Friday, July 17, 2015

Francis Lieber to Senator Charles Sumner, February 12, 1864

February, 12, 1864.

Yes, my dear Sumner, that vote of which you write me — namely, thirty-one out of thirty-nine for your death-blow to slavery — is wonderful. It amazes and rejoices me. Still, I say we want four, perhaps five, amendments; we want them not by way of theoretic perfection or publicistic symmetry, but for plain common-sense adjustment of the Constitution to the state of things, and by the great behest of history.  . . . You know I am not given to extravagance; on the contrary, I consider the constant tendency of over-doing and over-saying things one of our most developed and least manly characteristics; nevertheless I boldly state that, calmly reflecting and keenly remembering the whole course of human affairs, I cannot bring to my mind any change of opinion, conviction, and feeling, as by an afflatus, equal to the change that has been wrought in the American mind concerning slavery within the last one year. I stand amazed. I, for one, would never have dared to believe it possible that but yesterday a Taney could give his opinion boldly and an Abolitionist was treated like a leprous thing, and that to-day a Winter Davis can declare in Congress that the Constitution of the United States never acknowledged man as property. I rub my eyes, and say, “Where are we?” . . .

SOURCE: Thomas Sergeant Perry, Editor, The Life and Letters of Francis Lieber, p. 341

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