Unseen of men, the great spirits of History combat by the side of the people of Kansas, breathing divine courage.
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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I will say it,--no person with the upright form of man can be allowed, without violation of all decency, to switch out from his tongue the perpetual stench of offensive personality.
The noisome, squat, and nameless animal to which I now refer is not the proper model for an American Senator.
President, again the Senator switches his tongue, and again he fills the Senate with its offensive odor.
History records but one Thermopylæ: there ought to have been another, and that one for Preston S.
We would not jeopard the religion and morality of the South to save a Union that had failed for every useful purpose.
Yes, Sir, I have his words, and I intend to hold him responsible for them.
In equality before the law they find their strength.
The latter are maintaining the odious relics of a barbarous age and civilization,--not the civilization of the New Testament,--not the civilization that is now blessing and adorning the best portions of the world.
It is her body that lies bleeding, and demands retribution at the hands of her children.
The Surgeons of the City of Washington.--God grant them wisdom! for they are dressing the wounds of a mighty empire, and of uncounted generations.
The blow struck upon the head of Charles Sumner did not fall upon him alone.
It was a blow struck at the very Tree of Liberty.
It says to us that Northern men shall not be heard in the halls of Congress, except at the peril of the bowie-knife, the bludgeon, and revolver.
They sicken the heart of the good citizen, of the patriot, of the Christian; they awaken a gloomy doubt whether the sacrifices and the sufferings endured by our fathers, that they might found a purer, higher, and freer civilization on this…
For they are holy, the wounds that the Southerner dealt thee: Count them blessed, and blessed the mother that bore thee.
Take thy deserving, then; wear it for life on thy forehead!
If anything could aggravate the inherent brutality of this act, it is the character of the man upon whom it was committed.
Taking small interest in the ordinary conflicts of parties, he has stood forth, from the moment that he entered the Senate, as the courageous and resolute champion of the slave.
With a lofty and relentless logic he tears away the covering veil of sophistry with which the Southern members had sought to conceal the naked iniquity of the transactions in Kansas.
God grant only that a life so valuable may be spared, and he will occupy in the estimation of all men, at home and abroad, whose judgment he would value, a prouder position than he ever occupied before.
I entreat you, my dear friend, not to think or act on public affairs until your health is firmly restored.
Sumner adds, “Whatever Massachusetts can give, let it all go to suffering Kansas.
Such sympathy and support in the cause, of which I am a humble representative, is all that I ask for myself, or am willing to accept.
Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.
Politicians like Charles Sumner
