Judicial Injustices
charles sumner
I hold judges, and especially the Supreme Court of the country, in much respect, but I am too familiar with the history of judicial proceedings to regard them with any superstitious reverence. Judges are but men, and in all ages have shown a full share of human frailty. Alas! alas! the worst crimes of history have been perpetrated under their sanction. The blood of martyrs and of patriots, crying from the ground, summons them to judgment.
It was a judicial tribunal which condemned Socrates to drink the fatal hemlock, and which pushed the Saviour barefoot over the pavements of Jerusalem, bending beneath his cross. It was a judicial tribunal which, against the testimony and entreaties of her father, surrendered the fair Virginia as a slave; which arrested the teachings of the great Apostle to the Gentiles and sent him in bonds from Judea to Rome; which, in the name of the Old Religion, adjudged the Saints and Fathers of the Christian Church to death in all its most dreadful forms; and which afterwards, in the name of the New Religion, enforced the tortures of the Inquisition, amidst the shrieks and agonies of its victims, while it compelled Galileo to declare, in solemn denial of the great truth he had disclosed, that the earth did not move round the sun.
It was a judicial tribunal which in France during the long reign of her monarchs lent itself to be the instrument of every tyranny, as during the brief Reign of Terror it did not hesitate to stand forth the unpitying accessory of the unpitying guillotine.
It was a judicial tribunal in England, surrounded by all the forms of law, which sanctioned every despotic caprice of Henry the Eighth, from the unjust divorce of his queen to the beheading of Sir Thomas More; which lighted the fires of persecution that glowed at Oxford and Smithfield over the cinders of Latimer, Ridley, and John Rogers; which, after deliberate argument, upheld the fatal tyranny of Ship-Money, against the patriot resistance of Hampden; which, in defiance of justice and humanity, sent Sidney and Russell to the block; which persistently enforced the laws of Conformity that our Puritan Fathers persistently refused to obey; and which afterwards, with Jeffreys on the bench, crimsoned the page of English history with massacre and murder—even with the blood of innocent women.
Ay, Sir, and it was a judicial tribunal, in our country, surrounded by all the forms of law, which hung the witches at Salem; which affirmed the constitutionality of the Stamp-Act which it admonished “jurors and the people” to obey; and which now in our day, lent its sanction to the unutterable atrocity of the Fugitive Slave Bill.
Footnotes
1 This extract is from a speech delivered in the United States Senate, March 21, 1898.