Charles Sumner

“ As your power is vast, so is your responsibility. Act, we entreat you, so that our country may have no fresh sorrow. Do not hazard Emancipation, which is the day-star of our age, and the special jewel in the crown of your martyred predecessor, by any concession to its enemies. Do not put in jeopardy all that we hold most dear, by untimely attempt to bring back into the national copartnership any of those ancient associates who have warred upon their country. Let them wait. You have said that treason is “crime,” and not merely difference of opinion. Do not let the criminals bear sway. ”

“ I answer at once, as a constitutional lawyer, that at the present time, under the words of the Constitution of the United States, declaring that the United States shall guaranty to every State a republican form of government, it is the bounden duty of the United States by Act of Congress to guaranty complete freedom to every citizen, immunity from all oppression, and absolute equality before the law. No Government failing to guaranty these things can be recognized as republican in form, when the United States are called to enforce the constitutional guaranty. ”

“ If there be any single fruit of our national unity, if there be any single element of the Union, if there be any single triumph of the Constitution to be placed above all others, it is the freedom of commerce between the States, under which free trade, the aspiration of philosophy, is assured to all citizens of the Union, as they circulate through our whole broad country, without hindrance from any State. ”

“ How shall the war waged by Abraham Lincoln be brought to an end, so as to assure peace, tranquillity, and reconciliation? All turns on the colored suffrage. This is the centre and pivot of national safety. A mistake now is worse than the loss of a battle. And yet here again we encounter the Rebellion in its odious pretensions, hardly less audacious than when it took up arms. Amidst its expiring camp-fires, the men who have trimmed them—with fresh oaths of allegiance on the lips—renew their early activity in plotting how to preserve an oligarchical power. ”

“ Such is the true idea of republican government according to American institutions.
The Slave-Masters, driven from their first intrenchments, occupy inner defences. Property in man is abandoned; but they now insist that the freedman shall not enjoy political rights. Liberty has been won. The battle for Equality is still pending. And now a new compromise is proposed, in the name of State Rights. Sad that it should be so. But I do not despair. The victory may be delayed, but not lost. All who set themselves against Equality will be overborne; for it is the cause of Humanity. ”

“ May no such golden opportunity be lost again! Nobody doubts now that a State in rebellion may be “coerced.” Nobody doubts now that the victories of Grant, the march of Sherman, and the charge of Sheridan were strictly constitutional. But this “coercion” must endure just so long as may be needed to obtain Security for the Future,—it may be for months, or it may be for years. There is no argument for it at the beginning which is not equally strong for it now. There is nothing in the Constitution against it. Everything in the Constitution is for it. ”

“ I am unqualifiedly against the retaliation resolutions concerning prisoners of war. The provision that the Southerners in our hands shall be watched over by national soldiers who have been in Southern pens is unworthy of any great people or high-minded statesman. I am not opposed to retaliation because it strikes those who are not or may not be guilty of the outrage we wish to put an end to. That is the terrible character of almost all retaliation in war. I abhor this revenge on prisoners of war, because we would sink thereby to the level of the enemy’s shame and dishonor. ”

“ Recognizing such a power, entering into semi-alliance with such a power, investing such a power with rights, opening ports to such a power, surrendering workshops to such a power, building ships for such a power, driving a busy commerce with such a power,—all this, or any part of this, is positive and plain complicity with the original guilt, and must be judged as we judge any other complicity with Slavery. To say that it was a necessity is only to repeat the perpetual plea by which slave-masters and slave-traders from the earliest moment have sought to vindicate their crime. ”

“ If the Union should continue to exist, it would be only as a name. The national unity would be destroyed.
The taste of revenue is to a government like the taste of blood to a wild beast, exciting and maddening the energies, so that it becomes deaf to suggestions of justice; and the difficulties must increase, where this taxation is enforced by a comprehensive monopoly. [Pg 131] The State, once tasting this blood, sees only an easy way of obtaining the means it desires; and other States will yield to the same temptation. ”

