THE SOUTH AND THE SLAVERY QUESTION
"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it." - Abraham Lincoln, 1859
"What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment... inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose." - Thomas Jefferson, 1786
"All day and almost all night long, the captain, pilot, crew, and passengers were talking of nothing else; and sometimes our ears were so wearied with the sound of cotton! cotton! cotton! that we gladly hailed a fresh inundation of company in hopes of some change - but alas!... 'What's cotton at?' was the first eager inquiry. 'Ten cents [a pound],' 'Oh, that will never do!'" - Basil Hall, on the preoccupation with cotton in the South, 1828
"He therefore most respectfully and earnestly prays that you will pass a law permitting him on the score of long and meritorious service to remain in the State, together with his wife and four children, and not force him in his old age to seek a livelihood in a new Country." - Arthur Lee, free black petitioning the Assembly of Virginia to allow him to stay, 1835
"I write you a letter to let you know of my distress my master has sold albert to a trader on Monday court day and myself and other child is for sale also and I want you to let hear from you very soon before next cort if you can I dont know when I dont want you to wait till Christmas I want you to tell Dr Hamelton and your master if either will buy me they can attend to it know and then I can go after-wards I dont want a trader to get me they asked me if I had got any person to buy me and I told them no they took me to the court houste too they never put me up a man buy the name of brady bought albert and is gone I dont know whare they say he lives in Scottesville my things is in several places some is in Staunton and if I should be sold I dont know what will become of them I dont expect to meet with the luck to get that way till I am quite heart sick nothing more I am and ever will be your kind wife Maria Perkins." - Maria Perkins, enslaved woman writing to her husband about the disruption to their family from slave traffic, 1852
"At this addition to the human stock Covey and his wife were ecstatic with joy. No one dreamed of reproaching the woman of finding fault with the hired man, Bill Smith, the father of the children, for Mr. Covey himself had locked the two up together every night, thus inviting the result." - Frederick Douglass, describing white slave owner Mr. Covey's purchase of a female slave as a "breeder"
"[T]here is but one opinion of him. Wherever he goes he arouses sympathy in your cause and love for himself... Our expectations were highly roused by his narrative, his printed speeches, and the eulogisms of the friends with whom he has been staying: but he far exceeds the picture we had formed both in outward graces, intellectual power and culture, and eloquence." - Mary A. Estlin, on Fredrick Douglass, 1846
MANIFEST DESTINY AND ITS LEGACY
"Our manifest destiny [is] to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." - John L. O'Sullivan, 1845
"Other nations have been called thin-skinned, but the citizens of the Union have, apparently, no skins at all; they wince if a breeze blows over them unless it be tempered with adulation." - Frances Trollope, upset by the failure of a utopian community she joined... describing Americans who lived there, 1832
"Both the government of the United States and Texas are founded upon the same political code. They have the same common origin - the same language, laws, and religion - the same pursuits and interests; and though they may remain independent of each other as to government, they are identified in weal and wo' - they will flourish side by side and the blight which affects the one will surely reach the other." - Thomas J. Green, brigadier general in the Texas revolution making a case for American support, 1845
"Our people are spreading out with the aid of the American multiplication table. Go to the West and see a young man with his mate of eighteen; after the lapse of thirty years, visit him again, and instead of two, you will find twenty-two. That is what I call the American multiplication table." - American congressman, boasting about American procreative power, 1846
"The act of sending an armed force among the Mexicans was unnecessary, inasmuch as Mexico was in no way molesting or menacing the United States or the people thereof; and... it was unconstitutional, because the power of levying war is vested in Congress, and not in the President." - Abraham Lincoln, 1860
"Now we ask, whether any man can coolly contemplate the idea of recalling our troops from the [Mexican] territory we at present occupy... and... resign this beautiful country to the custody of the ignorant cowards and profligate ruffians who have ruled it for the last twenty-five years? Why, humanity cries out against it. Civilization and Christianity protest against this reflux of the tide of barbarism and anarchy." - New York Evening Post, 1848
RENEWING THE SECTIONAL STRUGGLE
"Secession! Peaceable secession! Sir, your eyes and mine are never destined to see that miracle." - Daniel Webster, 1850
"I tell you the woman are in great demand in this country no matter whether they are married or not you need not think strange if you see me coming home with some good looking man some of these times with a pocket full of rocks... it is all the go here for Ladys to leave there Husbands two out of three do it there is a first rate Chance for a single woman she can have her choice of thousands i wish mother was here she could marry a rich man and not have to lift her hand to do her work." - Married woman, from the goldfields in California, 1853
"If a man is going to California, he announces it with some hesitation; because it is a confession that he has failed at home." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1849
