Various

“ Is it possible to imagine that after two or three years of fighting and misery, conquerors and conquered can be made to live harmoniously together? Can a country two or three times the size of France be subjugated? Would there not always be bloodshed between the parties? Separation is perhaps a misfortune, but now it is an irreparable one. Let us grant that the North has law, the letter and spirit of the Constitution on her side; there always remains an indisputable point—the South wishes to govern itself. You have no right to crush a people that defends itself so valiantly. ”

“ The Union has driven out or indemnified the Indians. The Union has built fortifications, constructed shipyards, light-houses, and harbors. It is the Union that has made all this wilderness valuable and rendered its settlement possible. It is the men of the North as well as those of the South who have cleared and planted these lands, and transformed them from barren solitudes to a flourishing condition. Show us, if you can, in old Europe, where unity is entirely the result of conquest, a title to property so sacred, a country which is more the common work of one people! ”

“ Those of the North and Northwest, who should remain and carry their States into the Southern confederacy, would be regarded in the South with loathing and contempt; the whole civilized world would consider their degradation as complete and eternal. They would soon loathe themselves, and feel that it was not only the negroes who were enslaved, but that they had put fetters upon their own limbs, and rendered themselves worthy to be worked as slaves on the plantations of Southern masters. I do not believe any of the Free States of the North and Northwest can thus be disgraced and humiliated. ”

“ Turkey was in the fulness of her power when Russia had not yet a name. The spirit of the Ottomans was remarkably exclusive. They regarded themselves as a separate and distinct people; they were conquerors, and as such thought themselves a superior race—men who were to teach and not to learn. In their intercourse with other nations, they borrowed nothing, and out of themselves looked for nothing. Their feeling of national glory was not extinguished by national degradation, but cherished through ages of slavery and shame. But the world is a world of progress. ”

“ In so severe a crisis, and in the midst of such unmerited sufferings, it is but natural that public opinion should become restless in Europe, and condemn the ambition of those who prolong a fratricidal war. Peace in America, peace is a necessity at any price, is the cry of thousands of men among us who are suffering from hunger, innocent victims of the passions and madness which steep the United States in blood. ”

“ I do not understand why there are persons in Europe who believe themselves liberal when they reproach the North for its generous resistance by advising her disgracefully to relinquish her rights. War is certainly a frightful evil, but from war a durable peace may issue, the South may tire of a struggle which exhausts its strength, the old Union may again arise in its glory, and the future may be saved. What but endless war and numberless miseries can result from a separation? ”

“ There is reason to apprehend that the men who are really true to the Union do not appreciate the extent to which treason is working among us. Worse than all, there are many, who, while believing themselves true to the good cause, are, by constant grumbling and complaint, aiding the very worst form of disunion. Could we prevail with one prayer upon the heart of every Federal freeman, it would be to implore him in this hour of trial not to withold his warmest support from the Administration and to fall into the common weakness of fault-finding and despairing. ”

“ And we believe that this class of men are firmly attached to the great cause of progressive freedom as represented by the Federal States and by the present Administration. Every day sees the truth spreading in France, and with its extension goes a deeply seated interest in the abolition of slavery. France—unlike England—feels shame at the idea of being chronicled in history as aiding oppression. The Frenchman is not so enormously conceited, so pitiably vain as to believe, like the Briton, that a crime is a virtue when for his own peculiar interest. ”

“ Up to this time I have reasoned in the supposition that the South would remain an independent power. But unless the West joins the confederates, and the Union reestablishes itself against New England, this independence is a chimera: it might last for some time; but in ten or twenty years, when the free population of the West would have doubled or trebled itself, how would the South, necessarily much enfeebled by slave culture, compare with a people, thirty millions in number, enclosing it on two sides? ”

“ If the south of France should revolt to-morrow and demand a separation; if Alsace and Lorraine should wish to withdraw, what would be, I will not say our right only, but our duty? Would we count voices to see if a third or a half of the French had a right to destroy our nationality, to annihilate France, to break up the glorious heritage our sires bought for us with their blood? No! we would shoulder our muskets and march. Woe to the man who does not feel his country to be sacred, and that it is a noble act to defend it, even at the price of extreme misery and every danger! ”

“ All His children, black and white,
Will meet in heaven if pure and true, clad in the eternal Light.
I die—God bless you, mistress!'... Sigh, and gasp—then all is o'er!
And the lady kneels beside a corpse upon the cabin floor.
Her thoughts are busy with the past, with love in falsehood spoken,
While her dusky sister's faithful heart had in silent anguish broken.
She takes the cold hand in her own: 'Poor Amy, can it be
That thou wert of a race accursed, unworthy to be free?
Man's falsehood! God! Thy right hand rests upon the dusky brow ”

