There was no escaping the issue of credit money in some form, and of whatever form adopted we knew that gold and silver would soon disappear under the shadow of war--that they would be hoarded or exported.
John Sherman
The Public Record
John Sherman was an American politician from Ohio who served in federal office throughout the Civil War and into the late nineteenth century. A member of the Republican Party, he served in both houses of the U.S. Congress. He also served as Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of State. Sherman sought the Republican presidential nomination three times, coming closest in 1888, but was never chosen by the party. Between 1861 and 1897, John Sherman served in the U.S. Senate for nearly 32 years and holds the record for longest serving senator from the state of Ohio.
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The alternative is to authorize me to accept the guaranty, or leave the treasury with scarcely anything in it and with outstanding demands, some of them very pressing, of at least six millions of dollars, for you and your political friends…
It has stamped the language, the laws, and the boasted freedom of Englishmen, upon a population double that in the mother country, and they, in turn, are taking lessons from us in extending to their people equality of rights and privileges.
The United States, as a great republic, has become an example already followed by European nations.
I sincerely hope and believe in the good time coming when sectional lines will not divide political parties, and common interests and a broader nationality will have destroyed sectional feeling and jealousy.
This war, though fearful in the sacrifice of property and life, has resulted in a better understanding among the people of both sections.
From the graves of the dead, who fought on opposite sides for their country of their state, there has been a resurrection, honorable to both sections, a Union stronger, more united and glorious than the Union established by our fathers…
With opinions so widely divergent in the two sections, and with a fixed purpose of each to stand by them, there was no way that poor frail human nature could devise to decide the controversy except to fight.
If we conquer a peace by preserving the Union, the constitution, our nationality, all our ample territories, the rebound of prosperity in this country will enable a single generation easily to pay the national debt, even if the war is…
The resources, wealth, and labor of twenty millions of freemen are amply sufficient to meet not only the physical, but financial, difficulties of the war.
Better a desert and universal poverty than disunion; better the war of the French Revolution than an oligarchy founded upon the labor of slaves.
Rather than yield to traitors or the intervention of foreign powers, rather than bequeath to the next generation a broken Union, and an interminable civil war, I would light the torch of fanaticism and destroy all that the labor of two…
No, Mr. president, rather than allow this war to terminate except upon the restoration of the Union intact in all its breadth and length, I would sacrifice the last man and see the country itself submerged.
Two nations of the same blood, of the same lineage, of the same spirit, cannot occupy the same continent, much less standing side by side as rival nations, dividing rivers and mountains for their boundary.
Do you not know that the normal condition of such a state of affairs would be eternal, everlasting war?
Indeed, I cannot contemplate the condition of my country if it shall be dissevered and divided.
I would stake the last life, the last dollar, the last man, upon the prosecution of the war.
Who of the north can say, that in like conditions, he would not have been a rebel?
I have no sympathy with secession, but I can appreciate the action of those who were born and reared under the influence of such teachings.
Once in the war, there was no way but to fight it out.
They had cultivated a bitter sectional enmity, amounting to contempt, for the people of the north, growing partly out of the subserviency of large portions of the north to the dictation of the south, but chiefly out of the wordy violence…
The slave owners believed that, by secession, they could establish a republic, founded on slavery, with an ample field in Mexico and Central America for conquest and expansion.
Besides the danger of escape, there was the growing hostility to slavery in a preponderance of the people of the United States, restrained only by its recognition by the constitution.
Undoubtedly, the existence of negro slavery in the south was the governing excitement to war.
I am bound to say that the members of the Democratic party in the loyal States, in the main, evinced the same patriotic determination to maintain the cause of the Union, as those of the Republican party.
Politicians like John Sherman
