Carl Schurz

“ No occasion eluded his grasp to push on the destruction of slavery, not only by sweeping decrees, but in detail, by pursuing it, as with a probing-iron, into every nook and corner of its existence. It was his sleepless care that every blow struck at the Rebellion should surely and heavily tell against slavery, and that every drop of American blood that was shed should surely be consecrated to human freedom. He could not rest until assurance was made doubly sure, and I doubt whether our legislative history shows an example of equal watchfulness, fidelity and devotion to a great object. ”

“ Let the battle-flags of the brave volunteers, which they brought home from the war with the glorious record of their victories, be preserved intact as a proud ornament of our State-houses and armories. But let the colors of the army, under which the sons of all the States are to meet and mingle in common patriotism, speak of nothing but union, — not a union of conquerors and conquered, but a union which is the mother of all, equally tender to all, knowing of nothing but equality, peace and love among her children. ”

“ One of those eternal laws which govern the development of human affairs asserted itself, — the law that a great wrong, which has been maintained in defiance of the moral sense of mankind, must finally, by the very means and measures necessary for its sustenance, render itself so insupportable as to insure its downfall and destruction.
So it was with slavery. I candidly acquit the American slave-power of willful and wanton aggression upon the liberties and general interests of the American people. If slavery was to be kept alive at all, its supporters could not act otherwise than they did. ”

“ Sumner loved England — had loved her as long as he lived — from a feeling of consanguinity, for the treasures of literature she had given to the world, for the services she had rendered to human freedom, for the blows she had struck at slavery, for the sturdy work she had done for the cause of progress and civilization, for the many dear friends he had among her citizens. Such was his impulse, and no man was more incapable of pandering to a vulgar prejudice. ”

“ Abraham Lincoln was a true child of the people. There was in his heart an inexhaustible fountain of tenderness, and from it sprung that longing to be true, just and merciful to all, which made the people love him. In the deep, large humanity of his soul had grown his moral and political principles, to which he clung with the fidelity of an honest nature, and which he defended with the strength of a vigorous mind. ”

“ Commerce said, — Do not disturb slavery, for its products fill our ships and are one of the principal means of our exchanges. Industry said, — Do not disturb slavery, for it feeds our machinery and gives us markets. The greed of wealth said, — Do not disturb slavery, for it is an inexhaustible fountain of riches. Political ambition said, — Do not disturb slavery, for it furnishes us combinations and compromises to keep parties alive and to make power the price of shrewd management. An anxious statesmanship said, — Do not disturb slavery, for you might break to pieces the union of these States. ”

“ Alas for the generation that would put such men into their graves with the poor boon of an apology for what was in them noblest and best! Who will not agree that, had power or partisan spirit, which persecuted him because he followed higher aims than party interest, ever succeeded in subjugating and moulding him after its fashion, against his conscience, against his conviction of duty, against his sense of right, he would have sunk into his grave a miserable ruin of his great self, wrecked in his moral nature, deserving only a tear of pity? ”

“ Is it well to make them believe that he who dares to be himself must be hunted as a political outlaw, who will find justice only when he is dead? That would have been the sad moral of his death, had Charles Sumner died a year ago.
Let the American people never forget that it has always been the independent spirit, the all-defying sense of duty which broke the way for every great progressive movement since mankind has a history; which gave the American Colonies their sovereignty and made this great Republic; which defied the power of slavery, and made this a Republic of freemen ”

“ Slavery is wrong.
Such was the vital spirit of the anti-slavery movement in its early development. Such a spirit alone could inspire that religious devotion which gave to the believer all the stubborn energy of fanaticism; it alone could kindle that deep enthusiasm which made men willing to risk and sacrifice everything for a great cause; it alone could keep alive that unconquerable faith in the certainty of ultimate success which boldly attempted to overcome seeming impossibilities. ”

“ It was indeed a great spirit, as, against difficulties which threw pusillanimity into despair, it painfully struggled into light, often baffled and as often pressing forward with devotion always fresh; nourished by nothing but a profound sense of right; encouraged by nothing but the cheering sympathy of liberty-loving mankind the world over, and by the hope that some day the conscience of the American people would be quickened by a full understanding of the dangers which the existence of the great wrong would bring upon the Republic. ”

“ Then the people rose against that oppression which touched their property; the anti-slavery movement originated in an impulse purely moral.
It was the irresistible breaking out of a trouble of conscience, — a trouble of conscience which had already disturbed the men who made the American Republic. It found a voice in their anxious admonitions, their gloomy prophecies, their scrupulous care to exclude from the Constitution all forms of expression which might have appeared to sanction the idea of property in man. ”

“ Sumner found his place and there he grew great, for that moral impulse was stronger in him than in most of the world around him; and it was in him not a mere crude, untutored force of nature, but educated and elevated by thought and study; and it found in his brain and heart an armory of strong weapons given to but few; vast information, legal learning, industry, eloquence, undaunted courage, an independent and iron will, profound convictions, unbounded devotion and sublime faith. ”

“ An overwhelming majority of the American people acquiesced in it. Material interest looked upon it with satisfaction, as a promise of repose; timid and sanguine patriots greeted it as a new bond of union; politicians hailed it as an assurance that the fight for the public plunder might be carried on without the disturbing intrusion of a moral principle in politics. But, deep down, men's conscience like a volcanic fire was restless, ready for a new outbreak as soon as the thin crust of compromise should crack. ”

