Finally, Sir, for the sake of peace and tranquillity, cease to shock the Public Conscience; for the sake of the Constitution, cease to exercise a power nowhere granted, and which violates inviolable rights expressly secured.
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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Pains and penalties I will endure, but this great wrong I will not do.
Never, in any capacity, can I render voluntary aid in its execution.
By the Supreme Law, which commands me to do no injustice, by the comprehensive Christian Law of Brotherhood, by the Constitution, which I have sworn to support, I AM BOUND TO DISOBEY THIS ACT.
The good citizen, who sees before him the shivering fugitive, guilty of no crime, pursued, hunted down like a beast, while praying for Christian help and deliverance, and then reads the requirements of this Act, is filled with horror.
In this conviction, patriots have braved unjust commands, and martyrs have died.
Such, also, by the lips of judges and sages, is the proud declaration of English law, whence our own is derived.
The mandates of an earthly power are to be discussed; those of Heaven must at once be performed; nor should we suffer ourselves to be drawn by any compact into opposition to God.
Any other rule attributes infallibility to human laws, places them beyond question, and degrades all men to an unthinking, passive obedience.
Each person, after anxious examination, without haste, without passion, solemnly for himself must decide this great controversy.
Where the conflict is open, as if Congress should command the perpetration of murder, the office of conscience as final arbiter is undisputed.
Clearly, human laws are not always in such conformity; nor can they ever be beyond question from each individual.
To assume that they are always in conformity with the laws of God is presumptuously and impiously to exalt man even to equality with God.
But to assume that human laws are beyond question is to claim for their fallible authors infallibility.
To question these is to question God himself.
As the throne of God is above every earthly throne, so are his laws and statutes above all the laws and statutes of man.
With modesty, and yet with firmness, let me add, Sir, it offends against the Divine Law.
The Slave Act violates the Constitution, and shocks the Public Conscience.
The name Slave--that litany of wrong and woe--does not appear in the clause.
For which reason the man who does not favor Liberty is to be adjudged impious and cruel.
Proscribed by you during life, they will proscribe you through all time.
By eloquent voice they have done much to make their wrongs known, and to secure the respect of the world.
Rude and ignorant they may be; but in their very efforts for Freedom they claim kindred with all that is noble in the Past.
Who could refrain, That had a heart to love, and in that heart Courage to make his love known?
For them every sentiment of humanity is aroused.
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