細節
SUMNER, Charles. Autograph letter signed ("Charles Sumner") to Michigan Senator Jacob M. Howard, Boston, 22 July 1865. 3 pages, 8vo, docketed.
"NEGRO SUFFRAGE IS NOT IMPOSED ON THE SOUTH..." Sumner, a key member of the Radical Republican faction, lobbies a colleague (probably in support of the approaching vote on the 13th Amendment), and comments on President Andrew Johnson and his cabinet. Sumner later strongly supported Johnson's impeachment. "...What are the signs of the West?" he enquires. "Massachusetts is in battle array, all armed for the conflict, as of old...But Preston King says the middle States & the West will settle the question. They will see that Negro suffrage is not imposed on the South. Will they? You know. But it will not be very easy...Your letter was like a brief speech in the Senate, full of true doctrine & timely counsel....Really this experiment of the Pres[i]d[en]t is [unproved?] & cruel. I fear that some of the cabinet have failed who ought not to have failed, & even there those who were right have not been frank with him...."
After the end of the Civil War, passage of the 13th Amendment became a primary goal of the radical Republican faction in Congress, and it is apparently the campaign Sumner alludes to here. The issue of suffrage for black Americans proved terribly devisive. Not quite a month after the end of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass proclaimed that "Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot." And once the 13th Amendment won passage, in December 1865, Sumner actively took up the campaign for black suffrage.
"NEGRO SUFFRAGE IS NOT IMPOSED ON THE SOUTH..." Sumner, a key member of the Radical Republican faction, lobbies a colleague (probably in support of the approaching vote on the 13th Amendment), and comments on President Andrew Johnson and his cabinet. Sumner later strongly supported Johnson's impeachment. "...What are the signs of the West?" he enquires. "Massachusetts is in battle array, all armed for the conflict, as of old...But Preston King says the middle States & the West will settle the question. They will see that Negro suffrage is not imposed on the South. Will they? You know. But it will not be very easy...Your letter was like a brief speech in the Senate, full of true doctrine & timely counsel....Really this experiment of the Pres[i]d[en]t is [unproved?] & cruel. I fear that some of the cabinet have failed who ought not to have failed, & even there those who were right have not been frank with him...."
After the end of the Civil War, passage of the 13th Amendment became a primary goal of the radical Republican faction in Congress, and it is apparently the campaign Sumner alludes to here. The issue of suffrage for black Americans proved terribly devisive. Not quite a month after the end of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass proclaimed that "Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot." And once the 13th Amendment won passage, in December 1865, Sumner actively took up the campaign for black suffrage.