Charles Sumner: his complete works, volume 06 (of 20)Sumner, Charles
History
Charles Sumner: his complete works, volume 06 (of 20)
Sumner, Charles
Slavery -- United States; Speeches, addresses, etc., American
The Crime against Kansas stands forth in painful light. Search history,
and you cannot find its parallel. The slave-trade is bad; but even this
enormity is petty, compared with that elaborate contrivance by which,
in a Christian age and within the limits of a Republic, all forms of
constitutional liberty were perverted, all the rights of human nature
violated, and the whole country held trembling on the edge of civil
war,--while all this large exuberance of wickedness, detestable in
itself, becomes tenfold more detestable, when its origin is traced
to the madness for Slavery. The fatal partition between Freedom and
Slavery, known as the Missouri Compromise,--the subsequent overthrow
of this partition, and the seizure of all by Slavery,--the violation
of plighted faith,--the conspiracy to force Slavery at all hazards
into Kansas,--the successive invasions by which all security there was
destroyed, and the electoral franchise itself was trodden down,--the
sacrilegious seizure of the very polls, and, through pretended forms of
law, the imposition of a foreign legislature upon this Territory,--the
acts of this legislature, fortifying the Usurpation, and, among other
things, establishing test-oaths, calculated to disfranchise actual
settlers friendly to Freedom, and securing the privileges of the
citizen to actual strangers friendly to Slavery,--the whole crowned
by a statute, “the be-all and the end-all” of the whole Usurpation,
through which Slavery was not only recognized on this beautiful soil,
but made to bristle with a Code of Death such as the world has rarely
seen,--all these I fully exposed on a former occasion. And yet the most
important part of the argument was at that time left untouched: I mean
that found in the Character of Slavery. This natural sequel, with the
permission of the Senate, I now propose to supply.
Motive is to Crime as soul to body; and it is only when we comprehend
the motive that we can truly comprehend the Crime. Here the motive is
found in Slavery and the rage for its extension. Therefore, by logical
necessity, must Slavery be discussed,--not indirectly, timidly, and
sparingly, but directly, openly, and thoroughly. It must be exhibited
as it is, alike in its influence and its animating character, so that
not only outside, but inside, may be seen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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