PUBLISHED BY GEO. S. BLANCHARD, 39 WEST FOURTH STREET. 1856. Copies sent by mail, on receipt of Six cents in postage stamps. Five Dollars per 100. Prof. H. L. Wilgus 1-8-34 SPEECH OF HON. CHARLES SUMNER. Mr. PRESIDENT: You are now called to redress a great transgression. Seldom in the history of nations has such a question been presented. Tariffs, army bills, navy bills, land bills, are important, and justly occupy your care; but these all belong to the course of ordinary legislation. As means and instruments only, they are necessarily subordinate to the conservation of Government itself. Grant them or deny them, in greater or less degree, and you will inflict no shock. The machinery of Government will continue to move. The State will not cease to exist. Far otherwise is it with the eminent question now before you, involving, as it does, Liberty in a broad Territory, and also involving the peace of the whole country with our good name in history forever more. יו Against this Territory, thus fortunate in position and population, a Crime has been committed, which is without example in the records of the Past. Not in plundered provinces or in the cruelties of selfish governors will you find its parallel; and yet there is an ancient instance, which may show at least the path of justice. In the terrible impeachment by which the great Roman Orator has blasted through all time the name of Verres, amidst, charges of robbery and sacrilege, the enormity which most aroused the indignant voice of his accuser, and which still stands forth with strongest distinctness, arresting the sympathetic indignation of all who read the story, is, that away in Sicily he had scourged a citizen of Rome-that the cry "I am a Roman citizen had been interposed in vain against the Tash of the tyrant governor. Other charges were, that he had carried away productions of art, and that he had violated the sacred shrines. It was in the presence of the Roman Senate that this arraignment proceeded; in a temple of the Forum; amidst crowds-such as no orator had ever before drawn together-thronging the por-ticos and colonnades, even clinging to the house tops and neighboring slopes-and under the anxious gaze of witnesses summoned from the scene of crime. But an audience grander farof higher dignity-of more various people and of wider intelligence-the countless multitude of succeeding generations, in every land, where eloquence has been studied or where the Roman name has been recoguised-has listened to the accusation, and throbbed with condemnation of the criminal. Sir, speaking in an age of light and in aland of constitutional liberty, where the safeguards of elections are justly placed among the highest triumphs of civilization, I fearlessly assert that the wrongs of much-abused Sicily, thus memorable in history, were small by the side of the wrongs of Kansas, where the very shrines of popular institutions, more sacred than any heathen altar, have been desecrated; where the ballotbox, more precious than any work, in ivory or marble, from the cunning hand of art, has been plundered; and where the cry "I am an American citizen" has been interposed in vain against outrage of every kind, even upon life itself. Are you against sacrilege? I present it for your execration. Are you against robbery? I hold it up to your scorn. Are you for the protection of Take down your map, sir, and you will find that the Territory of Kansas, more than any other region, occupies the middle spot of North AmerIca, equally distant from the Atlantic on the east, and the Pacific on the west; from the frozen waters of Hudson's Bay on the north, and the tepid Gulf Stream on the south, constituting the precise territorial centre of the whole vast Continent. To such advantages of situation, on the very highway between two oceans, are added a soil of unsurpassed richness, and a fascinating, undulating beauty of surface, with a health-giving climate, calculated to nurture a powerful and generous people, worthy to be a central pivot of American Institutions. A few short months only have passed since this spacious mediterranean country was open only to the savage, who ran wild in its woods and prairies; and now it has already drawn to its bosom a population of freemen larger than Athens crowded within her historic gates, when her sons, under Miltiades, won Liberty for mankind on the field of Marathon; more than Sparta contained when she ruled Greece, and sent forth her devoted children, quickened by a mother's benediction, to return with their shields or on them; more than Rome gathered on her seven hills, when, under her kings, she commenced that sovereign sway, which afterwards embraced the whole earth; more than London held, when, on the fields of Crecy and Agincourt, the English banner was carried victoriously over the chivalrous hosts of France. American citizens? I show you how their dear- | crowds in every vocation of life-the politician est rights have been cloven down, while a Tyran- with his local importance, the lawyer with his nical Usurpation has sought to install itself on subtle tongue, and even the authority of the their very necks! judge on the bench; and a familiar use of men But the wickedness which I now begin to ex-in places high and low, so that none, from the pose is immeasurably aggravated by the motive which prompted it. Not in any common lust for power did this uncommon tragedy have its origin. It is the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of Slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved longing for a new slave State, the