#robert winthrop

[mikyapixie]

Courage the Cowardly Dog ended 22 years ago today!!!

One of the best endings to a classic show!!!

[ice---queen]

Some of [Giddings'] words must also have awakened painful echoes of home in the mind of his sensitive colleague Winthrop, for in defending his refusal to vote supplies for the war effort, Giddings made use of arguments that Sumner, his close correspondent, had just made in Boston....Winthrop was furious to hear these same points now being made by Gidding on the floor of the House.

Young Charles Sumner by Anne-Marie Taylor

Today’s aesthetic: people getting pissed when they realize that Sumner was right all along.

[ice---queen]

The fact that the attacks came from someone Winthrop could only consider a social inferior added insult to injury. Though Clifford had immediately recognized Sumner's style behind the signature 'Boston,' Winthrop thought it must be Wendell Phillips or even George Hillard, whose backgrounds and literary pretensions seemed to him more in accord with the author's ability and apparent self-assuredness. 'The writer is an accomplished person, & does his work with elegance,' Winthrop had mused, refusing to consider the sheriff's son.

Young Charles Sumner by Anne-Marie Taylor

“Sumner wrote it.”

“No, whoever wrote it is too smart and elegant to be Sumner.”

[ice---queen]

Even if the army had been in danger, and Sumner pointed to evidence that it no longer was by the time Congress considered the matter, Winthrop’s vote would still have been unjustifiable–as unjustifiable as his insistence that ‘all wars involve an element of self-defence, after they have commenced’ was meaningless. 'Our troops were in danger,’ Sumner corrected his Representative, 'because they were on a foreign soil, forcibly and piratically displacing the jurisdiction and laws of the rightful government.’

Young Charles Sumner by Anne-Marie Taylor

[ice---queen]

As Sumner looked over the horrors of the war just starting--'innocent lives are to be sacrificed; pleasant homes are to be made wretched; children are to become fatherless; wives and sisters are to mourn husbands and brothers'--he urged upon Winthrop the seriousness of his action: 'All this misery has the sanction of your vote, Mr. Winthrop. Every soldier is nerved partly by you. Away, beyond the current of the Rio Grande, on a foreign soil, your name will be invoked as a supporter of the war. Surely, this is no common act. It cannot be forgotten on earth; it must be remembered in heaven. Blood! blood! is on the hands of the representative from Boston. Not all great Neptune's ocean can wash them clean.

Young Charles Sumner by Anne-Marie Taylor

[ice---queen]

Sumner had based his first article on the assumption that he and Winthrop, that Conscience and Cotton Whigs alike, agreed on the essential falsehood and injustice of the war against Mexico. All that ought to be required was to remind Winthrop of his duty. It was frustrating therefore to read the angry response of the Cotton Whigs press and Winthrop's own self-conscious efforts to defend his vote. In his subsequent articles Sumner felt the need to repeat what had at first seemed too obvious to mention--the details of Polk's aggression against Mexico, the illegality of the war, the sinister role of slavery. Winthrop had not been ignorant of these facts, yet he had voted without regard to them, charged Sumner. In his defense of himself Winthrop had then compounded his error by casting blame on Mexico, among other things for refusing to receive the American minister. Even if the Polk Administration had honored Mexico's request for a semi-official commissioner rather than a full minister, even if that minister had not been an individual hated by Mexico and whose choice was thus doubly a calculated insult by the Polk Administration--even if that minister had been without objection, Sumner reminded Winthrop, under international law the refusal to accept any minister could be 'no ground for war.' Winthrop's efforts to divert blame would not do; nor would his disregard for history and law. As Sumner returned to his desk to make his charges clearer, he attacked more and more directly what he believed to be Winthrop's essential failure, not only of citizenship but of statesmanship.

Young Charles Sumner by Anne-Marie Taylor

[craigtowens]

Men may as well build their houses upon the sand and expect to see them stand, when the rains fall, and the winds blow, and the floods come, as to found free institutions upon any other basis than that of morality and virtue, of which the Word of God is the only authoritative rule, and the only adequate sanction. All societies of men must be governed in some way or other. The less they have of stringent state government, the more they must have of individual self-government. The less they rely on public law or physical force, the more they must rely on private moral restraint. Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled either by a power within them or a power without them; either by the Word of God or by the strong arm of man; either by the Bible or by the bayonet. It may do for other countries and other governments to talk about the state supporting religion. Here, under our own free institutions, it is religion which must support the state.

Robert Winthrop, speaker of the US House of Representatives (1847–1849)