The logic of events requires you to be your own successor.

Upon the result of measures adopted to finish the war during the present spring and summer will depend the wish of the people to continue their present leaders, or to exchange them for others.

He thought he was a great political leader, and he might have been if he had ever been sure of himself; but he was one of the poorest judges of men, and in that way was often deceived, often misled, and often led to change his opinions....

With measured rhetoric he traced the usurpations of the President and the acknowledged policy that was in future to guide the Administration.

He courageously admitted that a majority of the people and both branches of Congress sustained the policy of the President, but such a policy, he declared, subordinating the laws, the courts, and the people themselves to military power…

The past, however, with its enormous debt, its depreciated currency, its suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and its abolition of free speech and a free press, did not mean such irretrievable ruin as the national bankruptcy which now…

It is a doctrine of national bankruptcy and national ruin; it is a measure for continued military despotism over one-third of our country, which will be the basis for military despotism over the whole land.

Every measure to convert the war against armed rebellion into one against private property and personal rights at the South, he continued, has been accompanied by claims to exercise military power in the North.

We now find that as the strength of rebellion is broken, new claims to arbitrary power are put forth.

More prerogatives are asserted in the hour of triumph than were claimed in days of disaster.

The war is not to be brought to an end by the submission of States to the Constitution and their return to the Union, but to be prolonged until the South is subjugated and accepts such terms as may be dictated.

This theory designs a sweeping revolution and the creation of a new political system.

There is but one course, he concluded, which will now save us from such national ruin--we must use every influence of wise statesmanship to bring back the States which now reject their constitutional obligations.

The triumphs won by the soldiers in the field should be followed up by the peacemaking policy of the statesmen in the Cabinet.

But he was unsparing in his lectures to the Administration, admonishing it to adopt the principles of government which prevailed when happiness and peace characterised the country's condition, and prophesying the ruin of the Union unless…

Two special causes are assigned for this great reaction in public sentiment--the want of military successes, and the impression in some minds, the fear and suspicion in others, that we are not to have peace in any event under this…

In December, 1860, in the presence of threatened war Lincoln refused to yield to a compromise that would extend slavery into free territory; now, in the presence of failure at the polls, he insisted upon a peace that would abolish slavery.

We will give you everything that local self-government demands; everything that a common ancestory of glory--everything that national fraternity or Christian fellowship requires; but to dissolve the federal bond between these States, to…

His speech, prepared with unusual care, showed the measured dignity and restraint of a trained orator, who knew how to please a popular audience with a glowing denunciation of principles it detested.

Throughout the whole ran the thread of one distinct proposition,--that the Republican party had sinned away its day of grace, and that the patriotic work of the Democratic party must begin at once if the Union was to be saved.

He had stated it in the last campaign and reiterated it in his latest message; but never before did he impress it by such striking sentences as now fell upon the ears of a delighted convention.

Nay, more than this, it will not listen to a proposal for peace which does not offer that which this government has no right to ask.

It has, by its proclamations, by vindictive legislation, by displays of hate and passion, placed obstacles in its own pathway which it cannot overcome, and has hampered its own freedom of action by unconstitutional acts.

The bigotry of fanatics and the intrigues of placemen have made the bloody pages of the history of the past three years.

Lincoln values many things above the Union; we put it first of all.