Charles Sumner

However he may have appeared before man, he came into the presence of God only as liberator of his slaves.

His last testament cancels his authority as a slaveholder.

From Washington on earth I appeal to Washington in heaven.

Often expressing himself with various degrees of force against Slavery, and promising his suffrage for its abolition, he did not see this wrong as he saw it at the close of life, in the illumination of another sphere.

The fugitive was never returned, but lived in freedom to a good old age, down to a very recent day, a monument of the just forbearance of him whom we aptly call Father of his Country.

If this be true as a general rule, if the public support and sympathy be essential to the life of all law, this is especially the case in an enactment which concerns the important and sensitive rights of Personal Liberty.

I do not mean that the cordial support of every man or of every small locality is necessary; but I do mean that the public feelings, the public convictions, the public conscience, must not be touched, wounded, lacerated, by every endeavor…

Even if this Act could claim any validity or apology under the Constitution, which it cannot, it lacks that essential support in the Public Conscience of the States, where it is to be enforced, which is the life of all law, and without…

All legislation hostile to the fundamental law of the land should be repealed without delay.

And just in this degree must history condemn the Slave Act more than the Stamp Act.

As Freedom is more than property, as Man is above the dollar that he earns, as heaven, to which we all aspire, is higher than earth, where every accumulation of wealth must ever remain, so are the rights assailed by an American Congress…

Both infringe important rights: one, of property; the other, the vital right of all, which is to other rights as soul to body,--the right of a man to himself.

No freeman could be seized under it as a slave.

In the charnel-house of history, with unclean things of the Past, it now rots.

The Americans have been wronged; they have been driven to madness by injustice....

Three millions of people, so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest....

To this great object, within the bounds of Law and the Constitution, were bent all the patriot energies of the land.

By resolutions of legislatures and of town meetings, by speeches and writings, by public assemblies and processions, the country was rallied in peaceful phalanx against the execution of the Act.

Earth, water, Nature they may subdue; but Truth they cannot subdue.

In the face of an awakened community, where discussion has free scope, no men, though supported by office and wealth, can long maintain injustice.

The unconstitutional Stamp Act was welcomed in the Colonies by the Tories of that day precisely as the unconstitutional Slave Act is welcomed by large and imperious numbers among us.

It was denounced as contrary to the British Constitution, on two principal grounds: first, as a usurpation by Parliament of powers not belonging to it, and an infraction of rights secured to the Colonies; and, secondly, as a denial of…

Its passage was the signal for a general flame of opposition and indignation throughout the Colonies.

Opposing this Act as doubly unconstitutional from the want of power in Congress and from the denial of Trial by Jury, I find myself again encouraged by the example of our Revolutionary Fathers, in a case which is a landmark of history.

Such, Sir, is the argument, briefly uttered, against the constitutionality of the Slave Act.