Historical voices

When at last the truth began to dawn upon the administration that the negro might be made useful to loyalty, as well as to treason, to the Union as well as to the Confederacy, it then considered in what way it could employ him, which would…

The abolition heart of the North ached over the delay, and uttered its bitter complaints, but the administration remained blind and dumb.

Destroy these,” was the burden of all my utterances during this part of the struggle, “and you cripple and destroy the rebellion.” It is surprising how long and bitterly the government resisted and rejected this view of the situation.

They are taught less by theories than by facts and events.

But nations seldom listen to advice from individuals, however reasonable.

True it is that this faith was many times shaken by passing events, but never destroyed.

From the first, I, for one, saw in this war the end of slavery; and truth requires me to say that my interest in the success of the North was largely due to this belief.

It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.

Our very lack of preparation for the conflict disposed us to look for some other than the way of blood out of the difficulty.

Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern calculation had covered.

For the moment the northern lamb was transformed into a lion, and his roar was terrible.

We could not but believe that there existed at the South a latent and powerful Union sentiment which would assert itself at last.

We (the people of the North) are a charitable people, and in the excess of this feeling we were disposed to put the very best construction upon the strange behavior of our southern brethren.

This haughty and unreasonable and unreasoning attitude of the imperious South saved the slave and saved the nation.

They had come to hate everything which had the prefix “Free”--free soil, free states, free territories, free schools, free speech, and freedom generally, and they would have no more such prefixes.

Happily for the cause of human freedom, and for the final unity of the American nation, the South was mad, and would listen to no concessions.

Some of these peace propositions would have been shocking to the last degree to the moral sense of the North, had not fear for the safety of the Union overwhelmed all moral conviction.

The reaction from the glorious assertion of freedom and independence on the part of the North in the triumphant election of Abraham Lincoln, was a painful and humiliating development of its weakness.

I confess to a feeling allied to satisfaction at the prospect of a conflict between the North and the South.

Had Southern men puzzled their brains to find the most effective means to array against slavery and slaveholding manners the solid opposition of the North, they could not have hit upon any expedient better suited to that end, than was this…

They were tired of the rule-or-ruin intimidation adopted by the South, and felt then, if never before, that they had quailed before it too often and too long.

Into this contest I threw myself, with firmer faith and more ardent hope than ever before, and what I could do by pen or voice was done with a will.

Not only the intelligence of the slave, but the instincts of humanity, must be barred by positive law, hence Breckenridge and his friends erected the flinty walls of the Constitution and the Supreme Court for the protection of slavery at…

The South was too sagacious to leave slavery to the chance of defeat in a fair vote by the people of a territory.