“ No civilized nation, from the republics of antiquity down to our days, ever thought it wise or patriotic to preserve in conspicuous and durable form the mementos of victories won over fellow-citizens in civil war. Why not? Because every citizen should feel himself with all others as the child of a common country, and not as a defeated foe. All civilized governments of our days have instinctively followed the same dictate of wisdom and patriotism. The Irishman, when fighting for old England at Waterloo, was not to behold on the red cross floating above him the name of the Boyne. ”

“ And this speech he delivered while the citizen soldiery of Boston in festive array were standing before him, and while the very air was stirred by the premonitory mutterings of an approaching war.
The whole man revealed himself in that utterance; a soul full of the native instinct of justice; an overpowering sense of right and wrong, which made him look at the problems of human society from the lofty plane of an ideal morality, which fixed for him, high beyond the existing condition of things, the aims for which he must strive, and inspired and fired his ardent nature for the struggle. ”

“ The spirit impelling him to do so was the same conscience which urged him to break away from the powerful party which controlled his State in the days of Daniel Webster, and to join a feeble minority, which stood up for freedom; to throw away the favor and defy the power of the wealthy and refined, in order to plead the cause of the down-trodden and degraded; to stand up against the slave-power in Congress with a courage never surpassed ”

“ He belongs to all of us in the North and in the South, — to the blacks he helped to make free, and to the whites he strove to make brothers again. Let, on the grave of him whom so many thought to be their enemy, and found to be their friend, the hands be clasped which so bitterly warred against each other. Let upon that grave the youth of America be taught, by the story of his life, that not only genius, power and success, but more than these, patriotic devotion and virtue, make the greatness of the citizen! ”

“ And it is natural that the American people should be proud of it, for such a biography condenses in the compass of a single life the great story of the American nation, as from the feebleness and misery of early settlements in the bleak solitude it advanced to the subjugation of the hostile forces of nature; plunged into an arduous struggle with dangers and difficulties only known to itself, gathering strength from every conflict and experience from every trial ”

“ It was obvious that nothing but a measure impressing beyond dispute upon our war a decided anti-slavery character, making it in profession what it was inevitably destined to be in fact, a war of emancipation, could enlist on our side the enlightened public opinion of the Old World so strongly as to restrain the hostile spirit of foreign governments. No European government could well venture to interfere against those who had convinced the world that they were fighting to give freedom to the slaves of North America. ”

“ But he had not grown great in any high school of statesmanship. He had, from the humblest beginnings, slowly and laboriously worked himself up, or rather he had gradually risen up without being aware of it, and suddenly he found himself in the foremost rank of the distinguished men of the land. In his youth and early manhood he had achieved no striking successes that might have imparted to him that overweening self-appreciation which so frequently leads self-made men to overestimate their faculties, and to ignore the limits of their strength. ”

“ There stood up in the Senate a man who was no politician; but who, on the highest field of politics, with a concentrated intensity of feeling and purpose never before witnessed there, gave expression to a moral impulse, which, although sleeping perhaps for a time, certainly existed in the popular conscience, and which, once become a political force, could not fail to produce a great revolution.
Charles Sumner possessed all the instincts, the courage, the firmness and the faith of the devotee of a great idea. ”

“ Thus slavery was pushed on and on by the inexorable logic of its existence; the slave masters were only the slaves of the necessities of slavery, and all their seeming exactions and usurpations were merely a struggle for its life.
Many of their demands had been satisfied, on the part of the North, by submission or compromise. The Northern people, although with reluctant conscience, had acquiesced in the contrivances of politicians, for the sake of peace. ”

“ But when the slave-power went so far as to demand for slavery the great domain of the nation which had been held sacred to freedom forever, then the people of the North suddenly understood that the necessities of slavery demanded what they could not yield. ”

“ But the greatest strength of the anti-slavery cause had always been in the conscience of mankind. There was our natural ally. The cause of slavery as such could have no open sympathy among the nations of Europe. It stood condemned by the moral sentiment of the civilized world. How could any European government, in the face of that universal sentiment, under take openly to interfere against a power waging war against slavery? ”

“ His public life was thrown into a period of a revolutionary character, when one great end was the self-imposed subject of a universal struggle, a struggle which was not made, not manufactured by the design of men, but had grown from the natural conflict of existing things, and grew irresistibly on and on, until it enveloped all the thought of the nation; and that one great end appealing more than to the practical sense, to the moral impulses of men, making of them the fighting force. ”

“ I am not sure whether I should have the courage to say those things to the men who are scowling around him."
Of all men in the Senate Chamber, Sumner was probably least aware that the thing he did required pluck. He simply did what he felt it his duty to his cause to do. It was to him a matter of course. He was like a soldier who, when he has to march upon the enemy's batteries, does not say to himself, "Now I am going to perform an act of heroism," but who simply obeys an impulse of duty, and marches forward without thinking of the bullets that fly around his head. ”

“ Should the son of South Carolina, when at some future day defending the Republic against some foreign foe, be reminded by an inscription on the colors floating over him, that under this flag the gun was fired that killed his father at Gettysburg? Should this great and enlightened Republic, proud of standing in the front of human progress, be less wise, less large-hearted, than the ancients were two thousand years ago, and the kingly governments of Europe are to-day? ”

“ It is at such a moment of bitter ordeal that an honest public man feels the impulse of retiring within himself; to examine with scrupulous care the quality of his own motives; anxiously to inquire whether he is really right in his opinions and objects when so many old friends say that he is wrong; and then, after such a review at the hand of conscience and duty, to form anew his conclusions without bias, and to proclaim them without fear. ”