Various

“ From the tales of distress, from the bewildering, sorrowful negro piety, from the jargon and rags and tears of poor childish contrabands, as simply and sadly set forth by Mrs. French, making every allowance, and penetrating to the depth of the dark problem, we still realize one tremendous truth—that Slavery, as a principle of government, is a lie, and that from a politico-economical point of view it has been a failure. It is a waste of power, and like every waste of human power results in suffering. ”

“ Then all would acknowledge the harmony of labor and capital, their ultimate association in profits for mutual benefit. This social as well as political union, together with the specializing and differentiation of pursuits, and observing duties as rights, would falsify the gloomy dogma of Malthus, founded on the doctrine of the eternal and ever-augmenting antagonism of wages and money, and solve, in favor of humanity, the great problem of the grand and glorious destiny of the masses of mankind. The law of humanity is progress, onward and upward, and will, in time, crush all opposing obstacles. ”

“ How long can slavery endure, and of what value is it in these counties, where every slave brought or sent to the District is free, and where it is already seriously contended that the language of the Constitution, 'slaves in one State, escaping into another,' cannot apply to this District? With the feeling so intensified already by this rebellion against slavery, it cannot long exist in Maryland. By advancing legislation, and public sentiment, the fugitive slave law is becoming inoperative, and slaves in Maryland are now held by a most precarious tenure. ”

“ And shall labor and education, literature and science, religion and the press, sustain an institution which is their deadly foe?
But slavery is the enemy of free government. It has commenced and now wages an unholy war against this Union, and thus assails the liberty of our country and of mankind. It has framed a government based on the eternity of chattel slavery, and demands in its name to rule the larger portion of the Union. It seeks to sever the lakes from the gulf, and the mighty Mississippi and its vast arterial tributary system. ”

“ And it is worse than death—aye, worse than a hundred thousand deaths—when a people has gravitated down into the creed that the wealth of nations consists not in generous hearts, in national virtues, and primitive simplicity, and heroic endurance, and preference of duty to life—not in MEN, but in silk and cotton, and something they call 'capital.' Peace is blessed—peace arising out of charity. ”

“ That Slavery is the natural and fit condition of negroes everywhere and at all times—that the abolition of Southern Slavery would be a great calamity to the white laborers of the North—such is the political philosophy assiduously dispensed and greedily imbibed in the grogshops and 'back slums' of every Northern city, and which politicians and journalists pretending to sense and decency do not hesitate for their party's and their ambition's sake to indorse and disseminate. ”

“ Let Slavery fall, and a million of bayonets could not keep the North and South disunited even twenty years. Apart from Slavery and its fancied necessities, there is not a Disunionist between New Brunswick and Mexico, Canada and Cuba. The Union is the darling of our affections, the seal of our security, the palladium of our strength. No American ever tolerated the idea of disunion except as he intensely loved or hated Slavery, and regarded the Union as an obstacle to the realization of his wishes respecting it. ”

“ States have been temporarily but rudely torn from their long and peaceful connections with sister States, and great rents in the political soil, filled with the bodies of slaughtered citizens, mark the lines of separation. Vast armies have been assembled and organized, and have met each other in the shock of battle, on fields made slippery with fraternal blood, where tens of thousands have fallen to rise no more—swept down by the relentless storm of iron hail with which brother has greeted brother in this most unholy war. ”

“ In the Senate, in the House of Representatives, in the great majority of States, in all the Territories, and, finally, in the very citadel of their former power, the presidential mansion, their almost immemorial superiority had been utterly overthrown. The Government was about to assume its true character, as the home of liberty and the veritable asylum of humanity. Slavery, fallen into the minority, was about to experience an accelerated decline and eventually to disappear. To resist this doom, was to fight against the Constitution and against destiny. ”

“ The minority was arrayed not merely against the majority, but also against the necessary results of our institutions and against the decrees of nature: that is to say, against the law of man, and against the law of God. The majority was expected to give way, and to permit the engine of national progress to be reversed, our eighty years of glorious history to be undone, and humanity itself to be turned back upon the dreary path of its earliest and saddest struggles. ”