"I opened a paper to-day in which he [Webster] pounds on the old strings [of liberty] in a letter to the Washington Birthday feasters at New York. 'Liberty! liberty!' Pho! Let Mr. Webster, for decency's sake, shut his lips once and forever on this word. The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1851
"Resolved. That the highwayman's plea, that 'might makes right,' embodied in the Ostend Circular, was in every respect unworthy of American diplomacy, and would bring shame and dishonor upon any Government or people that gave it their sanction." - Republican party platform, lashing out against the idea of seizing Cuba as outlined in the Ostend Manifesto, 1856
"annuls all past compromises with slavery, and makes all future compromises impossible. Thus it puts freedom and slavery face to face, and bids them grapple. Who can doubt the result?" - Charles Sumner, describing the good part about the Kansas-Nebraska Bill
DRIFTING TOWARD DISUNION
"A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." - Abraham Lincoln, 1858
"'No! no! no! my soul an't yours, Mas'r! You haven't bought it, - ye can't buy it! It's been bought and paid for, by one that is able to keep it, - no matter, no matter, you can't harm me!' 'I can't,' said Legree, with a sneer; 'we'll see, - we'll see! Here, Sambo, Quimbo, give this dog such a breakin' in as he won't get over, this month!'" - Closing scenes of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin
"Brooks and his Southern allies have deliberately adopted the monstrous creed that any man who dares to utter the sentiments which they deem wrong or unjust, shall be brutally assailed." - Illinois State Journal, on Bleeding Sumner
"Although Mr. Brooks ought to have selected some other spot for the altercation than the Senate chamber, if he had broken every bone in Sumner's carcass it would have been a just retribution upon this slanderer of the South and her individual citizens." - Petersburg Intelligencer, on Bleeding Sumner
"Fellow-Christians! Remember it is for Christ, for the nation, and for the world that you vote at this election! Vote as you pray! Pray as you vote!" - The Independent, a religious journal backing the campaign of John C. Fremont, 1856
"They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order; and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect... This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race." - Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, referring to the status of slaves when the Constitution was adopted in his Dred Scott decision, 1857
"I presume you all know who I am. I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the Legislature. My [Whiggish] politics are short and sweet, like the old woman's dance. I am in favor of a national bank. I am in favor of the internal improvement system, and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles. If elected, I shall be thankful; if not, it will be all the same." - Abraham Lincoln, 1832
"I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to those rights as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects - certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man." - Abraham Lincoln, comparing races, 1858
"I've been studying, and studying upon it, and its clar to me, it wasn't John Brown that died on that gallows. When I think how he gave up his life for our people, and how he never flinched, but was so brave to the end; its clar to me it wasn't mortal man, it was God in him." - Harriet Tubman
"[The Brown] affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many attempts, related in history, at the assassination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution." - Abraham Lincoln
"We affirm that the ends for which this [Federal] government was instituted have been defeated, and the government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding states... For twenty five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common government. Observing the forms of the constitution, a sectional party has found within that article establishing the executive department the means of subverting the constitution itself." - South Carolina, declaration of secession, 1860
"If the cotton States shall decide that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace. The right to secede may be a revolutionary one, but it exists nevertheless... Whenever a considerable section of our Union shall deliberately resolve to go out, we shall resist all coercive measures designed to keep it in. We hope never to live in a republic, whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets." - New York Tribune, 1860
"I firmly believe that the slave-holding South is now the controlling power of the world - that no other power would face us in hostility. Cotton, rice, tobacco, and naval stores command the world; and we have sense to know it, and are sufficiently Teutonic to carry it out successfully. The North without us would be a motherless calf, bleating about, and die of mange and starvation." - Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina, 1861
"The fault of the free States in the eyes of the South is not one that can be atoned for by any yielding of special points here and there. Their offense is that they are free, and that their habits and prepossessions are those of freedom. Their crime is the census of 1860. Their increase in numbers, wealth, and power is a standing aggression. It would not be enough to please the Southern States that we should stop asking them to abolish slavery: what they demand of us is nothing less than that we should abolish the spirit of the age. Our very thoughts are a menace." - James Russell Lowell
"The contest is really for empire on the side of the North, and for independence on that of the South, and in this respect we recognize an exact analogy between the North and the Government of George III, and the South and the Thirteen Revolted Provinces." - London Times, 1861
