Quotations from Charles Sumner (1811-1874)
Four-term Free-Soil and Republican Senator from Massachusetts
(1851-1874), and Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations (1861-1871)
…whatever the final determination of this convention, there are many
here today who will never yield support to any candidate for presidency
or vice-presidency who is not known to be against the extension of
slavery, even though he have received the sacramental unction of a
“regular nomination.” We cannot say, with detestable morality, “our
party, right or wrong.” The time has gone by when gentlemen can
expect to introduce among us the discipline of a camp. Loyalty to principle is higher
than loyalty to party. —Massachusetts Whig convention, 29 September 1847
In the coming contest, I wish it understood that I belong to the party of freedom — to
that party which plants itself on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution
of the United States. I hear the old political saw, that “we must take the least of two
evils.”…For myself, if two evils are presented to me I will take neither…. There are
matters legitimately within the range of expediency and compromise…But the question
before the country is of a different character. This will not admit of compromise. It is
not within the domain of expediency. To be wrong on this is to be wholly wrong…. —
convention of anti-slavery Whigs, Worcester, May 1848
The friends of freedom cannot lightly bestow their confidence. They can put trust only
in men of tried character and inflexible will. Three things at least they must require: the
first is backbone; the second is backbone; and the third is backbone. When I see a
person of upright character and pure soul yielding to a temporizing policy, I cannot but
say, “He wants backbone.” When I see a person talking loudly against slavery in
private, but hesitating in public and failing in the time of trial, I say, “He wants
backbone.” When I see a person leaning upon the action of a political party and never
venturing to think for himself, I say, “He wants backbone.” When I see a man careful
always to be on the side of the majority, and unwilling to appear in a minority, or, if
need be, to stand alone, I say, “He wants backbone.” Wanting this they all want that
courage, constancy, firmness, which are essential to the support of principle. Let no
such man be trusted. —Faneuil Hall, 6 November 1850
On 24 April 1851, the Massachusetts legislature elected Charles Sumner to the U.S.
Senate following a protracted contest (26 ballots spread over several months), even
though Sumner steadfastly refused all offers to compromise on the issue of slavery. He
took his seat on 1 December 1851.
Since true politics are simply morals applied to public affairs, I shall find constant
assistance from those everlasting rules of right and wrong which are a law alike to
individuals and communities. —public letter accepting his office1
We do not know the man who has entered the Senate under auspices so favorable to
personal independence as Mr. Sumner. He has not sought the office, has not made an
1
Sumner, The Works of Charles Sumner (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1870-83), II, 440.
effort for its acquisition. No pledge has he given to any party or any person upon any
question or measure. —New York Tribune2
On the Fugitive Slave Law, 1852:
By the supreme law which commands me to do no injustice, by the comprehensive
Christian law of brotherhood, by the Constitution which I have sworn to support, I am
bound to disobey this Act.
On the Kansas-Nebraska Act, repealing the Missouri Compromise:
… the bill you are about to pass is at once the worst and best on which Congress has
ever acted…It is the worst bill inasmuch as it is a present victory of
slavery…it is the best bill on which Congress ever acted, for it annuls all
past compromises with slavery and makes any future compromises
impossible.3
The Kansas-Nebraska Act spawned the Republican Party (out of a
fusion of Whigs and Democrats who opposed the act). Sumner was a
founding member.
Massachusetts will do well in following Vermont, which by special law
places the fugitive slave under the safeguard of trial by jury and the writ
of habeas corpus…A simple prohibition, declaring that no person holding
the commission of Massachusetts as justice of the peace or other magistrate shall
assume to act as a slave-hunting commissioner or as counsel of any slave hunter, under
some proper penalty, would go far to render the existing slave act inoperative…No man
who is not lost to self-respect…will voluntarily aid in enforcing a judgment which in
conscience he believes wrong. He will not hesitate “to obey God rather than man”…—
first Republican state convention, Worcester, 7 September 1854
The Massachusetts legislature did adopt a personal liberty law at its next session, in effect
nullifying the Fugitive Slave Act.
Speech in Faneuil Hall, the night before the election of 1860:
That power which, according to the boast of slave masters, has governed the country for
more than fifty years; …that power which has taught us by example how much of
tyranny there may be in the name of democracy, is doomed. The great clock will soon
strike, sounding its knell. Every four years a new president is chosen, but rarely a new
government. Tomorrow we shall have not only a new president, but a new government.
With the secession of the southern states in 1861, Sumner became chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee. He used his position to secure recognition of the black
republics of Haiti and Liberia.
He secured legislation enabling blacks to carry the mails, and to give witness in the courts
of the District of Columbia.
