Be assured, dear Sir, that you have gained a great many repenting sinners from the ranks of the timid cotton-bound apologists of Southern tyranny.
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 pray you may be saved from pain, and soon be brought to your seat in the Senate, and be long spared to defend the right and tell the truth.
In this great city of money-worshippers, thank God, there are none to defend this act of cowardice and meanness.
I think your speech is far the best one delivered this session, and will confer upon you immortality as a parliamentary debater,--not merely a ‘maker of addresses,’ as your enemies would have it.
I think it will stand right alongside with Webster’s reply to Hayne on the Foot resolution, which was his greatest effort in my judgment, and will be considered equal to it in apt classical allusion, strength of argument, bitter irony, and…
If you had been killed, no man could desire a nobler epitaph than your speech; and you will live to say again, in many a form, and on many a fit occasion, the stinging home truths to which no reply could be found but this.
You have been constantly in my mind and heart since the attempt at your assassination, and I must tell you how much I sympathize with the sentiments of your speech, how I glory in its genius, and how impossible it is for me to find words…
I cannot account for the course of Senator Butler, and of South Carolina, except on the supposition, that, fearing certain charitable persons might think you were too severe in your comments on them, they hastened to prove they were worse…
But your position, though more glorious than that of any other living man, has great responsibilities attached to it.
Shame on the country which needed such a wrong to move it to the right!
My chief motive in writing is to thank you for your magnificent speech, which met the requirements of the time with so much intellectual strength and moral heroism.
You rebuked States and individuals merely as the representatives of that ever-encroaching Slave Power, whose characteristic artifice, arrogance, and despotism it was necessary for you to portray in connection with the subject under debate.
Far otherwise is it with the eminent question now before you, involving, as it does, Liberty in a broad Territory, and also involving the peace of the whole country, with our good name in history forevermore.
Against this Territory, thus fortunate in position and population, a Crime has been committed which is without example in the records of the Past.
Not in plundered provinces or in the cruelties of selfish governors will you find its parallel; and yet there is an ancient instance which may show at least the path of justice.
I show you how their dearest rights are cloven down, while a Tyrannical Usurpation seeks to install itself on their very necks!
The wickedness which I now begin to expose is immeasurably aggravated by the motive which prompted it.
Not in any common lust for power did this uncommon tragedy have its origin.
Yes, Sir, when the whole world, alike Christian and Turk, is rising up to condemn this wrong, making it a hissing to the nations, here in our Republic, force--ay, Sir, FORCE--is openly employed in compelling Kansas to this pollution, and…
There is the simple fact, which you will vainly attempt to deny, but which in itself presents an essential wickedness that makes other public crimes seem like public virtues.
This enormity, vast beyond comparison, swells to dimensions of crime which the imagination toils in vain to grasp, when it is understood that for this purpose are hazarded the horrors of intestine feud, not only in this distant Territory…
Even now, while I speak, portents lower in the horizon, threatening to darken the land, which already palpitates with the mutterings of civil war.
The criminal also must be dragged into day, that you may see and measure the power by which all this wrong is sustained.
There, Sir, stands the criminal, all unmasked before you, heartless, grasping, and tyrannical, with an audacity beyond that of Verres, a subtlety beyond that of Machiavel, a meanness beyond that of Bacon, and an ability beyond that of…
Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.
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