Charles Sumner's speech on the origin and mainspring of the American rebellion

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Página 2 - ... rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery, subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. "This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
Página 8 - You do not forget his sympathetic portraiture of the disaffection throughout the slave States, or his testimony to the cause. Notoriously and shamefully his heart was with the conspirators, and he knew intimately the mainspring of their conduct. He proposed nothing short of...
Página 8 - The sessions were with closed doors ; but it is now known that, throughout the proceedings, lasting for weeks, nothing was discussed but slavery. And the propositions finally adopted by the Convention were confined to slavery. Forbearing all details, it will be enough to say that they undertook to give to slavery positive protection in the Constitution with new sanction and immunity — making it, notwithstanding the determination of our fathers, national instead of sectional ; and even more than...
Página 4 - I cannot understand ; therefore the Tariff was only the pretext, and Disunion and a Southern Confederacy the real object. The next pretext will be the Negro or Slavery Question.
Página 11 - ... safeguards of freedom ? Why this constant solicitude visible in all your faces ? The answer is clear. Slavery is the author — the agent— the cause. The anxious hours that you pass are darkened by slavery. The habeas corpus, and all those safeguard» of freedom which you deplore, have been prostrated by slavery.
Página 13 - Reason and sentiment both concur in this policy, which is only according to the most common principles of human conduct. In no way can we do so much at so little cost. To the enemy such a blow will be a terror, to good men it will be an encouragement, and to foreign nations watching this contest it will be an earnest of something beyond a mere carnival of battle.
Página 9 - ... with the accurate text of our Constitution. But even if tolerable in form, it was obnoxious, like the rest, as a fresh stipulation in favor of slavery. Sufficient, surely, in this respect, is the actual Constitution. Beyond this I cannot, I will not go. What Washington, Franklin, Madison, and Hamilton would not insert we cannot err in rejecting.
Página 12 - I. and proud, beneath their country's flag, have been brought home cold and stiff, with its folds wrapped about them for a shroud ? Let all who truly mourn the dead be aroused against slavery. Does a mother drop tears for a son in the flower of his days cut down upon the distant...
Página 7 - ... prolific parent. Wherever slavery prevails, this pretended right is recognized, and generally with an intensity proportioned to the prevalence of slavery; as, for instance, in South Carolina and Mississippi, more intensely than in Tennessee and Kentucky. It may be considered a fixed part of the slave-holding system. A pretended right to set aside the Constitution to the extent of breaking up the Government, is the natural companion of the pretended right to set aside human nature to the extent...
Página 4 - I have been engaged in this movement ever since I entered political life." Mr. Rhett confessed: "It is nothing produced by Mr. Lincoln's election or the non-execution of the Fugitive Slave Law. It is a matter which has been gathering head for thirty years.

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