William Seward: “The recital of heroic actions loses its chief value, if we cannot discover the principles in which they were born.”

Marble columns may, indeed, moulder into dust, time may erase all impress from the crumbling stone, but their fame remains; for with American liberty it rose, and with American liberty only can it perish.

No man was a more ardent lover of liberty, or was more anxious that its institutions should be established throughout the earth, at the earliest practicable moment.

There are events, the monuments of which, surviving every other memorial of human existence, eternize the nation to whose history they belong, after all other vestiges of its glory have disappeared from the globe.

I still hold the same opinions; and, although highly respecting the purity of intention of those who object, on constitutional grounds, to the exercise of this power, it is with heartfelt satisfaction that I perceive those objections…