GIRDING FOR WAR: THE NORTH AND THE SOUTH
"I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves." - Abraham Lincoln, July 1861
"I would demand explanations from Spain and France, categorically, at once. I would seek explanations from Great Britain and Russia... And, if satisfactory explanations are not received from Spain and France... would convene Congress and declare war against them." - William H. Seward, memorandum to Lincoln, 1861
"I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we cannot hold Missouri, nor, I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capital [Washington]." - Abraham Lincoln, September 1861
"If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that." - Abraham Lincoln, August 1862
"The great body of the aristocracy and the commercial classes are anxious to see the United States go to pieces [but] the middle and lower class sympathise with us [because they] see in the convulsion in America an era in the history of the world, out of which must come in the end a general recognition of the right of mankind to the produce of their labor and the pursuit of happiness." - American minister to Britain
"We are as busy, as rich, and as fortunate in our trade as if the American war had never broken out, and our trade with the States had never been disturbed. Cotton was no King, notwithstanding the prerogatives which had been loudly claimed for him." - London Times, January 1864
"A poor woman yesterday applied to a merchant in Carey Street to purchase a barrel of flour. The price he demanded was $70. 'My God!' exclaimed she, 'how can I pay such prices? I have seven children; what shall I do?' 'I don't know, madam,' said he coolly, 'unless you eat your children.'" - Richmond diary, portraying the effects of inflation, October 1863
THE FURNACE OF CIVIL WAR
"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery." - Abraham Lincoln, 1862
"We called to them, tried to tell them there was no danger, called them to stop, implored them to stand. We called them cowards, denounced them in the most offensive terms, put out our heavy revolvers, and threatened to shoot them, but all in vain; a cruel, crazy, mad, hopeless, panic possessed them, and communicated to everybody about in front and rear. The heat was awful, although now about six; the men were exhausted - their mouths gaped, their lips cracked and blackened with powder of the cartridges they had bitten off in battle, their eyes staring in frenzy; no mortal ever saw such a mass of ghastly wretches." - Observer describing the Federal troops' retreat from Bull Run
"I have just read your dispatch about sore-tongued and fatigued horses. Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?" - Lincoln's response to General George McClellan's complaint that his horses were tired, October 1862
"The sights and smells that assailed us were simply indescribable... corpses swollen to twice their original size, some of them actually burst asunder with the pressure of foul gasses... The odors were so nauseating and so deadly that in a short time we all sickened and were lying with our moths close to the ground, most of us vomiting profusely." - Confederate soldier assigned to burial detail after the Seven Days' Battles, 1862
"The most frightened man on that gloomy day... was the Secretary of War [Stanton]. He was at times almost frantic... The Merrimack, he said, would destroy every vessel in the service, could lay every city on the coast under contribution, could take Fortress Monroe... Likely the first movement of the Merrimack would be to come up the Potomac and disperse Congress, destroy the Capitol and public buildings." - Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy
"You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but, no matter. Fight you, then, exclusively to save the Union. I issued the proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union." - Abraham Lincoln, letter to Democrats, August 1863
"The hundreds of thousands, if not millions of slaves [the act] will emancipate will come North and West and will either be competitors with our white mechanics and laborers, degrading them by competition, or they will have to be supported as paupers and criminals at the public expense." - Cincinnati Enquirer
"works doubly, weakening the enemy and strengthening us." - Abraham Lincoln, letter to General Grant on the impact of enlisting black soldiers, August 1863
"It is difficult to say they are not as good soldiers as any." - Abraham Lincoln, on black soldiers, December 1863
"Abandon all the posts now garrisoned by black men, take 150,000 [black] men from our side and put them in the battlefield or cornfield against us, and we would be compelled to abandon the war in three weeks." - Abraham Lincoln, on the effectiveness of black soldiers, August 1864
"All the negroes found in blue uniform or with any outward marks of a Union soldier upon him was killed - I saw some taken into the woods and hung - Others I saw stripped of all their clothing and they stood upon the bank of the river with their faces riverwards and then they were shot - Still others were killed by having their brains beaten out by the butt end of the muskets in the hands of the Rebels." - Affidavit by a Union sergeant, on Confederate treatment of some black soldiers
"If you of the East, who have found this war against the South, and for the negro, gratifying to your hate or profitable to your purse, will continue it... [be prepared for] eternal divorce between the West and the East." - Ohio congressman, January 1863
"The erection of the states watered by the Mississippi and its tributaries into an independent Republic is the talk of every other western man." - Ohio congressman
