If they cannot stand together, then it is the “blockade” which must be modified by the national sovereignty, and not the national sovereignty by the blockade.
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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The British assumption, besides being offensive from mere technicality, is inconsistent with the Proclamation of the President, taken as a whole, which, while appointing a blockade, is careful to reserve the rights of sovereignty, thus…
Such a concession, like war itself, must be at the peril of the nation making it.
War cannot be justified merely on a technicality; nor can the concession of ocean belligerency to rebels without a port or prize court.
We must look at the substance, and find a reason in nothing short of overruling necessity.
It is sufficient that in a great case like the present, where the correlative duties of a friendly power are in question, an act fraught with such portentous evil cannot be vindicated on a technicality.
There can be no reason why the life of our Republic should be less sacred than the life of an Emperor, or should enjoy less protection from British law.
The direct consequence of this concession was to place the Rebels on an equality with ourselves in all British markets, whether of ships or munitions of war.
Nor could any munitions of war have been furnished: not a blockade-runner, laden with supplies, could have left the English shores, except under a kindred penalty.
Had it not been made, no Rebel ship could have been built in England: every step in her building would have been piracy.
Unfriendly in the precipitancy with which it was launched, this concession was more unfriendly in substance.
Admitting that they were belligerents on the land, they were never belligerents on the ocean.
But, whatever power the Rebels possessed on the land, they were always without power on the ocean.
From the beginning, when “God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters called He Seas,” the two have been separate, and power over one has not necessarily implied power over the other.
It cannot be imagined, or divined, or invented; it must exist as a “fact” within the knowledge of the world, or at least as a “fact” susceptible of proof.
While doing so little for us, the treaty makes ample provision for all known claims on the British side.
Whatever the treaty may say in terms, there is no settlement in fact; and until this is made, there will be constant menace of discord.
The treaty not merely makes no provision for the determination of the great question, but it seems to provide expressly that it shall never hereafter be presented.
The moral sense is disturbed by such a process at any stage of the trial; nor is it satisfied by the subsequent provision for the selection of a sovereign or head of a friendly state as arbitrator.
Nothing here gives notice of the real question.
Who would believe that under these words of commonplace was concealed the unsettled difference which has already so deeply stirred the American people, and is destined, until finally adjusted, to occupy the attention of the civilized world?
An inspection of the treaty shows how from beginning to end it is merely for the settlement of individual claims on both sides, putting the two batches on an equality, so that the sufferers by the misconduct of England may be…
To take such a convention as the model for a treaty which was to determine a national grievance of transcendent importance in the relations of two countries marked on the threshold an insensibility to the true nature of the difference to…
It is sufficient to say that the present treaty does no such thing, and that, whatever may have been the disposition of the negotiators, the real root of evil remains untouched in all its original strength.
Surely I do not err, when I say that a wise statesmanship, whether on our side or on the other side, must apply itself to find the real root of evil, and then, with courage tempered by candor and moderation, see that it is extirpated.
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