hideous offspring of such a crime, in the hope of adding to the power of Slavery in the National Government. Yes, sir, when the whole world, alike Christian and Turk, is rising up to condemn this wrong, and to make it a hissing to the pations, here in our Republic, force-aye, sir, FORCE-has been openly employed in compelling Kansas to this pollution, and all for the sake of political power. There is the simple fact, which you will vainly attempt to deny, but which in itself presents an essential wickedness that makes other public crimes seem like public virtues. President to the lowest border postmaster, should decline to be its tool; all these things and more were needed; and they were found in the Slave Power of our Republic. There, sir, stands the criminal-all unmasked before you-heartless, grasping, and tyrannical-with an audacity be yond that of Verres, a subtlety beyond that of Machiavel, a meanness beyond that of Bacon, and an ability beyond that of Hastings. Justice to Kansas can be secured only by the prostration of this influence; for this is the Power be hind-greater than any President-which succors and sustains the Crime. Nay, the proceedings I now arraign derive their fearful consequence only from this connection. In now opening this great matter, I am not insensible to the austere demands of the occasion; but the dependence of the crime against Kansas upon the Slave Power is so peculiar and importBut this enormity, vast beyond comparison, ant, that I trust to be pardoned while I impress swells to dimensions of wickedness which the it by an illustration, which to some may seem imagination toils in vain to grasp, when it is un- trivial. It is related in Northern mythology, that derstood, that for this purpose are hazarded the the god of Force, visiting an enchanted region, horrors of intestine feud, not only in this distant was challenged by his royal entertainer to what Territory, but everywhere throughout the coun- seemed a humble feat of strength-merely, sir, try. Already the muster has begun. The strife to lift a cat from the ground. The god smiled is no longer local, but. national. Even now, while at the challenge, and, calmly placing his hand I speak, portents hang on all the arches of the under the belly of the animal, with superhuman horizon, threatening to darken the broad land, strength, strove, while the back of the feline which already yawns with the mutterings of monster arched far upwards, even beyond reach, civil war. The fury of the propagandists of Sla- and one paw actually forsook the earth, until at very, and the calm determination of their oppo-last the discomfited divinity desisted; but he nents, are now diffused from the distant Territo- was little surprised at his defeat, when he learnry over wide-spread communities, and the whole ed that this créature, which seemed to be a cat, country, in all its extent-marshalling hostile and nothing more, was not merely a cat, but that divisions, and foreshadowing a strife, which, un-it belonged to and was a part of the great Terless happily averted by the triumph of Freedom, will become war- fratricidal, parricidal war—with an accumulated wickedness beyond the wickedness of any war in human annals; justly proroking the avenging judgment of Providence and the avenging pen of history, and constituting a strie, in the language of the ancient writer, more than foreign, more than social, more than civil; but something compounded of all these strifes, and in itself more than war; sed potius commune quoddam ex omnibus, et plus quam bellum. Such is the Crime which you are to judge. But the criminal also must be dragged into day, that you may see and measure the power by which all this wrong is sustained. From no common source could it proceed. In its perpetration, was needed a spirit of vaulting ambition which would hesitate at nothing; a hardihood Such is the Crime, and such the criminal, which of purpose which was insensible to the judgment it is my duty in this debate to expose, and, by of mankind; a madness for Slavery which should the blessing of God, this duty shall be done comdisregard the Constitution, the laws, and all the pletely to the end. But this will not be enough. great examples of our history; also a conscious- The Apologies, which, with strange hardihood, ness of power such as comes from the habit have been offered for the Crime, must be torn of power; a combination of energies found only away, so that it shall stand forth, without a sinin a hundred arms directed by a hundred eyes;gle rag, or fig-leaf, to cover its vileness. And, a control of Public Opinion, through venal pens finally, the True Remedy must be shown. and a prostituted press; an ability to subsidize subject is complex in its relations, as it is trans restrial Serpent, which, in its innumerable folds, encircled the whole globe. Even so the creature, whose paws are now fastened upon Kansas, whatever it may seem to be, constitutes in reality a part of the Slave Power, which, with loathsome folds, is now coiled about the whole land. Thus do I expose the extent of the present contest, where we encounter not merely local resistance, but also the unconquered sustaining arm behind. But out of the vastness of the Crime attempted, with all its woe and shame, I derive a wellfounded assurance of a commensurate vastness of effort against it, by the aroused masses of the country, determined not only to vindicate Right against Wrong, but to redeem the Republic from the thraldom of that Oligarchy, which prompts, directs, and concentrates, the distant wrong. The |
