The wisdom of maintaining that institution was abundantly vindicated by the results of the war.

Durant speaks of no duty, apparently thinks of none resting upon Southern Union men.

Of course the Rebellion will never be suppressed in Louisiana if the professed Union men there will neither help to do it nor permit the Government to do it without their help. . . .

I am in no boastful mood: I shall not do more than I can, but I shall do all I can to save the Government, which is my sworn duty as well as my personal inclination.

An attempt to guarantee and protect a revived State government constructed in whole or in preponderating part from the very element against whose hostility and violence it is to be protected is simply absurd.

The two schools in short marked the dividing line between the radical and the conservative.

The need of action and of energy so pressed upon him that he found no time to utter lamentation, none to indulge even in the most sacred personal grief.

I refer myself not to the men of my time, but to the judgment of history.

In turn, the course of the National Administration would certainly be influenced, and its fate in large degree determined, by the conduct of the Southern men, in whom the President was placing unbounded trust.

Observing men in the loyal States regarded such a policy not only as weak and maudlin, but as utterly insufficient and assuredly dangerous to the future safety of the Government.

The feeling in many portions of the country toward the emancipated slaves, especially among the ignorant and uneducated, is one of vindictive and malicious hatred.

The deep-seated prejudice against color is assiduously cultivated by the public journals and leads to acts of cruelty, oppression, and murder, which the local authorities are at no pains to prevent or punish.

Emboldened by the support of the National Administration, the Southern leaders believed that they could carry their designs through, and, instead of being restrained by the protest or the advice of Republicans, they chose with apparent…

Many Northern Democrats had indeed given the assurance that if any attempt at coercion should be made by the Republican National Administration, they would themselves meet it with force, and that, if war should come, it would be in the…

But in the treatment of the colored man, now proposed, there was absolute heartlessness and rank injustice.

Crises often arise in the conduct of National affairs when cherished opinions must be sacrificed and new departures taken.

He was a lawyer in full practice, a man of the highest integrity, without fear and without reproach.

Their pirates burned your unarmed commerce upon every sea.

He had placed himself in a position from which he could not with grace retreat, and to go forward in which was still further to blight his hopes of promotion in his party.

I believe that if it should pass it will receive the sanction of nineteen-twentieths of the loyal people of the country.

In my judgment our sole authority for the acts which we have done during the last four years was the authority communicated to Congress by the Constitution to suppress insurrection.

An avenging God cannot sleep while such things find countenance.

If you are not ready to be the Moses of an oppressed people, do not become their Pharaoh.

The wonder excited by the raising of the vast army which saved the Union from destruction was even surpassed by the wonder excited by its prompt and peaceful dissolution.