Charles Sumner

Ours is the cause of truth, of morals, of religion, of God.

First in principles we already are,--first in devotion to those truths which give dignity and security to our common country: let us be FIRST also in numbers and power.

Let our efforts in the next election show us to be FIRST.

Remember, then, to vote for no man who is not willing to unite with us in declaring opposition to Slavery and the Slave Power to be above all other questions, and who cannot be relied upon to sustain those men only who join in this…

The principles which we have upheld in the Presidential election, as paramount to all others, let us continue to uphold and advance through the new organization now happily established.

To support these paramount principles, without equivocation or compromise, at all times and in every way, she has now given her first earnest and determined pledge.

Still further, she has declared, by the vote of nearly FORTY THOUSAND Freemen, that Slavery shall not be extended,--that Slavery shall not be allowed to continue under the National Government, wherever that Government is responsible for…

Nearly FORTY THOUSAND Freemen have, by their votes, borne testimony against the two old political organizations, and for the new party of FREEDOM.

The great law of Human Progress, the all-prevailing might of truth and of God, are on our side.

Confident in the justice of our cause, we will dedicate to it our best powers, careless of opposing factions or the misrepresentations of a mendacious press,--sustaining it with enthusiasm, and yet with candor, with firmness, and yet with…

Nor is it easy to put confidence in the moral firmness of men who, while this great cause is pending, can sustain any party or individual not unequivocally pledged to its support.

We cannot sustain men who contribute votes to place the power and patronage of the highest offices in hands which may exercise them against Freedom.

The American people are intelligent and humane; they are not bulls, to be turned aside by shaking in their eyes a bit of red cloth, or whales, to be stopped by a tub.

If this be so, it does what is better, and what other organizations fail to do: it acknowledges those high principles which, like the great central light, vivify all, and without which all is dark and sterile.

The Gospel is never more truly or sublimely preached than when the politician is told that he, too, is bound by its laws, and communities, whether villages, towns, states, or nations, are summoned, like individuals, to obey its sacred…

Let virtuous men, then, unite on the ground of universal moral principle, and the tyranny of party will be crushed.

Let all good men do this, and they will form a party by themselves, a party acting in the fear of God, and sustained by the arm of Omnipotence....

Let him learn to surrender party for moral principle....

If a disciple of Christ has learned to value his political party more highly than he does truth and justice and mercy, it is surely time that his connection with it were broken off.

Taking our place as a new party, we fulfil the desires of many good men, living and dead, who have longed to see the thraldom of the old organizations broken.

The love of Right, which is the animating principle of our movement, is higher than the love of Freedom.

Our cause is holier than theirs, inasmuch as it is nobler to struggle for the freedom of others than for our own.

Let us, in the spirit of the fathers, pledge ourselves to sustain it with lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.

Now, in the course of human events, it has become our duty to dissolve the political bands which have hitherto bound us to the old organizations, and to assume a separate existence.

It is to uphold and advance these principles, thus neglected by others, that we have come together, leaving the parties to which we have been respectively attached.