“ Occasionally we forded a small stream, where, high up on the bank, was a rude ferry, which served in the rainy season as a miserable substitute for a bridge; and once in a while, far back from the road, we caught sight of an old country-seat, whose dingy, unpainted walls, broken down fences, and dilapidated surroundings reminded one that shiftless working men, and careless, reckless proprietors, are the natural products of slavery. Thus we rode on for several hours, till, turning a slight bend in the road, we suddenly halted before the gateway of my friend's plantation. ”

“ The nation instinctively feels that its unity is its salvation—that disunion will be destructive of all its long-cherished and glorious hopes. Its permanent peace, its prosperity and progress, its greatness, its honor, and its influence among civilized nations—all depend on its unity. These, which are the glory of our country to every patriotic heart, were the stumbling blocks to the conspirators. Slavery was ambitious and discontented with its appointed lot ”

“ You too are of the Northmen, the children of Odin and of Freyr, the inexhaustible race of warriors and of workmen—the free laborers who forged the swords they wielded against the dark and wily fiend who stole his weapons from the foe ere the war began. And the Horse so easily ruled—the all-powerful Will—stands bridled beneath the eternal Ash Tree of Life; and while he lives and the tree grows, hope need not perish, and freedom cannot die. ”

“ Music would chant its praise in every clime, and all peoples would swell the chorus. The painter would give it immortality, and the sculptor monuments more enduring than the pyramids, statues more godlike and sublime than ever crowned Grecian Parthenon, or adorned with Parian marble the temples of Augustan Rome. The press would glow with enthusiasm, and the procession of nations march in the grand ovation, not to national airs, or under national banners, but under the world's new flag, and to the music of the world's new anthem of universal freedom and regenerated man. ”

“ It is clear, that if the South retains the institution, it will, before the close of this century, sink into comparative insignificance, and contain less than a sixth in population of the Union. After the calamities which slavery has brought upon the South, the ruin and desolation the rebellion has already accomplished there, who from the North or from Europe would hereafter immigrate to any State retaining the system?—while thousands of the native sons of the South have already fled North or to Europe, and hundreds of thousands will follow. ”

“ Slavery, then, the census proves, is hostile to the progress of wealth and population, to science, literature, and education, to schools, colleges, and universities, to books and libraries, to churches and religion, to the press, and therefore to free government; hostile to the poor, keeping them in want and ignorance; hostile to labor, reducing it to servitude, and decreasing two thirds the value of its products ”

“ In the first place, because the prevalence of a higher military tone and the maintenance of a more effective military force are indispensable for the national security and defence. Until the millennium comes we shall always be liable to foreign invasions or internal rebellion. In either case there is nothing before us but to fight, and nothing but successful fighting can save us. But how can we fight successfully if we have only raw recruits or an ill-trained militia, and officers better skilled to handle the yard stick than the sword, to marshal a column of figures than a body of men? ”

“ The strength of man may not have been much increased, but his power is augmented a thousand-fold. His life may not have been materially lengthened, but, in the march of knowledge, a year now is as a century, compared with man's progress in the darkness of the middle ages. The eternal advance toward omniscience goes on, but is like that of the infinite approach of the asymptote, which never reaches the hyperbolic curve. The onward march of science is in a geometrical ratio, so that in time, the intellectual progress of a day in the future, must exceed that of a century in the past. ”

“ It was a clear, cold, sunshiny day—one of those days so peculiar to the Southern climate, when the blood hounds through every vein as if thrilled by electricity, and a man of lively temperament can scarcely restrain his legs from dancing a 'breakdown.' We rode rapidly on through a timbered country, where the tall trees grew up close by the roadside, locking their huge arms high in the air, and the long, graceful, black moss hung like mourning drapery from their great branches. ”