In May 1862, he pressed for emancipation:
The rebel in arms is an enemy, and something more….In appealing to war, he has
voluntarily renounced all safeguards of the Constitution, and put himself beyond its
2
3
Moorfield Storey, Charles Sumner (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900), 84.
Ibid. 108.
pale….And yet, sir, the Constitution is cited as a limitation upon these rights. As well
cite the Constitution on the field of battle to check the bayonet charge of our
armies…The Constitution is entirely inapplicable… If it be constitutional to make war,
to set armies in the field, to launch navies, to occupy fields and houses, to bombard
cities, to kill in battle—all without trial by jury, or any process of law, or judicial
proceeding of any kind—it is equally constitutional, as a war measure, to confiscate the
property of the enemy and to liberate his slaves…You may condemn confiscation and
liberation as impolitic, but you cannot condemn them as unconstitutional unless, in the
same breath, you condemn all other agencies of war, and resolve our present proceeding
into the process of a criminal court, guarded at each step by the technicalities of the
common law…I confess frankly that I look with more hope and confidence to liberation
than to confiscation. To give freedom is nobler than to take property, and on this
occasion it cannot fail to be more efficacious.4
On 30 April 1864, Sumner introduced the first bill to reform the civil service, providing
against removals except for cause, and promotions by seniority, except that one-fifth of
promotions could be made irrespective of seniority. The legislation did not pass until
1871, when the Civil Service Commission was formed.
When the Committee on Military Affairs reported a resolution calling for retaliation
against southern prisoners for the mistreatment of northern prisoners, in January 1865:
…any attempted imitation of rebel barbarism in the treatment of prisoners…could have
no other result than to degrade the national character and the national name, and to
bring down upon our country the reprobation of history.
Letter to John Bright, 1865:
I insist that the rebel states shall not come back except on the footing of the Declaration
of Independence, with all persons equal before the law and government founded on the
consent of the governed. In other words, there shall be no discrimination on account of
color. If all whites vote, then must all blacks…there is more harm in refusing than in
conceding the franchise….Without their votes we cannot establish stable governments
in the rebel States. Their votes are as necessary as their muskets; of this I am satisfied.
Without them the old enemy will reappear, and under the form of law
take possession of the governments, choose magistrates and officers,
and, in alliance with the Northern Democracy [Democrats], put us all
in peril again…
Massachusetts Republican state convention, 14 September 1865:
Neither the rebellion nor slavery is yet ended. The rebellion has been
disarmed; but that is all. Slavery has been abolished in name, but that
is all…The work of liberation is not yet completed. Nor can it be, until
the equal rights of every person once claimed as a slave are placed
under the safeguard of irreversible guarantees….Unless this is done, the condition of
the freedman will be deplorable….Compelled to pay taxes, he will be excluded from all
representation in the government. Without this security, emancipation is illusory….It is
impartial suffrage that I claim, without distinction of color, so that there shall be one
equal rule for all men. And this, too, must be placed under the safeguard of
constitutional law.
4
Ibid. 226.
President Andrew Johnson instead organized new state governments through the
franchise of all who were eligible to vote prior to the war (excluding blacks) and willing
to take an oath to support the Constitution—in effect betraying the loyalist minority and
restoring the power of the former slave-owners.
In February 1866 the Senate took up a resolution passed by the House (with the support
of Thaddeus Stevens) in favor of a constitutional amendment that would apportion
representatives among the states according to population “excluding Indians not taxed”
and providing “That whenever the elective franchise shall be denied or abridged in any
State on account of race or color, all persons therein of such race or color shall be
excluded from the basis of representation”:
A state which, in the foundation of its government, sets aside “the consent of the
governed,” which imposes taxation without representation, which discards the principle
of equal rights, and lodges power exclusively with an oligarchy, aristocracy, caste, or
monopoly, cannot be recognized as a “republican form of government,” according to
the requirement of American institutions.
The resolution was defeated, preparing the way for the 14th and 15th Amendments.
In 1866, Sumner broke with other Republicans by voting against the admission of
Republican Nebraska and Colorado, because their proposed constitutions only allowed
white men to vote.
Tell me not that it is expedient to create two more votes in this chamber. Nothing can be
expedient that is not right.
In 1867, both states were admitted on condition that they not deny the vote on the basis of
race. Sumner was likewise successful in adding a provision to the Reconstruction Bill
requiring southern states to adopt constitutions that enfranchised all citizens with a proper
residence.
