Your devoted friend,
Nisage Saget.
MR. SUMNER’S REPLY.
Washington, July 4, 1873.
MR. PRESIDENT,—I cannot, at this late day, acknowledge the letter with which you have honored me, without explaining the reason of my delay.
Owing to absence in Europe, where I had gone for my health, I did not receive your valuable communication until some time in the winter, when it was put into my hands by your excellent Minister. Continuing feeble in health, I reluctantly postponed this acknowledgment. I now take advantage of convalescence to do, thus tardily, what my feelings prompted at an earlier day.
Please, Sir, accept my thanks for your generous appreciation of what I have done, and your kindness in letting me know it under your own hand. But I beg you to understand that I do not deserve the praise with which you honor me. In advocating the cause of an oppressed people I have only acted according to my conscience. I could not have done otherwise; and now my only regret is that I have done so little. I wish I had done more.
In the history of mankind the crime against the African race will stand forth in terrible eminence,—always observed, and never forgotten. Just in proportion as civilization prevails will this enormous wrong be apparent in its true character; and men will read with astonishment how human beings, guilty only of being black, were sold into slavery, and then (such was the continuing injustice towards this unhappy people) how, when slavery ceased, they were still treated with indignity by persons whose lordly pretensions were founded on the skin only. As these things are seen in increasing light, they will be condemned in no uncertain words; nor will the denial of equal rights, on account of color, escape the judgment awarded to slavery itself. Human conduct on this question is a measure of character. Where the African race is enslaved or degraded, where it is exposed to any indignity or shut out from that equality which is a primal right to humanity, there civilization is still feeble.
To the certain triumph of civilization I look with constant hope. It is sure to come; and one sign of its arrival will be that prevailing sentiment which recognizes the perpetual obligations of equal justice to all, and the duty to repair past wrongs by compensations in the future.