“ I cannot close without declaring again my opinion, that Congress at this moment is complete master of the whole subject of Slavery everywhere in the United States, even without any Constitutional Amendment. It can sweep all out of existence, precisely as it can remove any other obstruction to the national defence, and all this by virtue of a power as indisputable as the power to raise armies or to suspend the Habeas Corpus. Future generations will read with amazement, that a great people, when national life was assailed, hesitated to exercise a power so simple and beneficent ”

“ There was God above, who watches all, and does not desert the lowly. Plain in person, life, and manners, and knowing absolutely nothing of form or ceremony, for six months with a village schoolmaster as his only teacher, he grew up in companionship with the people, with Nature, with trees, with the fruitful corn, and with the stars. While yet a child, his father had borne him away from a soil wasted by Slavery, and he was now citizen of a Free State, where Free Labor had been placed under safeguard of irreversible compact and fundamental law. ”

“ I believe the best way in which we can retaliate upon the South for the cruel treatment of our prisoners is for us to continue to treat their prisoners with entire humanity and all reasonable kindness,—and not only so, but to seize every opportunity like the present to go beyond this. Indeed, it is no more than our duty to treat the prisoner well. The Law of Nations requires it. The Government that refuses or neglects it does not deserve the name of civilized. Even inability is no justification. ”

“ All retaliation has some limit. If we fight with Indians who slowly roast their prisoners, we cannot roast in turn the Indians whom we may capture. And what is more, I defy Congress or Government to make the Northern people treat captured Southerners as our sons are treated by them. God be thanked, you could not do it; and if you could, how it would brutalize our own people! I feel the cruelty as keenly as any one; I grieve most bitterly that people whom we and all the world have taken to possess the common attributes of humanity, and who, after all, are our kin, have sunk so loathsomely low ”

“ There also is the Declaration of Independence, [Pg 343] which now shines like the sun in the heavens, rejoicing to penetrate every by-way and every cabin, if you will not stand in its light. Let it shine, until the Republic has completely dispelled that disgusting pretension which is at once a stupendous monopoly and an impious caste. Above all, do not take from the loyal black man and give to the disloyal white man; do not confiscate the political rights of the freedman, who has shed his blood for us, and lavish them upon his Rebel master. ”

“ That in the life of Abraham Lincoln, who, by the benignant favor of republican institutions, rose from humble beginnings to the height of power and fame, they recognize an example of purity, simplicity, and virtue which should be a lesson to mankind; while in his death they acknowledge a martyr whose memory will become more precious as men learn to prize those principles of constitutional order, and those rights, civil, political, and human, for which he was made a sacrifice. ”

“ But if an oath be taken, it must not stop with support of the Proclamation of Emancipation. It must embrace all those other objects of guaranty, including especially the national freedman and the national creditor. Each of these will be a test of loyalty. But at a moment like the present, at the close of a ferocious rebellion, when hatred and passion are only pent up and not extinguished, an oath is little better than a cotton thread to hold a frigate scourged by a northwester. The Hollanders might as well undertake to swear each individual wave that beats upon their coast. ”

“ Unless this is done, the condition of the freedman will be deplorable. Exposed to every brutality, he will not be heard as a witness against his oppressor. Compelled to pay taxes, he will be excluded from all representation in the government. Without this security, Emancipation is illusory. It is a jack-o’-lantern, which the poor slave will pursue in vain. Even if Slavery cease to exist, it will give place to a condition hardly less galling. ”

“ These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect,—the supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads plotting against the people. They are the vanguard, the miners and sappers, of returning despotism. We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us.
“This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it. ”

“ Permit me the pleasure of congratulating you on the firm and noble stand you are maintaining in the Senate for the rights of loyal men in Louisiana, irrespective of color, and for the prerogative of Congress, as well as its obligation, to settle the government of that State as a republican government. Your efforts are so much the more admirable and important as they are opposed by mistaken Senators, such as Trumbull and Doolittle, and by some of our editors, as of the Times. The heart of the country goes with you, not with your opponents. ”

“ Without security, agriculture and commerce must languish and die; without security, the whole country must be impoverished in resources, while the rich become poor and the poor become poorer; without security, rights of property and rights of person will lose their value; and without security, the Union, justice, domestic tranquillity, the common defence, the general welfare, and the blessings of Liberty, for which the Constitution was ordained and established, must all fail. ”