Whatever is announced in the Declaration is essentially National, and so also is all that is assured.
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.
gutenberg.org
The principles of the Declaration, reinforced by the Constitutional Amendments, cannot be allowed to suffer.
Nor can any State set up its local system against the universal law.
Equality implies universality; and what is universal must be national.
If each State is left to determine the protection of Equal Rights, then will protection vary according to the State, and Equal Rights will prevail only according to the accident of local law.
But no such tyranny is proposed among us,--nor any interference of any kind with matters local in character.
The Nation will not enter the State, except for the safeguard of rights national in character, and then only as the sunshine, with beneficent power, and, like the sunshine, for the equal good of all.
Here is a just centralism; here is a generous imperialism.
And may this National Capitol, where we are now assembled, be the emblem of our Nation!
Planted on a hill-top, with portals opening North and South, East and West, with spacious chambers, and with arching dome crowned by the image of Liberty,--such is our imperial Republic; but in nothing is it so truly imperial as in that…
The Republican party must do its work, which is nothing less than the regeneration of the Nation according to the promises of the Declaration of Independence.
To maintain the Republic in its unity, and the people in their rights,--such is this transcendent duty.
Nor do I fear any political party which assails these sacred promises, even if it falsely assume the name of Democrat.
How powerless their efforts against these immortal principles!
Here have I labored steadfastly from early life, bearing obloquy and enmity; and here again I pledge the energies which remain to me, even if obloquy and enmity survive.
Happily, Slavery is abolished; but, alas! wrong is not banished from the earth, nor has it ceased to be organized in human institutions, or to be maintained by governments.
Blessed are the peacemakers!” Here is our opportunity to obtain this blessing; but we must begin by stopping our war-dance about the island, kept up at immense cost for more than a year.
PRESIDENT,--This question is important, primarily, as it concerns the liberty of the citizen; but it is made important also by the attempt, to which we have just listened, to establish for the Senate a prerogative which on history and…
An attempt has been made to claim for the Senate prerogatives which belong to the House of Lords.
Such privileges as the Senate has are derived from the House of Commons rather than from the House of Lords, so far as they are derived from either of these bodies.
But the power to protract the imprisonment of a citizen must be kindred with that to imprison.
I dismiss the whole argument founded upon the prolongation of the Committee as entirely irrelevant.
Prolong the Committee, if you please, till doomsday; you cannot by that in any way affect the liberty of the citizen.
The citizen is imprisoned only by the order of the Senate, and the power to imprison or to detain expires with the session.
According to the Parliamentary Law of England there is a difference between the Lords and Commons in this respect: the former being authorized, and the latter not, to imprison for a period beyond the session.
Politicians like Charles Sumner
