SPEECH IN THE SENATE, ON THE BILL FOR THE ADMISSION OF KANSAS AS A FREE
STATE, JUNE 4, 1860.
Thou art a slave, whom Fortune’s tender arm
With favor never clasped, but bred a dog.
SHAKESPEARE, _Timon of Athens_, Act IV. Sc. 3.
A universe of death, which God by curse
Created evil, for evil only good,
Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds,
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things.
MILTON, _Paradise Lost_, Book II. 622-625.
Onward! onward!
With the night-wind,
Over field and farm and forest,
Lonely homestead, darksome hamlet,
Blighting all we breathe upon!
LONGFELLOW, _Golden Legend_.
Instrumenti genus vocale, et semivocale, et mutum: _vocale, in
quo sunt servi_; semivocale, in quo sunt boves; mutum, in quo
sunt plaustra.--VARRO, _De Re Rustica_, Lib. I. cap. xvii. § 1.
Nil metuunt jurare, nihil promittere parcunt;
Dicta nihil metuere, nihil perjuria curant.
CATULLUS, _Carm._ LXIV. 146, 148.
Pone crucem servo.--Meruit quo crimine servus
Supplicium? quis testis adest? quis detulit? Audi;
Nulla unquam de morte hominis cunctatio longa est.--
O demens, ita servus homo est? Nil fecerit, esto:
Hoc volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas.
JUVENAL. _Sat._ VI. 219-223.
There is a tradition of the Prophet having said, that the
greatest mortification at the Day of Judgment will be when
the pious slave is carried to Paradise and the wicked master
condemned to Hell.--SAADI, _The Gulistan_, tr. Gladwin, p. 242.
“And the Black Oppressor am I called. And for this reason I
am called the Black Oppressor, that there is not a single man
around me whom I have not oppressed, and justice have I done
unto none.” … “Since thou hast, indeed, been an oppressor so
long,” said Peredur, “I will cause that thou continue so no
longer.” So he slew him.--_The Mabinogion_, tr. Lady Charlotte
Guest, Vol. I. pp. 341, 342.
After we had secured these people, I called the linguists, and
ordered them to bid the men-negroes between decks be quiet (for
there was a great noise amongst them). On their being silent, I
asked, What had induced them to mutiny? They answered, _I was
a great rogue to buy them_ in order to carry them away from
their own country, and that they were resolved to regain their
liberty, if possible.--SNELGRAVE, _New Account of some Parts of
Guinea and the Slave-Trade_, p. 170.
A system of concubinage was practised among them worse than the
loose polygamy of the savages: the savage had as many women as
consented to become his wives; the colonist as many as he could
enslave. There is an ineffaceable stigma upon the Europeans in
their intercourse with those whom they treat as inferior races;
there is a perpetual contradiction between their lust and
their avarice. The planter will one day take a slave for his
harlot, and sell her the next as a being of some lower species,
a beast of labor. If she be indeed an inferior animal, what
shall be said of the one action? If she be equally with himself
a human being and an immortal soul, what shall be said of the
other? Either way there is a crime committed against human
nature.--SOUTHEY, _History of Brazil_, Chap. VIII., Vol. I. p.
258.
Negro slavery exists in no part of the world without
producing indolence, licentiousness, and inhumanity in
the whites; and these vices draw after them their earthly
punishment,--to look no farther into their fearful, but assured
consequences.--IBID., Chap. XLIV., Vol. III. p. 816.
I had observed much, and heard more, of the cruelty of masters
towards their negroes; but now I received an authentic account
of some horrid instances thereof. The giving a child a slave of
its own age to tyrannize over, to beat and abuse out of sport,
was, I myself saw, a common practice. Nor is it strange, being
thus trained up in cruelty, they should afterwards arrive at
so great perfection in it; that Mr. Star, a gentleman I often
met at Mr. Lasserre’s, should, as he himself informed L., first
nail up a negro by the ears, then order him to be whipped in
the severest manner, and then to have scalding water thrown
over him, so that the poor creature could not stir for four
months after. Another much applauded punishment is drawing
their slaves’ teeth. One Colonel LYNCH is universally known to
have cut off a poor negro’s legs, and to kill several of them
every year by his barbarities.--REV. CHARLES WESLEY, _Journal_,
Charleston, S. C., August 2, 1736.
You are to have no regard to the health, strength, comfort,
natural affections, or moral feelings, or intellectual
endowments of my negroes. You are only to consider what
subsistence to allow them and what labor to exact of them
will subserve my interest. According to the most accurate
calculation I can make, the proportion of subsistence and
labor which will work them up in six years upon an average
is the most profitable to the planter. And this allowance,
surely, is very humane; for we estimate here the lives of our
coal-heavers, upon an average, at only two years, … and our
soldiers and seamen no matter what.--_A West-India Planter’s
Instructions for his Overseers_: JOHN ADAMS, _Works_, Vol. X.
pp. 339, 340.