"it was "dam fulishness" trying to "lick shurmin." He had been getting "nuthin but hell & lots uv it" ever since he saw the "dam yanks," and he was "tirde uv it." He would head for home now, but his old horse was "plaid out." If the "dam yankees" had not got there yet, it would be a "dam wunder." They were thicker than "lise on a hen and a dam site ornerier." - Letter picked up from a dead Confederate soldier in North Carolina
"In the death of President Lincoln we feel the pressure of a heavy national calamity; but the great and irrevocable decree of the loyal States that the Union must and shall be preserved will lose nothing of its force, but will be immensely if not terribly strengthened. In striking Abraham Lincoln and his kindly disposed Secretary of State the assassins struck at the best friends in the government to the prostrate rebels of the South." - New York Herald, April 1865
THE ORDEAL OF RECONSTRUCTION
"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." - Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 1865
"I felt like a bird out of a cage. Amen. Amen. Amen. I could hardly ask to feel any better than I did that day... The week passed off in a blaze of glory." - Houston H. Holloway, emancipated slave recalling his feelings
"Men are taking their wives and children, families which had been for a long time broken up are united and oh! such happiness. I am glad I am here." - Union officer, writing home
"I thought I must do something, not having money at my command, what could I do but give myself to the work... I would go to them, and give them my life if necessary." - Female volunteer, going to the South to teach freedmen
"It is not promulgating anything that I have not heretofore said to say that traitors must be made odious, that treason must be made odious, that traitors must be punished and impoverished. They must not only be punished, but their social power must be destroyed. If not, they will still maintain an ascendancy, and may again become numerous and powerful; for, in the words of a former Senator of the United States, 'When traitors become numerous enough, treason becomes respectable.'" - President Andrew Johnson, April 1865
"The blacks eat, sleep, move, live, only by the tolerance of the whites, who hate them. The blacks own absolutely nothing but their bodies; their former masters own everything, and will sell them nothing. If a black man draws even a bucket of water from a well, he must first get the permission of a white man, his enemy... If he asks for work to earn his living, he must ask it of a white man; and the whites are determined to give him no work, except on such terms as will make him a serf and impair his liberty." - Congressman quoting a Georgian, 1866
"I am for Negro suffrage in every rebel state. If it be just, it should not be denied; if it be necessary, it should be adopted; if it be a punishment to traitors, they deserve it." - Thaddeus Stevens, congressional speech, January 1867
"We claim exactly the same rights, privileges and immunities as are enjoyed by white men - we ask nothing more and will be content with nothing less... The law no longer knows white nor black, but simply men, and consequently we are entitled to ride in public conveyances, hold office, sit on juries and do everything else which we have in the past been prevented from doing solely on the ground of color." - Freed people's declaration of rights in Alabama, at the state constitutional convention
"Look at this, all of you. And hear me swear that I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work for or demand the ballot for the negro and not the woman." - Susan B. Anthony, outraged over the exclusion of women in the Fourteenth Amendment
"We believe you are not familiar with the description of the Ku Klux Klans riding nightly over the country, going from county to county, and in the county towns, spreading terror wherever they go by robbing, whipping, ravishing, and killing our people without provocation, compelling colored people to break the ice and bathe in the chilly waters of the Kentucky River. The [state] legislature has adjourned. They refused to enact any laws to suppress Ku-Klux disorder. We regard them [the Ku-Kluxers] as now being licensed to continue their dark and bloody deeds under cover of dark night. They refuse to allow us to testify in the state courts where a white man is concerned. We find their deeds are perpetrated only upon colored men and white Republicans. We also find that for our services to the government and our race we have become the special object of hatred and persecution at the hands of the Democratic Party. Our people are driven from their homes in great numbers, having no redress only [except] the United States court, which is in many cases unable to reach them." - Kentucky blacks appeal to Congress, 1871
"It is extraordinary that a race such as yours, professing gallantry, chivalry, education, and superiority, living in a land where ringing chimes call child and sire to the Gospel of God - that with all these advantages on your side, you can make war upon the poor defenseless black man." - Black leader, 1868
"Though slavery was abolished, the wrongs of my people were not ended. Though they were not slaves, they were not yet quite free. No man can be truly free whose liberty is dependent upon the thought, feeling, and action of others, and who has himself no means in his own hands for guarding, protecting, defending, and maintaining that liberty. Yet the Negro after his emancipation was precisely in this state of destitution... He was free from the individual master, but the slave of society. He had neither money, property, nor friends. He was free from the old plantation, but he had nothing but the dusty road under his feet. He was free from the old quarter that once gave him shelter, but a slave to the rains of summer and the frosts of winter. He was, in a word, literally turned loose, naked, hungry, and destitute, to the open sky." - Frederick Douglass, 1882