Historical voices

Again, if one State may secede, so may another; and when all shall have seceded, none is left to pay the debts.

Whatever concerns the whole world should be confided to the whole--to the General Government; while whatever concerns only the State should be left exclusively to the State.

The Union, and not themselves separately, procured their independence and their liberty.

If they break from this, they can only do so against law and by revolution.

The States have their status in the Union, and they have no other legal status.

Would it be far wrong to define it "a political community without a political superior?" Tested by this, no one of our States, except Texas, ever was a sovereignty.

Much is said about the "sovereignty" of the States; but the word is not in the National Constitution, nor, as is believed, in any of the State constitutions.

Having never been States, either in substance or name, outside of the Union, whence this magical omnipotence of "State-Rights," asserting a claim of power to lawfully destroy the Union itself?

The express plighting of faith by each and all of the original thirteen in the Articles of Confederation two years later, that the Union shall be perpetual, is most conclusive.

Our States have neither more nor less power than that reserved to them in the Union by the Constitution, no one of them ever having been a State out of the Union.

The sophism itself is that any State of the Union may consistently with the national Constitution, and therefore lawfully and peacefully, withdraw from the Union without the consent of the Union or of any other State.

They invented an ingenious sophism which, if conceded, was followed by perfectly logical steps, through all the incidents, to the complete destruction of the Union.

In a word, the people will save their government, if the government itself will do its part only indifferently well.

A right result at this time, will be worth more to the world than ten times the men and ten times the money.

So viewing the issue, no choice was left but to call out the war power of the government, and so to resist force employed for its destruction by force for its preservation.

It forces us to ask: "Is there, in all republics, this inherent and fatal weakness?" "Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?

It presents to the whole family of man the question whether a constitutional republic or democracy--a government of the people by the same people--can or cannot maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes.

In this act, discarding all else, they have forced upon the country the distinct issue, "immediate dissolution or blood.

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the…

Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.

You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it.

You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.

Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favoured land, are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulty.