Charles Sumner

“ Let the ballot-box of the Union, with multitudinous might, protect the ballot-box in that Territory. Let the voters everywhere, while rejoicing in their own rights, help guard the equal rights of distant fellow-citizens, that the shrines of popular institutions, now desecrated, may be sanctified anew,—that the ballot-box, now plundered, may be restored,—and that the cry, “I am an American citizen,” shall no longer be impotent against outrage. ”

“ With the disappearance of the Slave Oligarchy, the wickedness of the Fugitive Slave Bill will drop from the statute-book,—Slavery will cease at the national capital,—Freedom will become the universal law of the national territory,—the Slave-Trade will no longer skulk along our coast beneath the national flag,—the Slave-marriage of the nation will be dissolved,—the rule of our country will be Freedom instead of Slavery,—the North will no longer be trampled on by the South,—the North will at last be allowed its just proportion of office and honor. ”

“ The people of Kansas are, many of them, from Massachusetts,—bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh; but as fellow-citizens under the Constitution they are bound to us by ties which we cannot disown; nay, more,—by the subtile cord which connects this embryo settlement with the Republic, they are made part of us. The outrage which touches them touches us. What galls them galls us. The fetter which binds the slave in Kansas binds every citizen in Massachusetts. ”

“ It is, then, on the testimony of slave-masters, solemnly, legislatively, judicially attested in the very law itself, that I now arraign this institution as an outrage upon man and his Creator. And herein is the necessity of the Antislavery Enterprise. A wrong so transcendent, so loathsome, so direful, must be encountered, wherever it can be reached; and the battle must be continued without truce or compromise, until the field is entirely won. Freedom and Slavery can hold no divided empire; nor can there be any true repose, until Freedom is everywhere established. ”

“ The blindness which makes him insensible to wrong so transcendent naturally makes him insensible to the lesser wrong by which it is maintained. What is the writ of Habeas Corpus, the trial by jury, the privilege of debate, or your liberty or mine, in the estimation of a person who has already screwed himself to the pitch of injustice necessary for the vindication of an institution which separates parent and child, which stamps woman as a concubine, which shuts the gates of knowledge, and which snatches from the weak all the hard-earned fruits of incessant toil? ”

“ Mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters are aroused to take part in the great battle. There is a new aspiration for justice on earth, awakening not merely a sentiment against Slavery, such as prevailed with our fathers, but a deep, undying conviction of its wrong, and a determination to leave no effort unattempted for its removal. With the sympathies of all Christendom as allies, already it encompasses the slave-masters by a moral blockade, invisible to the eye, but more potent than navies, from which there can be no escape except in final capitulation. ”

“ The asserted rights of Slavery, which shock equality of all kinds, are cloaked by a fantastic claim of equality. If the Slave States cannot enjoy what, in mockery of the great fathers of the Republic, he misnames Equality under the Constitution,—in other words, the full power in the National Territories to compel fellow-men to unpaid toil, to separate husband and wife, and to sell little children at the auction-block,—then, Sir, the chivalric Senator will conduct the State of South Carolina out of the Union! ”

“ I have long been convinced that the great obstacle to the cause of human rights and the ultimate prosperity and freedom of our native land is the corruption of the moral sense of our nation. We are very religious as a people, so far as religion is convenient, and consistent with money-getting, office, and power; but so far as it interferes with those pursuits, we are a nation of infidels. To me it seems the Democratic party is utterly and ostentatiously profligate, the unblushing advocates of human slavery and piratical warfare, the most God-defying party which ever cursed our country. ”

“ Sir, this is the Senate of the United States, an important body under the Constitution, with great powers. Its members are justly supposed, from years, to be above the intemperance of youth, and from character to be above the gusts of vulgarity. They are supposed to have something of wisdom and something of that candor which is the handmaid of wisdom. Let the Senator bear these things in mind, and remember hereafter that the bowie-knife and bludgeon are not proper emblems of senatorial debate. ”

“ Sir, it is easy to call names; but I beg to tell the Senator, that, if the word “traitor” is in any way applicable to those who reject a tyrannical Usurpation, whether in Kansas or elsewhere, then must some new word, of deeper color, be invented to designate those mad spirits who would endanger and degrade the Republic, while they betray all the cherished sentiments of the Fathers and the spirit of the Constitution, that Slavery may have new spread. Let the Senator proceed. Not the first time in history will a scaffold become the pedestal of honor. ”

“ Ours, too, is the argument alike of the Conservative and the Reformer; for our cause stands on the truest conservatism and the truest reform. It seeks the conservation of Freedom itself, and of kindred historic principles; it seeks also the reform of Slavery, and of the kindred tyranny by which it is upheld. Religion, morals, justice, economy, the Constitution, each and all, may be invoked; and one person is touched by one argument, while another person is touched by another. You do not forget how Christopher Columbus won Isabella of Spain to his enterprise of discovery. ”

“ And this giant strength is used with giant heartlessness. By cruel enactment, which has no source in the Constitution, which defies justice, tramples on humanity, and rebels against God, the Free States are made the hunting-ground for slaves, and you and I and all good citizens are pressed to join in the loathsome and abhorred work. Your hearts and judgments, swift to feel and to condemn, will not require me to expose here the abomination of the Fugitive Slave Bill, or its unconstitutionality. ”

“ Newspapers, even in the land of bondage, blush at the hunt of men by bloodhounds,—thus protesting against an unquestionable incident of Slavery. Other signs appear in the added comfort of the slave,—in the enlarged attention to his wants,—in the experiments now beginning, by which the slave is enabled to share in the profits of his labor, and thus finally secure his freedom,—and, above all, in the consciousness among slave-masters that they dwell now, as never before, under the keen observation of an ever-wakeful Public Opinion, quickened by an ever-wakeful Public Press. ”

“ Government which cannot suppress such crimes as theirs has failed of its purpose. Either such wretches must be hung or put in the penitentiary, or the South should prepare at once to quit the Union. We would not jeopard the religion and morality of the South to save a Union that had failed for every useful purpose. Let us tell the North at once, If you cannot suppress the treasonable action, and silence the foul, licentious, and infidel propagandism of such men as Stephen Pearl Andrews, Wendell Phillips, Beecher, Garrison, Sumner, and their negro and female associates, let us part in peace. ”

“ The sentiments that brought those humble men to the little green at Lexington, and to the bridge at Concord, which carried them up the slope of Bunker Hill, and which drove forth the British troops from Boston, never again to press the soil of Massachusetts,—that sentiment still governs the councils of Massachusetts, and rules in the hearts of her people. The feeling which governed the men of that glorious epoch of our history is the feeling of the men of Massachusetts of to-day. ”

“ It is right to be taught by the enemy; and with their example before us, and their power brandished in our very faces, we cannot hesitate. With them Slavery is the mainspring of political life, and the absorbing centre of political activity; with them all differences are swallowed up by this one idea, as all other rods were swallowed up by the rod of Aaron; with them all unite to keep the National Government under the control of slave-masters: and surely we should not do less for Freedom than they do for Slavery. We, too, must be united. ”

“ It was a swindle of a broad territory, thus cheated of protection against Slavery. It was a swindle of a great cause, early espoused by Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, surrounded by the best fathers of the Republic. Sir, it was a swindle of God-given, inalienable rights. Turn it over, look at it on all sides, and it is everywhere a swindle; and if the word I now employ has not the authority of classical usage, it has, on this occasion, the indubitable authority of fitness. No other word will adequately express the mingled meanness and wickedness of the cheat. ”

“ No man knew better than he did the proprieties of the place, for he had always observed them. No man knew better than he did parliamentary law, because he had made it the study of his life. No man saw more clearly than he did the flaming sword of the Constitution turning every way, guarding all the avenues of the Senate. But he was not thinking of these things; he was not thinking then of the privileges of the Senate, nor of the guaranties of the Constitution. He was there to denounce tyranny and crime ”

“ The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must, each for itself, be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer, who takes an oath to support the Constitution, swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others. It is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the President, to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill or resolution which may be presented to them for passage or approval, as it is of the Supreme Judges, when it may be brought before them for judicial decision.... ”

“ A blameless citizen, who, in obedience to generous impulses, and in harmony with received law, merely gave notice to a person held as a slave in a Free State that she was in reality free, has been thrust into jail, and now, after the lapse of months, still languishes there, the victim of this pretension; while—that no excess might be wanting in the madness of this tyranny—the great writ of Habeas Corpus, proudly known as the writ of deliverance, has been made the instrument of his imprisonment. [26] Outrage treads upon outrage, and great rights pass away to perish. ”

“ But Massachusetts, by one stroke of the pen of the Supreme Court, abolished Slavery forever in that State, and the slaves became freemen. They and their descendants are there to-day, as intelligent as the average people of the United States, many of them being men that grace and adorn the State, which, by just and equal laws, protects them in the enjoyment of all their rights,—men whom I am proud here to call my constituents, and some of whom I recognize as my friends. ”

“ If the North shall triumph, if the South shall be gradually ground under, if Slavery shall be smuggled out of sight, and decent people shall be ashamed to own it, he will be condemned and execrated; but if the South shall stand firm in her integrity, if Slavery shall not fall before its antagonist, but shall stand, as it is capable of standing, the great central institution of the land for all other interests to climb upon, and shall give law to opinion, as it shall give regulation to Liberty, then his memory will be loved and venerated ”

“ And since the Slave Power now stakes on this issue all its ill-gotten supremacy, the People, while vindicating Kansas, will at the same time overthrow this Tyranny. Thus the contest which she begins involves Liberty not only for herself, but for the whole country. God be praised that Kansas does not bend ignobly beneath the yoke! Far away on the prairies, she is now battling for the Liberty of all, against the President, who misrepresents all. Everywhere among those not insensible to Right, the generous struggle meets a generous response. ”

“ The privileged few govern; the many have the privilege of being governed by them.
“Sir, I have no disposition to assail South Carolina. God knows that I would peril my life in defence of any State of this Union, if assailed by a foreign foe. I have voted, and I will continue to vote, while I have a seat on this floor, as cheerfully for appropriations, or for anything that can benefit South Carolina, or any other State of this Union, as for my own Commonwealth of Massachusetts. South Carolina is a part of my country. Slaveholders are not the tenth part of her population. ”

“ And this is my answer to the interrogatory, What have we at the North to do with Slavery?
But the answer may be made yet more irresistible, while, with mingled sorrow and shame, I portray the tyrannical power which holds us in thraldom. Notwithstanding all its excess of numbers, wealth, and intelligence, the North is now the vassal of an OLIGARCHY, whose single inspiration comes from Slavery. According to official tables of our recent census, the slave-masters, all told, are only THREE HUNDRED AND FORTY-SEVEN THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE ”

“ He is not merely restricted in liberty, but totally deprived of it,—not merely curtailed in rights, but absolutely stripped of them,—not merely loaded with burdens, but changed into a beast of burden,—not merely bent in countenance to the earth, but sunk in law to the level of a quadruped,—not merely exposed to personal cruelty, but deprived of his character as a person,—not merely compelled to involuntary labor, but degraded to a rude thing,—not merely shut out from knowledge, but wrested from his place in the human family. ”