Arise now, and Liberty will be secured forever.
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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Nay, more, is not this cause worth living for? is not this cause worth dying for?
Beyond these precepts is also his great example, which, from first to last, teaches the constant lesson of fidelity, in standing up for the liberties of our country, in undoubting faith that the good cause cannot fail.
No bludgeon can dim the lustre of our champion of Freedom.
In all simplicity let me say that I seek nothing but the triumph of Truth.
But this same argument bears with equal force upon our Slavery; so that, in reading his indignant exposure of the West India jurisprudence, we see rising before us the kindred enormities of our own Slave States, and acknowledge the truth…
If you will adopt the principles of Liberty, adopt them altogether.
Every argument which you can urge in support of your own claims might be employed, with far greater justice, in favor of the emancipation of your bondsmen.
At present, what you require under the name of Freedom is nothing but unlimited power to oppress.
But it has an unaccustomed magnitude on this occasion, because the case is novel in this body; so that what you now do, besides involving the liberty of the gentleman at the bar, will establish a precedent, which, in itself, will be a law…
You are to have no regard to the health, strength, comfort, natural affections, or moral feelings, or intellectual endowments of my negroes.
You are only to consider what subsistence to allow them and what labor to exact of them will subserve my interest.
It is now no longer time to flatter petty tyrants by acknowledging that color constitutes a legitimate title for holding men in abject and perpetual bondage.
The Crime against Kansas stands forth in painful light.
Foremost, of course, in these elements, is the impossible pretension, where Barbarism is lost in impiety, by which man claims property in man.
It is an outrage, where five different pretensions all concur in one single object, looking only to the profit of the master, and constituting its ever-present motive power, which is simply to compel the labor of fellow-men without wages.
The Slave-Master of course declines work, and his pernicious example infects all others.
With impious resolve, they would reverse the Almighty decree appointing labor as the duty of man, and declaring that in the sweat of his face shall he eat his bread.
In the Free States the number of publishers was 331; in the Slave States, 24.
But, alas! unless examples of history and lessons of political wisdom are alike delusive, its unrecorded horrors must assume a form of more fearful dimensions.
Of these great men it is the praise, well deserving perpetual mention, and grudged only by malign influence, that, reared amidst Slavery, they did not hesitate to condemn it.
The first looked down upon Slavery; the second look up to Slavery.
In fact, how can that man respect his own dignity, his own rights, who has not learned to respect either the rights or the dignity of his fellow-man?
It is clear that a thing cannot be a human being, and it is equally clear that a human being cannot be a thing.
Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.
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