In that common trench the young hero rests, symbolizing the great Equality for which he died.
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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No Roman monument, with its Siste, viator, to the passing traveller, no “labor of an age in pilèd stones,” can match in grandeur that simple burial.
The God-given color of the African is a constant offence to the disdainful white, who, like the pretentious lord, asking Hotspur for prisoners, can bear nothing so unhandsome “betwixt the wind and his nobility.” This is the whole case.
And shall those Equal Rights promised by the great Declaration be sacrificed to a prejudice?
Shall that Equality before the Law, which is the best part of citizenship, be denied to those who do not happen to be white?
Is this a white man’s government or is it a government of “all men,” as declared by our fathers?
Is it a Republic of Equal Laws, or an Oligarchy of the Skin?
Once Slavery was justified by color, as now the denial of Equal Rights is justified; and the reason is as little respectable in one case as in the other.
At present nobody dares say, “I can sell them”; but the inn, the common conveyance, the theatre, the school, the scientific institute, the church, and the cemetery deny them the equal rights of Freedom.
But it has been reserved for our Republic, dedicated to the rights of human nature, to adopt the color of the skin as the sign of separation, and to organize it in law.
There are white, yellow, red, and black, with intermediate shades; but no matter what their hue, they are always MEN, gifted with a common manhood and entitled to common rights.
Observe, if you please, how little the word “white” is authorized to play the great part it performs, and how much of an intruder it is in all its appearances.
In those two title-deeds, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, there are no words of color, whether white, yellow, red, or black; but here is the fountain out of which all is derived.
The Declaration speaks of “all men,” and not of “all white men”; and the Constitution says, “We the people,” and not “We the white people.” Where, then, is authority for any such discrimination, whether by the nation or any component part?
The fountain failing, and the word non-existent, the whole pretension is a disgusting usurpation, which is more utterly irrational when it is considered that authority for such an outrage can be found only in positive words, plain and…
It cannot be invented, imagined, or implied; it must be found in the very text: and this I assert according to fixed principles of jurisprudence.
This conclusion is reinforced by the several Constitutional Amendments; but I prefer to dwell on the original text of the Constitution, in presence of which you might as well undertake to make a king as to degrade a fellow-citizen on…
This judgment is a torch to illumine the Constitution, while it shows how naturally our fathers in the great Declaration said, “All men,” and not “All white men,” and in the Constitution said, “We the people,” and not “We the white people.
In melancholy contrast with the monumental judgment of the English Chief-Justice are judicial decisions in our own country, especially that masterpiece of elaborate inhumanity, the judgment of our late Chief-Justice in the Dred Scott case.
Such learned debate on the rights of man dependent on complexion would excite a smile, if it did not awaken indignation.
To what meanness of inquiry has not the judicial mind descended in the enforcement of an odious prejudice?
Such decisions are a discredit to Republican Government; and so also is the existing practice of public institutions harmonizing with them.
Nor can any shade of color be an apology for interference with that consideration to which character is justly entitled.
The word “white” found no place in the original Common Law; nor did it find any place afterward in our two title-deeds of Constitutional Liberty, each interpreting the other, and being the fountain out of which are derived the rights and…
Nor, again, did it find place in the Constitutional Amendment expressly defining a “citizen.” How, then, can it become a limitation upon the citizen?
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