“ It was such religion, such absolute, undoubting slavery to faith, which wore away millions on millions of lives in carrying out in dim, old, barbarous days the rock sculptures of the temples of Ellora—which dug Sibyls' grots, and piled together Cyclopean walls, and pierced Cimmerian caves of awful depth and solid gloom, in the fair isles of the Mediterranean; and which, it may have been at the same time, it may have been at a later day, massed together the miracles of Stonehenge, the enormous dragon rows of Brittany, and the almost indentically similar serpent mounds of our own West. ”

“ In spite of the universal prevalence of slavery at first, free labor pushed itself forward and won its way, until, in more than half the original States, slave labor had receded before it and disappeared forever. The wisdom of those great fundamental provisions of our Constitution has been fully vindicated by the results of eighty years' experience. They have worked smoothly and progressively, in perfect conformity with that universal social law which, has made slavery a temporary and transitional institution wherever it has existed among civilized nations. ”

“ In Switzerland the motto is: 'No regular army, but every citizen, a soldier.' This motto lies at the basis of their system. But then the system makes every citizen really a soldier. It is a system that has shown itself adequate and admirably adapted for the defence of the country against foreign foes and internal rebellion. Not their mountains merely, but their hearts and arms—and a knowledge on the part of their neighbors what those hearts and arms were capable of—have preserved their independence. ”

“ Wordsworth's sonnet, and feeling that 'for a few white-robed scholars only,' it was not built; but as an utterance of man's spirit, more fervent than he could express in the articulate speech of man. The soul of the individual, nurtured by any semblance of culture, who can stand unmoved beneath that fretted roof, must be cold as the frozen zone. It remains with me, like Niagara.
As a college, Trinity is the most interesting. ”

“ No one can write a book, however unpretentious, on the subject of slavery, and fill it with plain facts, without making a startling volume. Take the subject up on the grounds of the barest humanity, even as one would the welfare of animals; laying aside all 'Abolition' or anti-abolition views whatever, and we find a tremendous abyss of abuses, inexcusable even according to the principles of the most rabid pro-slavery disciple. ”

“ Dreading nothing from foreign nations on this side of the ocean, counting on the obvious policy of the nations of the old world to keep the peace with us, and never dreaming of such a rebellion as has broken out in our midst—we have not only neglected but discountenanced the cultivation of the military spirit. ”

“ It grew out of the antecedents of existing society; and the present generation is not wholly responsible for it. The misfortunes of our fathers, their omissions and errors as well as ours, have left this fatal legacy to descend into our hands. We may not have dealt with it wisely, but assuredly the framers of the Constitution did not intend slavery to be perpetual, nor did they provide for it the power to overthrow the Government. ”

“ Avoiding the last dread scene of the great Egyptian drama, may we have, not the Jewish Passover, but the grand American jubilee, when we may hail the South redeemed from the curse of slavery, and forever united with the North, as the one blessed home of universal freedom. ”

“ Maryland, the border States, and the South would then indeed commence a new career of progress, by removing slavery and negroism; and their augmented wealth, and that of the whole country, would soon return to the Government, in increased revenue, a sum far exceeding the cost of gradual emancipation and colonization. Indeed, if, as a mere financial question, I was devising the most effective plan for liquidating the national debt and reducing our taxes, it would be thus vastly to augment our wealth and population by adopting this system. ”

“ Dear reader, the battle between Freyr and Surtur is ever raging—in your heart as in all the world. But whenever a great strife for freedom and truth and man's rights is battled out, then the branch has grown, and the horse of the Great King is saddled beneath the Ash, and his rule draws nearer than ever. Even as I write the battle rages, as it never raged before on earth, between the infernal Loki and Surtur and the glorious Asen—the great children of light and of truth. ”

“ If we consent to divide our country, the victorious Rebels will very fairly say, 'Give us our share of the Federal Territories.' In other words, 'Surrender to Slavery, through Disunion, the very thing which you refused to concede to it to prevent Disunion.' And that demand, if we concede the right and the fact of Secession, can with difficulty be resisted. Yet its concession involves the moral certainty that Mexico and Cuba will in time be overrun, conquered, absorbed, and devoted to Slavery, by the martial, aggressive, ambitious despotism to 'which we shall have succumbed. ”