Sir, is not the Senator answered? Is not the distinction clear as noonday between what is prohibited by the Constitution and what is proposed by my amendment? The difference between the two is as wide as between the sky and the earth. They cannot be mingled. There is no likeness, similitude, or anything by which they can be brought together. The Senator opposes a religious amendment. I assert that there shall be no political distinction; and that is my answer to his argument on churches.
And now, Sir, may I say, in no unkindness, and not even in criticism, but simply according to the exigencies of this debate, that the Senator from Wisconsin has erred? If you will listen, I think you will see the origin of his error. I do not introduce it here; nor should I refer to it, if he had not introduced it himself. The Senator has never had an adequate idea of the Great Declaration. The Senator smiles. I have been in this Chamber long enough to witness the vicissitudes of opinion on our Magna Charta. I have seen it derided by others more than it ever was by the Senator from Wisconsin.
Mr. Carpenter. I should like to ask the Senator from Massachusetts when he ever heard me deride it.
Mr. Sumner. The Senator will pardon me; I am coming to that. The Senator shall know. The person who first in this Chamber opened assault upon the Declaration was John C. Calhoun, in his speech on the Oregon Bill, June 27, 1848. He denounced the claim of equality as “the most false and dangerous of all political errors”; and he proceeded to say that it “has done more to retard the cause of Liberty and Civilization, and is doing more at present, than all other causes combined.” He then added, that “for a long time it lay dormant, but in the process of time it began to germinate and produce its poisonous fruits,”[232]—these poisonous fruits being that public sentiment against Slavery which was beginning to make itself felt.
This extravagance naturally found echo from his followers. Mr. Pettit, a Senator from Indiana, after quoting “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” proceeded:—
“I hold it to be a self-evident lie. There is no such thing. Sir, tell me that the imbecile, the deformed, the weak, the blurred intellect in man is my equal, physically, mentally, or morally, and you tell me a lie. Tell me, Sir, that the slave in the South, who is born a slave, and with but little over one-half the volume of brain that attaches to the northern European race, is his equal, and you tell what is physically a falsehood. There is no truth in it at all.”[233]
This was in the Senate, February 20, 1854. Of course it proceeded on a wretched misconstruction of the Declaration, which announced equality of rights and not any other equality, physical, intellectual, or moral. It was a declaration of rights,—nor more nor less.
Then, in the order of impeachment, followed a remarkable utterance from a much-valued friend of my own and of the Senator, the late Rufus Choate, who, without descending into the same particularity, seems to have reached a similar conclusion, when, in addressing political associates, he characterized the Declaration of Independence as “that passionate and eloquent manifesto of a revolutionary war,” and then again spoke of its self-evident truths as “the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right.”[234] This was in his letter to the Maine Whig State Central Committee, August 9, 1856. In my friendship for this remarkable orator, I can never think of these too famous words without a pang of regret.
This great question became a hinge in the memorable debate between Mr. Douglas and Mr. Lincoln in the contest for the Senatorship of Illinois, when the former said, in various forms of speech, that “the Declaration of Independence only included the white people of the United States”;[235] and Abraham Lincoln replied, that “the entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration.”[236] This was in Mr. Lincoln’s speech at Galesburg, October 7, 1858. Elsewhere he repeated the same sentiment.
Andrew Johnson renewed the assault. After quoting the great words of the Declaration, he said in this Chamber, December 12, 1859:—