But the Abolitionists, staking their all upon the Kansas issue, and hesitating at no means, fair or foul, are moving heaven and earth to render that beautiful Territory a Free State.
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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They are passing laws disfranchising all the citizens of Kansas who do not believe Negro Slavery to be a Christian institution and a national blessing.
They are proposing to punish with imprisonment the utterance of views inconsistent with their own.
And they are trying to perpetuate their preposterous and infernal tyranny by appointing for a term of years creatures of their own, as commissioners in every county, to lay and collect taxes, and see that the laws they are passing are…
Has this age anything to compare with these acts in audacity?
It was, indeed, too true that Kansas had been invaded, conquered, subjugated, by an armed force from beyond her borders, led on by a fanatical spirit, trampling under foot the principles of the Kansas Bill and the right of suffrage.
On this cumulative, irresistible evidence, in concurrence with antecedent history, I rest.
And yet Senators here argue that this cannot be,--precisely as the conspiracy of Catiline was doubted in the Roman Senate.
As I listened to the Senator from Illinois, while he painfully strove to show that there is no Usurpation, I was reminded of the effort by a distinguished logician to prove that Napoleon Bonaparte never existed.
And permit me to say, that the fact of his existence is not more entirely above doubt than the fact of this Usurpation.
The columns of the public press are daily filled with testimony solemnly taken before the Committee of Congress in Kansas, which attests, in awful light, the violence ending in the Usurpation.
Thus is Liberty sacrificed to Slavery, and Death summoned to sit at the gates as guardian of the Wrong.
And this could not be, except by the entire prostration of all the safeguards of Human Rights.
To such extent are the great liberties of speech and of the press subverted!
By tyrannical forethought, the Usurpation not only fortified all that it did, but assumed a self-perpetuating energy.
As the gallant ship, voyaging on pleasant summer seas, is assailed by a pirate crew, and plundered of its doubloons and dollars, so is this beautiful Territory now assailed in peace and prosperity, and robbed of its political power for the…
Even now the black flag of the land pirates from Missouri waves at the mast-head; in their laws you hear the pirate yell and see the flash of the pirate knife; while, incredible to relate, the President, gathering the Slave Power at his…
Popular Sovereignty, which, when truly understood, is a fountain of just power, has ended in Popular Slavery,--not in the subjection of the unhappy African race merely, but of this proud Caucasian blood which you boast.
The profession with which you began, of All by the People, is lost in the wretched reality of Nothing for the People.
Great crimes of history have never been without apologies.
But the Apologies for the Crime are worse than the efforts at denial.
In essential heartlessness they identify their authors with the great iniquity.
Tyranny, imbecility, absurdity, and infamy all unite to dance, like the weird sisters, about this Crime.
In denying these principles, you place the certificate above the thing certified, and give a perpetual lease to violence and fraud, merely because at an ephemeral moment they are unquestioned.
Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.
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