In the same year, Sumner secured ratification of the treaty to purchase Alaska from
Russia, not wanting to “miss the opportunity of dismissing another European sovereign
from our continent.”5
From his 1869 lecture on “Caste”:
To those who find peril in the growing multitudes admitted to citizenship I reply, that
our Republic assumed those responsibilities when it declared the equal rights of all
men, and that just government stands only on the consent of the governed. Hospitality
of citizenship is the law of its being…. If the Chinese come for labor only, we have the
advantage of their wonderful and docile industry. If they come for citizenship, then do
they offer the pledge of incorporation in our Republic, filling it with increase. Nor is
there peril in the gifts they bring. As all rivers are lost in the sea, which shows no sign
of their presence, so will all peoples be lost in the widening confines of our Republic,
with an ocean-bound continent for its unparalleled expanse, and one harmonious
citizenship, where all are equal in rights, for its gentle and impartial sway.
In 1870, Sumner successfully opposed President Grant’s proposed annexation of Santo
Domingo (not the city, but what is today known as the Dominican Republic). On
December 21, he addressed the vice-president on the floor of the Senate:
5
Ibid. 339.
Go to the President, I ask you, and address him frankly with the voice of a friend to
whom he must harken. Counsel him to shun all approach to the example of Franklin
Pierce, James Buchanan, and Andrew Johnson; tell him not to allow the oppression of a
weak and humble people; ask him not to exercise war powers without authority of
Congress; and remind him, kindly, but firmly, that there is a grandeur in justice and
peace beyond anything in material aggrandizement, beyond anything in war….I am not
insensible to the commercial and material prosperity of my country. But there is
something above these. It is the honor and good name of the Republic, now darkened
by an act of wrong. If this territory so much coveted by the President were infinitely
more valuable than it is, I hope the Senate would not be tempted to obtain it by
trampling on the weak and humble.
At Grant’s urging, the newly installed Senate stripped Sumner of the chairmanship of the
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in March 1871.
It is difficult to see how we can condemn…our own domestic Ku-Klux with its fearful
outrages, while the President puts himself at the head of a powerful and costly
proceeding operating abroad in defiance of international law and the Constitution of the
United States…. had the President been so inspired as to bestow upon the protection of
Southern Unionists, white and black, one half, nay, sir, one quarter, of the time, money,
zeal, will, personal attention, personal effort, and personal intercession, which he has
bestowed on his attempt to obtain half an island in the Caribbean Sea, Our Southern
Ku-Klux would have existed in name only, while tranquility reigned everywhere within
our borders.
After Sumner backed Horace Greeley against Grant in 1872, he was expelled from the
Senate Republican caucus in March 1873, being made to sit with the Democrats.
In May 1870, Sumner introduced a “supplementary civil rights bill,” whose first section
declared that “all citizens of the United States, without distinction of race, color, or
previous condition of servitude” were entitled to “equal and impartial facilities and
accomodations from common carriers, innkeepers, managers of theaters and other places
of public amusement, the officers of common schools and other public institutions of
learning, supported or authorized by law, and the officers of church organizations,
cemetary associations, and benevolent institutions incorporated by public authority.”
How often shall I say that this is no question of taste—it is no question of society—it is
a stern, austere, hard question of rights? … I may have whom I please as friend,
acquaintance, associate; …but I cannot deny any human being, the humblest, any right
of equality. He must be equal with me before the law, or the promises of the
Declaration of Independence are not yet fulfilled. (20 December 1871)
In 1873, he moved his civil rights bill one last time:
My desire, the darling desire, if I may say so, of my soul, at this moment, is to close
forever this great question, so that it shall never again intrude into these chambers—so
that hereafter in all our legislation there shall be no such words as “black” or “white,”
but that we shall speak only of citizens and of men.6
After his death on 11 March 1874, the Senate passed an amended version of his civil
rights bill, which was later struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.
6
Ibid. 427.
Sumner’s last words, to Judge Hoar: “You must take care of the civil rights bill—my bill,
the civil rights bill—don’t let it fail,” and finally, “Judge, tell Emerson how much I love
and revere him.”7
During the last ten years of his life the opponents of his proposals repeatedly attributed
to Sumner such control over his Republican associates that, no matter how distasteful to
them his ideas might be at the outset, they always finally adopted them; or as Mr.
Doolittle said in 1868, “he had not only educated, but had Sumnerized the Senate.”—
Moorfield Storey8
John Quincy Adams described Sumner as someone who would
contribute largely to redeem the spirit of the free people of the Union from the dastardly
servility to the slave-monger oligarchy into which they have…almost unconsciously
fallen.—To Sumner, 29 August 1846
Wherever I have met with a dear lover of the country and its moral interests, he is sure
to be a supporter of Sumner—Ralph Waldo Emerson9
The Russian minister said to me, “Make him rest—he must. No man in Washington can
fill his place—no man, no man. We foreigners all know he is honest. We do not think
that of many. —Wendell Phillips, following Sumner’s attack of angina pectoris on 18
February 187110
7
Ibid. 430.
Ibid. 263.
9
Ibid. 362.
10
Ibid. 392.
8