In this speech, Sumner, as openly as Garrison, declared himself the eternal opponent of slavery, and defined his position and marked out his work within the constitution of the United States, and by the constitution, just as Garrison had marked out his work outside of the constitution, and against it.
Sumner took the ground that the constitution of the United States was not a covenant with death, or an agreement with hell, but an instrument designed to secure liberty and equal rights, and that the present sanction and encouragement it was giving to slavery was owing to a perversion of its original design. He maintained that the constitution nowhere recognises slavery as an institution, that the slave is nowhere spoken of in it as a chattel but as a person, and that those provisions in the constitution which confer certain privileges on slaveholders were supposed to be temporary compromises with what the founders of the constitution imagined would prove only a temporary institution—soon to pass entirely away from the country. He asserts in this speech:
"There is in the constitution no compromise on the subject of slavery of a character not to be reached legally and constitutionally, which is the only way in which I propose to reach it. Wherever power and jurisdiction are secured to Congress, they may unquestionably be exercised in conformity with the constitution. And even in matters beyond existing powers and jurisdiction there is a constitutional mode of action. The constitution contains an article pointing out how at any time amendments may be made thereto. This is an important article, giving to the constitution a progressive character, and allowing it to be moulded to suit new exigences and new conditions of feeling. The wise framers of this instrument did not treat the country as a Chinese foot, never to grow after its infancy, but anticipated the changes incident to its growth."
Accordingly, Sumner proposed to the Whig party, as a rallying watch-word, the
Repeal of slavery under the constitution and laws of the Federal Government.
Of this course he said: "The time has passed when this can be opposed on constitutional grounds. It will not be questioned by any competent authority, that Congress may by express legislation abolish slavery, 1st, in the District of Columbia; 2d, in the Territories, if there should be any; 3d, that it may abolish the slave-trade on the high seas between the states; 4th, that it may refuse to admit any new state with a constitution sanctioning slavery. Nor can it be doubted that the people of the free States may in the manner pointed out by the constitution, proceed to its amendment."
Here we have, in a few words, the platform of the Political Abolitionists, every step of which has actually been accomplished.
But at that time it was altogether too exalted doctrine to be received by the Whig party, and Sumner tried his eloquence upon them in vain. In vain he called upon Daniel Webster to carry out this glorious programme in his place in the Senate.
"Assume," he says, "these unperformed duties. The aged shall bear witness of you; the young shall kindle with rapture as they repeat the name of Webster; and the large company of the ransomed shall teach their children and their children's children to the latest generation, to call you blessed; while all shall award you another title, not to be forgotten in earth or heaven—Defender of Humanity."
But Webster had other aspirations. He wanted to be president of the United States, to be that he must please the South, and so instead of Defender of Humanity he turned to be a defender of kidnapping and of the fugitive slave law.