Hon Charles Sumner

The Barbarism of Slavery (1863) Hon Charles Sumner

Speech of Hon. Charles Sumner, on the bill for the admission of Kansas as a free state, in the United States Senate, June 4, 1860: In the debate over whether new states and territories should be free or slaveholding, few spoke more passionately than Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner. In this speech, delivered before the Senate in 1860 when Kansas applied for statehood, Sumner makes clear his abolitionist stance. Decrying slavery as barbaric, he criticizes various pro-slavery arguments and offers statistics to show how, in his opinion, slavery rendered the South economically inferior to the North.