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…
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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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.
But all resources will be vain and valueless without human intelligence, skill, and exertion.
These will change the face of the country, opening forests, ploughing fields, working mines, building roads, establishing schools, planting churches, administering justice.
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…
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…
It is on the ground of this obligation that the bill now before the Senate is most strongly commended.
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.
If the latter, according to all the laws of good neighborhood, would be bound to help such a work, then is the Government bound.
To decline this duty, to shirk this obvious obligation, is to behave as no private citizen could behave without the imputation of meanness.
The influence of roads and canals in enhancing the value of the public domain through which they pass is well illustrated by experience.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of roads as means of civilization.
This, at least, may be said: Where roads are not, civilization cannot be; and civilization advances as roads are extended.
The roads, together with the laws, of ancient Rome are now better remembered than her victories.
The Flaminian and Appian Ways, once trod by such great destinies, still remain as beneficent representatives of ancient grandeur.
Under God, the road and the schoolmaster are two chief agents of human improvement.
The education begun by the schoolmaster is expanded, liberalized, and completed by intercourse with the world; and this intercourse finds new opportunities and inducements in every road that is built.
In all this I see not only further opportunities for commerce, but a new extension to civilization and increased strength to our National Union.
But the true Golden Age is before, not behind; and one of its tokens will be the opening of those long ways, by which villages, towns, counties, states, provinces, nations, are all to be associated and knit together in a fellowship that…
And since it can owe little to my individual position, I accept the opposition it encounters as a tribute to its intrinsic importance.
It has been met by harmless pleasantry, and by equally harmless vituperation,--by figures of arithmetic and figures of rhetoric,--by minute criticism and extended discussion,--also, by that sure resource of a weak cause, hard words, and an…
The position I took is regarded as natural, or excusable, in a Senator from one of the Land States, acting under the vulgar spur of local interest; but it is pronounced unnatural and inexcusable in a Senator from Massachusetts.
Now, Sir, it is sufficient for me to say, in reply to this imputation, that, while I know there are influences and biases incident to particular States or sections of the Union, I recognize no difference in the duties of Senators on this…
Coming from different States and opposite sections, we are all Senators of the Union; and our constant duty is, without fear or favor, to introduce into the national legislation the principle of justice.
Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.
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