Political Quotes

On the record
If the wild precipitation of the Southern leaders must be condemned, the compromising course of the majority in each branch of Congress will not escape censure,--censure for misjudgment, not for wrong intention.
Said by
James Blaine
Republican · Maine

Editor's note · Context

Blaine critiques both the Southern leaders and Congress for their respective roles in the lead-up to the Civil War.

Share

More from James Blaine

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.

gutenberg.org

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…

gutenberg.org

These divergent practices had been allowed to develop for seventy-seven years of the nation's life, when, admonished by the Stockton case of the latitudinary results to which loose methods might lead, Congress took jurisdiction of the…

gutenberg.org

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

gutenberg.org

Other voices in this conversation