Isaac N. Arnold

“ 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. Much yet remains to be done to secure this. Many a battle on the field has yet to be fought and won against the mighty power which fights for slavery, the barbarous system of the past. ”

“ No superficial observer even of our history, North or South, or of any party, can doubt that slavery lies at the bottom of our present troubles. Our fathers who made the Constitution regarded it as an evil, and looked forward to its early extinction. They felt the inconsistency of their position, while proclaiming the equal rights of all to life, liberty, and happiness, they denied liberty, happiness, and life itself to a whole race, except in subordination to them. ”

“ Controlling absolutely the policy of the South, swaying the policy of the nation, impressing itself upon the legislation, the sentiments, and opinions of the North, slavery moved on to assured dominion. Under its aggressive advances, emancipation societies, organized by the men of the revolutionary era in the first bright ardor of secured liberty, one by one disappeared, presses and churches forgot to remember those in bonds as bound with them, and recreant sons disowned the sentiments, opinions, and principles of a glorious ancestry. ”

“ Our aim is national unity without slavery. Not 'the Union as it was, and the Constitution as it is,' but a nation without slavery, the Constitution the Magna Charta which shall secure liberty to all... The wandering stars must be brought back with their lustre brightened by the ordeal through which they have passed... We can have no national harmony and union without freedom. ”

“ Live a century, nay a thousand years, and no such opportunity to do a great deed for humanity, for liberty, for peace and for your country, will ever again present itself. Pass this joint resolution, and you will win a victory over wrong and injustice, lasting as eternity. The whole world will rise up to do you honor. Every lover of liberty in Germany, France, Italy, Great Britain, the world, will rise up and call you blessed. The gallant soldiers in the field who are giving their lives for liberty and union, will call down upon you the blessings of heaven. ”

“ Why seek to prolong the life, to restore to vigor, the institution of slavery, now needing but this last act to doom it to everlasting death and damnation? Gentlemen may flatter themselves with the hope of a restoration of the slave power in this country. ”

“ But if the grand idea can be realized of a free, homogeneous people, united in a great continental republic based on liberty for all, and retaining the great principles of Magna Charta, we shall see realized the noblest structure of government and national polity ever organized on earth... It is the duty of the Executive, by the sword, and by war, to destroy all armed opposition. ”

“ They looked forward to the not distant nor, as they supposed, uncertain period, when slavery should be abolished, and the government become in fact what they made it in name, one securing the blessings of liberty to all. The history of the last seventy years has proved that the founders of the republic were mistaken in their expectations; and slavery, so far from gradually disappearing as they had anticipated, had so strengthened itself, that in 1860, its advocates demanded the control of the nation in its interests, failing in which, they attempted its overthrow. ”

“ All this may be done under the rules of war, and in the exercise of the powers vested in the Executive of carrying the war against public enemies and traitors... [16] Slavery is the soul, body, and spirit of the rebellion. It is slavery which marshals yonder rebel hosts which confront the armies of Grant and Sherman...
"In view of all the long catalogue of wrongs which slavery has inflicted upon the country, I demand to-day of the Congress of the United States, the death of African slavery. We can have no permanent peace while slavery lives. ”

“ What are the thunders of this war but the voice of God calling upon the nation to return from the evil paths, made rough by errors and misfortunes, blunders and crimes, made slippery by the warm, smoking blood of our brothers and friends, to the grand highway of prosperity, happiness, glory, and peace in which He planted the feet of the fathers. ”

“ Many a battle has yet to be won in the higher sphere of moral conflict. While our gallant soldiers are subduing the rebels in the field, let us second their efforts by sweeping from the statute book every stay, and prop, and shield, of human slavery--the scourge of our country--and let us crown all by incorporating into our organic law, the law of universal liberty." [17]
Randall, of Pennsylvania, a leading democrat from that state, opposed the resolution. He said: "Let the Constitution alone. It is good enough. ”

“ So early as January, 1837, when he was a very obscure man, in his lecture to the young men's association at Springfield, on "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions," he spoke of the glory and distinction to be gained by the "emancipation of slaves." "Many great and good men may be found," he said, "whose ambition would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or presidential chair, but such belong not to the family of the lion or the tribe of the eagle." ”

“ The states not embraced in this proclamation had emancipated their slaves, so that slavery existed only within the rebel lines, and only on territory over which the rebels had military control. The abolition of slavery in the republic so far as it could be done by Congress and the Commander in Chief was an accomplished fact. It existed within the rebel lines alone, and there the slaves were held by force. Lincoln was by nature a conservative, and he had always wished to emancipate the negroes, but he desired to accomplish it by gradual and compensated emancipation. ”

“ That mighty horde, which from time to time have gone from the Atlantic imbued with the principles of human freedom which animated their fathers in running the perils of the mighty deep, and seeking liberty here, are now there, and, as they have said, they will continue to say until time shall be no more: 'We mean that the government in future shall be as in the past, an example of human freedom for the light and example of the world, and illustrating in the blessings and happiness it confers, the truth of the principles incorporated into the Declaration of Independence ”

“ I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle, the nation's condition is not what either party or any man devised or expected. God alone can claim it. ”

“ This was to introduce into the Constitution itself a provision to abolish slavery in the United States, and prohibit its existence in every part thereof forever. To accomplish this required the adoption, by a two-thirds vote of each House of Congress, of a joint resolution to be submitted to, and ratified by three-fourths of the states. To use the homely but expressive phrase of Mr. Lincoln, "this would finish the job," and to this he now devoted his constant efforts. "We cannot," says he, "escape history. We will be remembered in spite of ourselves... ”

“ Why is it that the young men of America, in the pride and bloom of early manhood, are summoned from homes, from the mothers who bore them, from the wives and sisters who love them, to the fields of bloody strife?... ”

“ Seizing on the needed acquisitions of Louisiana and of Florida, to extend its boundaries, consolidate its power, and enlarge its sway, slavery crossed the Mississippi, and there established its barbarous dominion against the too feeble resistance of a not yet conquered people. ”

“ If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills that we of the North, as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new causes to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God. ”

“ I believe that it is the rightful exercise of a belligerent power to emancipate the slaves of the enemy, if we can get possession of them, just as it is the rightful exercise of a belligerent right to take any other property belonging to the enemy, which may be taken under the civilized rules of modern warfare, or as it is a belligerent right to capture any other person of the enemy. ”

“ No one will ever dispute that Senator Trumbull is entitled to the honor of framing, reporting, and carrying through the Senate, the thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, a measure as much more important when compared with the Ordinance, as the whole country is more important than the Northwest territory. ”

“ A Kentuckian by birth, and representing a district very hostile to abolition, he introduced into Congress, in 1849, a bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. In June, 1858, he made the speech in which he said: "A house divided against itself cannot stand." ”

“ This attempt brought into hostile collision the slaveholding aristocracy, who made the right to live by the toil of others the chief article of their faith, and the free laboring masses of the North, who believed in the right of every man to eat the bread his own hands had earned. ”

“ More than a year of trial now shows no loss by it in our foreign relations, none in our white military force, no loss by it anyhow or anywhere. On the contrary, it shows a gain of quite an hundred and thirty thousand soldiers, seamen, and laborers. These are palpable facts, about which, as facts, there can be no caviling. We have the men ”