Ulysses S. Grant

“ Secession was illogical as well as impracticable; it was revolution.
Now, the right of revolution is an inherent one. When people are oppressed by their government, it is a natural right they enjoy to relieve themselves of the oppression, if they are strong enough, either by withdrawal from it, or by overthrowing it and substituting a government more acceptable. But any people or part of a people who resort to this remedy, stake their lives, their property, and every claim for protection given by citizenship—on the issue. Victory, or the conditions imposed by the conqueror—must be the result. ”

“ But admitting that these two classes of citizens are to be benefited by expansion, would it be honest to give it? Would not the general loss be too great to justify such relief? Would it not be just as honest and prudent to authorize each debtor to issue his own legal-tenders to the extent of his liabilities? Than to do this, would it not be safer, for fear of overissues by unscrupulous creditors, to say that all debt obligations are obliterated in the United States, and now we commence anew, each possessing all he has at the time free from incumbrance? ”

“ We are prepared to fight, and the enemy is not. Now is the time for action, while he is yet unprepared. Let the fife sound 'Gray Jackets over the Border,' and let a hundred thousand men, with such arms as they can snatch, get over the border as quickly as they can. Let a division enter every Northern border State, destroy railroad connection to prevent concentration of the enemy, and the desperate strait of these States, the body of Lincoln's country, will compel him to a peace—or compel his successor, should Virginia not suffer him to escape from his doomed capital. ”

“ The young men of the South, fired by the Southern leaders' false appeals, must soon return to reason. The prairie fire is terrible while it sweeps along, but it soon burns out. When the young men face the emblem of their Nation's glory—the flag of the land of their birth—then will come the reaction and their false leaders will be hurled from place and power, and all will again be right. Yea, when it comes to firing on the old, old flag, they will not, cannot, do it! Between the Compromise within their reach, and such Sacrilege as this, they cannot waver long. ”

“ And, after appealing to both Border-State men, and Democrats of the Free States, not to stay the passage of this Resolution which "will strike the Rebellion at the heart," he continued: "Gentlemen may flatter themselves with a restoration of the Slave-power in this Country. 'The Union as it was!' It is a dream, never again to be realized. The America of the past, has gone forever. A new Nation is to be born from the agony through which the People are now passing. This new Nation is to be wholly Free. Liberty, Equality before the Law, is to be the great Corner-stone." ”

“ We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad Land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
Strange, indeed, must have been the thoughts that crowded through the brain and oppressed the heart of Abraham Lincoln that night—his first at the White House! ”

“ Some of our own guns in those batteries are turned on us. The Enemy's Infantry make a rush over the blood-soaked brow of the fatal plateau, pouring into our men a deadly fire, as they advance,—while over to our right and rear, at the same moment, are seen the fresh regiments of Early's Brigade coming out of the woods—deploying rapidly in several lines—with Stuart's handful of Rebel Cavalry, while Beckham's guns, in the same quarter, open an oblique enfilading reverse fire upon us, in a lively manner. ”

“ How does it happen that we have not had unanimity enough to agree on any measure of that kind? Can we account for it to ourselves, gentlemen? We see the danger; we acknowledge our duty, and yet, with all this before us, we are acknowledging before the world that we can do nothing; acknowledging before the world, or appearing to all the world, as men who do nothing! Sir, this will make a strange record in the history of Governments and in the history of the world. Some are for Coercion; yet no army has been raised, no navy has been equipped. ”

“ It was to be a flanking force of the Enemy—a reverse fire—a fire in the rear of the Union Army, by Northern men; a powerful cooperating force—all the more powerful because secret—operating safely because secretly and in silence—and breeding discontent, envy, hatred, and other ill feelings wherever possible, in and out of Army circles, from the highest to the lowest, at all possible times, and on all possible occasions. ”

“ I do not believe that any Compromise embracing the maintenance of the Union is now possible. All that I learn leads to a directly opposite belief. The strength of the Rebellion is its Military, its Army. That Army dominates all the Country, and all the people, within its range. Any offer of terms made by any man or men within that range, in opposition to that Army, is simply nothing for the present: because such man or men have no power whatever to enforce their side of a Compromise, if one were made with them. ”

“ The hardest task in war is to lie in support of some position or battery, under fire without the privilege of returning it; or to guard some train left in the rear, within hearing but out of danger; or to provide for the wounded and dead of some corps which is too busy ahead to care for its own.
To be at the head of a strong column of troops, in the execution of some task that requires brain, is the highest pleasure of war--a grim one and terrible, but which leaves on the mind and memory the strongest mark; to detect the weak point of an enemy's line ”

“ And now, when War has for nearly three years menaced the life of the Nation, bathed the Land in blood, and filled two hundred thousand graves with our slain sons, these men of the Loyal States still cling to the falling fortunes of the relentless and unappeasable Enemy of their Country and its democratic institutions; they mourn, and will not be comforted, over the expiring System, in the Border Slave-States; and, in tones of indignation or of anguish, they utter lamentations over the Proclamation of Emancipation, and the policy that is bringing Rebel States back again radiant with Freedom. ”

“ If any man, North or South, withholds his share of taxes, or his physical assistance in this, the crisis of our history, he should be deprived of all voice in the future elections of this country, and might be banished, or reduced to the condition of a mere denizen of the land.
War is upon us, none can deny it. It is not the choice of the Government of the United States, but of a faction; the Government was forced to accept the issue, or to submit to a degradation fatal and disgraceful to all the inhabitants. In accepting war, it should be "pure and simple" as applied to the belligerents. ”

