opinion, and, within the limits of our Republic, more than three millions of human beings, guilty only of a skin not colored like your own, are left the victims of its…

Tell me not of the sympathy which overflows from the mansion of the master to the cabin of the slave.

Tell me not of the lenity with which this cruel law is tempered to its unhappy subjects.