Charles Sumner: his complete works, volume 05 (of 20)Sumner, Charles
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Charles Sumner: his complete works, volume 05 (of 20)
Sumner, Charles
Slavery -- United States; Speeches, addresses, etc., American
Not content with this poor menace, which we have been twice told
was “measured,” the Senator, in the unrestrained chivalry of his
nature, has undertaken to apply opprobrious words to those who differ
from him on this floor. He calls them “sectional and fanatical”;
and resistance to the Usurpation of Kansas he denounces as “an
uncalculating fanaticism.” To be sure, these charges lack all grace of
originality and all sentiment of truth; but the adventurous Senator
does not hesitate. He is the uncompromising, unblushing representative
on this floor of a flagrant _sectionalism_, now domineering over the
Republic,--and yet, with a ludicrous ignorance of his own position,
unable to see himself as others see him, or with an effrontery which
even his white head ought not to protect from rebuke, he applies
to those here who resist his _sectionalism_ the very epithet which
designates himself. The men who strive to bring back the Government to
its original policy, when Freedom and not Slavery was national, while
Slavery and not Freedom was sectional, he arraigns as _sectional_.
This will not do. It involves too great a perversion of terms. I tell
that Senator that it is to himself, and to the “organization” of which
he is the “committed advocate,” that this epithet belongs. I now
fasten it upon them. For myself, I care little for names; but, since
the question is raised here, I affirm that the Republican party of the
Union is in no just sense _sectional_, but, more than any other party,
_national_,--and that it now goes forth to dislodge from the high
places that tyrannical sectionalism of which the Senator from South
Carolina is one of the maddest zealots.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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