“ It is a rather rough experience that now befalls the Grand Army of the Union. All unused, as we have seen, to the fatigues and other hardships of the march, the raw levies, of which it almost wholly consists, which started bright and fresh, strong and hopeful, full of the buoyant ardor of enthusiastic patriotism, on that hot July afternoon, only some thirty hours back, are now dust-begrimed, footsore, broken down, exhausted by the scorching sun, hungry, and without food,—for they have wasted the rations with which they started, and the supply-trains have not yet arrived. ”

“ Lincoln will have no check. He can appoint his Cabinet, and have it confirmed. The Congress will then be Republican, and he will be able to pass such laws as he may suggest. The Supreme Court will be powerless to protect us. We implore you to stand by us, and by our friends in the Free States; and let us all, the bold, the true, and just men in the Free and Slave States, with a united front, stand by each other, by our principles, by our rights, our equality, our honor, and by the Union under the Constitution. ”

“ Whenever you shall have conquered all resistance to the Union, if I shall urge you to continue fighting, it will be an apt time then for you to declare you will not fight to Free Negroes. I thought that in your struggle for the Union, to whatever extent the Negroes should cease helping the Enemy, to that extent it weakened the Enemy in his resistance to you. Do you think differently? I thought whatever Negroes can be got to do as soldiers, leaves just so much less for White soldiers to do in saving the Union. Does it appear otherwise to you? But Negroes, like other people, act upon motives. ”

“ But now, when hundreds of thousands of brave souls have gone up to God under the shadow of the Flag, and when thousands more, maimed and shattered in the Contest, are sadly awaiting the deliverance of death; now, when three years of terrific warfare have raged over us, when our Armies have pushed the Rebellion back over mountains and rivers and crowded it back into narrow limits, until a wall of fire girds it; now, when the uplifted hand of a majestic People is about to let fall the lightning of its conquering power upon the Rebellion ”

“ And now, while Quinby's Regiment, on another ridge, more to the left, is also again engaging the Enemy, the 69th New York, led by the fearless Corcoran, dashes forward, up the Henry House hill, over the forbidding brow, and beyond. As the brave Irishmen reach the abandoned batteries, the hoarse roar of cannon, the sharp rattle of musketry-volleys, the scream of shot and shell, and the whistling of bullets, is at once deafening and appalling, while the air seems filled with the iron and leaden sleet which sweeps across the scorched and blasted plateau of the Henry House. ”

“ Plainly, the central idea of Secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority, held in restraint by Constitutional checks and limitations and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a Free People. Whoever rejects it, does, of necessity, fly to anarchy, or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left. ”

“ Our people, divided among themselves, maddened by the struggle, and blinded by the smoke of battle, invited upon our soil contending armies—the one to destroy the Government, the other to maintain it. The consequence to us is plain. The shock of the contest upturns Society and desolates the Land. We have made sacrifices, but at last they were only the sacrifices demanded by duty, and unless we are willing to make others, indeed any that the good of the Country, involved in the overthrow of Treason, may expect at our hands, our title to patriotism is not complete. ”

“ This Union can only be preserved by maintaining the fraternal feeling between the North and the South, the East and the West. If that good feeling can be preserved, the Union will be as perpetual as the fame of its great founders. It can be maintained by preserving the sovereignty of the States, the right of each State and each Territory to settle its domestic concerns for itself, and the duty of each to refrain from interfering with the other in any of its local or domestic institutions. ”

“ Are we to predict evil, and retire from what we predict? Is it not the manly part to go on as we have begun, to raise money, and levy Armies, to organize them, to prepare to advance; when we do advance, to regulate that advance by all the laws and regulations that civilization and humanity will allow in time of battle? Can we do anything more? To talk to us about stopping, is idle; we will never stop. Will the Senator yield to Rebellion? Will he shrink from armed Insurrection? Will his State justify it? Will its better public opinion allow it? Shall we send a flag of Truce? ”

“ You cannot use a blockade against your own people. An embargo even, you cannot use. That is a remedy against a Foreign Nation with whom you expect to be at War. You must treat us as in the Union, or out of it. We have gone out. We are willing to live at peace with you; but, as sure as fate, whenever any flag comes into one of our ports, that has thirty-three stars upon it, that flag will be fired at. Displaying a flag with stars which we have plucked from that bright galaxy, is an insult to the State within whose waters that flag is displayed. ”

“ Your whole administration gives the highest assurance that you are moved, not so much from a desire to see all men everywhere made free, as from a higher desire to preserve free institutions for the benefit of men already free; not to make Slaves, Freemen, but to prevent Freemen from being made Slaves; not to destroy an Institution, which a portion of us only consider bad, but to save institutions which we all alike consider good. I am satisfied you would not ask from any of your fellow-citizens a sacrifice not, in your judgment, imperatively required by the safety of the Country. ”

“ My aim then was, to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. "Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." I did not want them to cast in our teeth what General Hood had once done in Atlanta, that we had to call on their slaves to help us to subdue them. But, as regards kindness to the race, encouraging them to patience and forbearance, procuring them food and clothing, and providing them with land whereon to labor, I assert that no army ever did more for that race than the one I commanded in Savannah. ”