It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of roads as means of civilization.
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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The influence of roads and canals in enhancing the value of the public domain through which they pass is well illustrated by experience.
To decline this duty, to shirk this obvious obligation, is to behave as no private citizen could behave without the imputation of meanness.
If the latter, according to all the laws of good neighborhood, would be bound to help such a work, then is the Government bound.
I say confidently on unanswerable grounds of justice, because nothing can render the rules of justice in such a case less obligatory upon the Government than upon a private individual.
It is on the ground of this obligation that the bill now before the Senate is most strongly commended.
Reason declares, with unhesitating voice, that, whatever may be the legal immunities of the Great Landholder, he cannot, in equity, be above his neighbors, and that he should contribute to these works in some proportion according to the…
And now the question is directly presented, whether the Great Landholder, persevering in this system, will leave to the small landholders by his side the further labor of building railroads, by which his own magnificent domain will be…
These will change the face of the country, opening forests, ploughing fields, working mines, building roads, establishing schools, planting churches, administering justice.
But all resources will be vain and valueless without human intelligence, skill, and exertion.
Its fields will naturally wave with golden harvests, while its inexhaustible stores of coal will quicken every form of human industry, and will furnish an incalculable motive-power to all its multiplying machinery and workshops.
If this argument did not seem sufficiently conclusive to render any further discussion superfluous, at least from me, I might go forward, and show that the true interests of the whole country--of every State in the Union, as of Iowa…
It remains, then, that, with candor and justice, they should recognize the superior--I will not say exclusive--claims of the States within whose borders and under the protection of whose laws the national domain is found.
Against these clear and well-supported merits, the old States present small claims to consideration.
On the one side, they have received little, very little, from the nation,--while, on the other side, the nation, by strong considerations of equity, is largely indebted to them.
After the constant charges of squandering the public lands and of partiality to the Land States, I think all will be astonished at the small amount on the debtor side, in the great account between the States and the Nation.
I will not believe, however, that any discrimination can be made between particular Land States, on the ground of difference in conditions properly attributable to accidental circumstances.
But I do confidently submit, that in this peculiar, time-honored immunity, originally claimed by the nation, and conceded by the States within which the public lands lie, there is ample ground of equity, under which these States may now…
Lands belonging to the nation, which, it seems, even royal prerogative at this day in England cannot save from taxation, are in our country, under express provisions of compact, early established, exempted from this burden.
Taxation is a sacred right, essential to the existence of Government,--an incident of sovereignty.
But, as a Senator from one of the old States, I desire thus early to declare my dissent from these views, and the reasons for this dissent.
Clemency: A grace which it can never be otherwise than honorable to ask and honorable to grant.
But be assured I shall rejoice in every word of affection and honor for Ireland, and of sympathy with all her children, especially those patriots who have striven and suffered for the common good.
So, among the Nations, all violence, and especially all belligerent intervention, should be forbidden by International Law; and I trust the day is not far distant when this prohibition will be maintained by the Federation of Christian…
But though not present in person, my heart will be with them in every word of honor to that illustrious man, in every assurance of sympathy for his great cause, and in every practical effort to place our country openly on the side of…
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