Better “smash the egg” than permit it to produce a viper.

I see little chance of peace or tranquillity in any Rebel State, unless the rights of all are recognized without distinction of color.

The article on Reconstruction to which you call my attention proceeds on the idea, born of Slavery, that persons with a white skin are the only “citizens.” This is a mistake.

As you do me the honor to ask me the proper stand for you to make, I have no hesitation in replying that you must insist on all the rights and privileges of a citizen.

They are yours; and whoever undertakes to rob you of them is a usurper and impostor.

They ask him for direction, and he, in response, counsels them to take part in the organization of the Government,--that it is their right and duty.

I trust that you will do everything possible to arouse hope and encouragement in the colored people.

Let them know that their friends will stand by them.

All white persons who have any regard for the Declaration of Independence ought to unite in favor of its principles, and insist that they shall be made the foundation of the new order of things.

Think nothing of me, take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever, but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence.

In the universe of God there are no accidents.

From the fall of a sparrow to the fall of an empire or the sweep of a planet, all is according to Divine Providence, whose laws are everlasting.

Never, perhaps, in history has this Providence been more conspicuous than in that recent procession of events, where the final triumph is wrapped in the gloom of tragedy.

It is our present duty to find the moral of the stupendous drama.

It is from the nature of things, and because the part Lincoln was called to perform resembled in character the part performed by Washington.

The work left undone by Washington was continued by Lincoln.

Kindred in service, kindred in patriotism, each is surrounded in death by kindred homage.

One sleeps in the East, the other sleeps in the West; and thus, in death, as in life, one is the complement of the other.

Each was head of the Republic during a period of surpassing trial; and each thought only of the public good, simply, purely, constantly, so that single-hearted devotion to country will always find a synonym in their names.

The first was for National Independence; the second was to make the Republic one and indivisible, on the indestructible foundation of Liberty and Equality.

The first cut the connection with the mother country, and opened the way to the duties and advantages of Popular Government; the second will have failed, unless it consummates all the original promises of the Declaration our fathers took…

By no accident did these two great men become representatives of their country at these two different epochs, so alike in peril, and yet so unlike in the principles involved.

Always strictly just, according to prevailing principles, and at his death ordering the emancipation of his slaves, he was more a general and statesman than philanthropist; nor did he seem inspired, beyond the duties of patriotism, to…

In the ample record of what he wrote or said there is no word of adhesion to the great ideas of the Declaration.

Strange, but happy, Providence, that a voice from that savage wilderness, now fertile in men, was inspired to uphold the pledges and promises of the Declaration!