The unfortunate man would have been tried upon five other
indictments, some of them still more atrocious than the one
upon which he was found guilty; and his general character for
barbarity was so notorious that no room was left for me even to
deliberate. His victims have been numerous; some of them were
even buried in their chains, and there have been found upon
the bones taken from the grave chains and iron rings of near
forty pounds’ weight.… He had been three times married, has
left several children; he had been in the Army, had a liberal
education, and lived in what is called the great world. His
manners and address were those of a gentleman. Cruelty appears
in him to have been the effect of violence of temper, _and
habit had made him regardless of the death and suffering of
a slave_.--RIGHT HON. HUGH ELLIOT, Governor of the Leeward
Islands: _Memoir_, by the COUNTESS OF MINTO, pp. 409, 410.
Is slavery less slavery in a Christian than in a Mahometan
country? I entreat your attention, while I plead the general
cause of humanity. In such a cause it is right to appeal to
your sensibility as well as your reason. It is now no longer
time to flatter petty tyrants by acknowledging that color
constitutes a legitimate title for holding men in abject and
perpetual bondage. In support of this usurpation what can be
urged but the law of the strongest?--COL. DAVID HUMPHREYS,
_Valedictory Discourse before the Cincinnati of Connecticut_,
July 4, 1804, p. 29.
Christianity suppressed slavery, but the Christians of the
sixteenth century reëstablished it,--as an exception, indeed,
to their social system, and restricted to one of the races of
mankind; but the wound thus inflicted upon humanity, though
less extensive, was far more difficult of cure.--TOCQUEVILLE,
_Democracy in America_, ed. Bowen, Chap. XVIII. sec. 2, Vol. I.
p. 457.
The Kentuckian delights in violent bodily exertion; he is
familiar with the use of arms, and is accustomed from a very
early age to expose his life in single combat.… Were I inclined
to continue this parallel, I could easily prove that almost all
the differences which may be remarked between the characters of
the Americans in the Southern and in the Northern States have
originated in Slavery.--IBID., pp. 467, 468.
I visited our State Penitentiary a short time since, and
from my own personal observation I am led to the inevitable
conclusion that the plan of sending our slaves to the
Penitentiary, as a _punishment_ for crime, is exactly the
reverse: it is rather a reward than punishment. “Let sober
reason judge.”
We punish offenders to prevent crime. I would ask any
reasonable man, Is the sending a slave of any of our farms
to the Penitentiary a punishment? The white man is punished
by being deprived of his liberty for that length of time:
what liberty is the slave deprived of? He has as much, and
oftentimes _more_, liberty within the walls of the Penitentiary
than on any of those large sugar or cotton plantations. Then
where is the punishment? We send white men there, and the dread
of going is a _stain_ on his character: what character has
the negro to lose? Hence we must come to the conclusion that
sending negro slaves to the Penitentiary is not a punishment.
A moment’s reflection will convince any man who has ever had
the management of negroes on a plantation, that the well-being
and safety of societies demand that any offence committed by
a negro, for which the _lash_ is not a sufficient punishment,
_death_ should be the penalty.
Taking these things into consideration, would it not be just
and laudable to sell all negroes now in the Penitentiary to
the highest bidder, on or about the first of November next,
by the Sheriff of the Parish of East Baton Rouge, on the same
terms and conditions that negroes are sold at present, under
an ordinary _fi. fa._, and, as near as can be, two thirds of
the net proceeds of each negro be paid to the former owners or
their legal representatives, the balance be and remain in the
State Treasury for ordinary purposes?--_Weekly Advocate_, Baton
Rouge, La., Jan. 17, 1858.
A very large edition of this speech was printed at Washington,
immediately after its delivery. Another appeared at Boston,
with a portrait; and another at San Francisco, with the
Republican Platform. While the Rebellion was still warring on
the National Government, an edition was brought out in New York
by the “Young Men’s Republican Union,” to which Mr. Sumner
prefixed a Dedication to the Young Men of the United States,
which will be found in its proper place, according to date, in
this collection.
* * * * *
A letter from that devoted friend of the Slave, the late George
L. Stearns, of Boston, under date of March 1st, 1860, shows
something of the outside prompting under which Mr. Sumner spoke.
“I have just read ----’s speech. He stands up to the mark
_well_, for a politician; but we want one who believes a
Man is greater than a President, and who would not lift
his finger to obtain the best office in the gift of our
nation, to raise this question above the political slough
into its true position. Charles O’Conor, in his late speech
in New York, affirmed, that, ‘if Slavery were not a wise
and beneficent institution for the black as well as the
white, it could not be defended.’ We want you to take up
the gauntlet that he has thrown down so defiantly.”
A letter from William H. Brooks, of Cambridgeport,
unconsciously harmonized with Mr. Stearns.
“Feeling that our nation is now in the very throes of her
deliverance, and I trust her prompt deliverance, from
bondage to her, not Thirty, but Three Hundred Thousand
Tyrants, may I frankly say, that, if not inconsistent with
your health and safety, which are on no consideration to
be perilled, you could aid more than any single person,
or score of them, in effectually accomplishing the
great triumph.… The unseen forces of public opinion are
gathering and forming for the great November conflict. Your
long, enforced, and martyr silence will give a depth of
impression and moving power and ten thousand echoes to your
words beyond their accustomed might.”
Something about the menace of violence after this speech, with
illustrations of its reception at the time, is postponed to an
Appendix.
* * * * *
Kansas was not admitted as a State into the Union until January
29, 1861, after the slaveholding Senators had withdrawn to
organize the Rebellion, when the bill on which the present
speech was made became a law.