I wish to be as brief as possible. If the Senator will take the trouble to read the documents on the table, he will see that among all the numerous applications made by the United States to the Government of Prussia, the leading power of Germany, there is hardly an instance where this power did not meet us kindly and generously. I speak according to the record. I have been over every one of these cases; and I must say, as I read them I felt a new gratification in the power of my country, which made itself felt for the protection of its citizens in those distant places, and also a new sense of the comity of nations. A letter went forth from one of our ministers, and though at that time this difficult question of expatriation was still unsettled, yet, out of regard to our country, or out of regard, it might be, sometimes, to the personal character of our minister, the claim was abandoned. You can hardly find an instance——
Mr. Conness rose.
Mr. Sumner. Will the Senator let me finish my sentence?
Mr. Conness. Certainly.
Mr. Sumner. You can hardly find an instance in that voluminous correspondence where the claim has been persisted in on the part of the Prussian Government. The abstract question was left unsettled; but the individual was left free, without claim of allegiance or military service. All this was anterior to the treaty, by which this whole question is happily settled forever.
But it is not my purpose to discuss the conduct of foreign Governments. My simple aim is to show the conduct of our own. That was the point with which I began. I said that it needed no quickening such as the Senator from Oregon proposes to apply. There is no evidence that our Government has not been persistent and earnest for the protection of its citizens abroad, whether native-born or naturalized, and I alluded to Prussia only by way of illustration. Pass that by. We have then the greater and more complex case of England. But I would rather not enter upon this. Here are the documents on my table, the passages all marked, which would illustrate the conduct of the British Government and the British tribunals toward every one of these persons whose names have been brought in question. I do not wish to go into this question. I should be misunderstood; and it is not necessary. I am speaking now of the conduct of our own Government, rather than of the conduct of any other Government. Mark, Sir, my reply to the Senator from Oregon was, that our Government did not need any additional power or any additional impulse to activity in this behalf. Already it has the power to do everything permitted by the Law of Nations, and it ought not to do anything else.
Mr. Conness followed in support of the bill, and to a correction from Mr. Sumner retorted:—
“The honorable Senator would be very quick to demand the interference of all the powers of this Government in behalf of an arrested American citizen, if he were black. But, Sir, those arrested happen to be of another color,—not a color which appeals to his sympathies, but a color that allows him to belittle their arrest and incarceration,—that enables him to say here in the Senate that our Government have done everything that they could do, all that was necessary. It is true in his judgment, I have no doubt; for, if you only write letters, if you only publish and utter productions of the brain, if you only present views, the honorable Senator is satisfied. Those are his means, except when the progress through the thoroughfares of the city or the country of an American citizen of African descent is involved. Then views are at once thrown to the dogs, and he demands the interference of the Government, the police authority; if it be a railroad company, repeal their acts of incorporation! No matter how much capital stands in the way,—it may be $10,000,000 that is affected,—repeal their acts at once! How dare they impiously set up their tyranny over one human being who is stamped with American citizenship?… The law as proposed to be passed under the direction of the honorable Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations amounts to nothing.… I hope, without detaining the Senate any longer, that we shall not add to our too great delay upon these questions the offence and insult that the passage of this Act would be as proposed by the Committee.[259]
To this attack Mr. Sumner replied as follows:—