“ The fragments of the old Union will have to be always ready to defend themselves against their rivals. Questions of customs and of frontiers; rivalries, jealousies, in fact all the scourges of old Europe will overwhelm America at once and together; she will have to establish custom houses over an extent of five hundred leagues; to build and arm forts on this immense frontier, to keep on foot large standing armies, to maintain a naval force; in other words, she will have to renounce her old Constitution, to weaken her municipal independence by the centralization of power. ”

“ As the existence of slavery in any State is a great evil and reproach, and a source of much weakness to the whole country, so should the nation compensate for any loss that may be occasioned by the abandonment of the system in any loyal State. Not only is this just, but the faith of the nation is solemnly pledged by resolutions adopted by Congress at its last session to carry this policy into full effect with the consent of any State. Twenty millions of dollars to secure such a result should be regarded as of little moment. Gladly would the nation pay a much larger sum for a single victory. ”

“ We shall have cut the gordian knot of slavery, and the death agonies of the hydra would soon be visible. The importance of the result would be felt in the North also, and the wretched traitors there, far more guilty even than those of the South, will shrink from their atrocious conspiracy to dissolve this Union. The dark plot of severing New England from the Republic and of reuniting the rest of the States with the Southern confederacy, will be abandoned. ”

“ Whence comes this prosperity of the Americans? Because they are alone upon an immense territory; they have never been obliged to concentrate their power and enfeeble liberty in order to resist the jealousy and ambition of their neighbors. In the United States there was no standing army, no naval force; the Americans employed the immense sums which we expend to avert or to sustain war, in opening schools, and in giving to all their citizens, poor or rich, that education and that instruction which form the moral greatness and the true riches of the people. ”

“ A nation cannot remain stationary; she must advance or retrograde. Turkey is not what she was, while Russia, with the rest of Christendom, has advanced; her faults grew with her strength, but did not die with her decay. It will not be sufficient for her merely to regain her former power; she must overtake Christendom in the progress made during her decadence. Her spirit of vitality is not yet extinct; it wants guidance and development to strengthen and elevate it. There is still hope of reforming the Turkish empire without that baptism of blood which many have urged and are still urging. ”

“ This delusion has and still maintains the resistance of the South, it prolongs the war, and with it our sufferings. If, as the North had a right to expect, the friends of liberty had, from the first, boldly pronounced against the policy of slavery, if the advocates of peace upon the seas, if the defenders of the rights of neutrals had spoken in favor of the Union and rejected a separation, which could only profit England, it is probable that the South would have been less anxious to start on a journey without visible end. ”

“ For when toward the close, raising his voice until it broke almost in a scream, he exclaimed, 'Let the night which decides the election of Mr. Lincoln be ushered in by the booming of the hostile cannon of the South,' the hall rang again and again with the shouts of his excited hearers. But nemo repente turpissimus semper fuit. These were not the sentiments of all. There was a large class present who did not applaud—but neither did they hiss. They seemed for the time overawed by the energy of the spirit which had suddenly sprung up among them. ”

“ The adoration and prostrations of the Turk afford an imposing sight even to the Christian. 'Praises be to God, for He is great,' resounds at sunrise and at sunset, from ship to ship at sea, from kiosk to minaret on land.
According to the Koran, there is a paradise for all true believers. This paradise, Al Janat, signifies a pleasure garden, from which flows a river, the river of life, whose water is clear as crystal, cold as snow, and sweet as nectar. The believer who takes a draught shall thirst no more. ”

“ To resist successfully, the South would be forced to rely on Europe; it could only live when protected by a great naval power, and England is the only one in a condition to guarantee for it its sovereignty. Here is a new danger for free America and for Europe. The South has no commercial marine, nor with slavery ever will have; England will at once seize the monopoly of cotton, and will furnish capital and vessels to the South. In two words, the triumph of the South is the reinstatement of England on the continent, whence the policy of Louis XVI and Napoleon has driven her ”

“ We must count by hundreds of millions those sums that we have used during the last seventy years in the upholding our liberty in Europe; these hundreds of millions the United States have employed in improvements of every description. Here is the secret of their prodigious fortune; it is their perfect independence which makes their prosperity.
Let us now suppose the separation finally accomplished, and that the new confederation comprises all the Slave States; the North has at once lost both its power and the foundations of that power. ”

“ It was Christmas morning when we rode up the long, winding avenue, and halted before the doorway of 'Silver Lake'—the new name which the Yankee schoolmistress, aping the custom of her Yankee cousins, had bestowed on Preston's plantation. The day was mild and sunshiny, and the whole population of the little patriarchate was gathered on the green in front of the mansion, distributing Christmas presents among the negroes. When we came in sight, from behind the thick cluster of live oaks which bordered the miniature lake, the whole assemblage sent up a glad shout, and hurried up to welcome us. ”

“ Ruined in character in the eyes of all honest men, their names a byword for treason, and in most cases for literal crimes, political outcasts of the stamp who are said to vibrate between the legislature and the penitentiary, these desperadoes are now working with all their might to mass the cowardice of the North into a body powerful enough to do collectively, that for which an individual has in all countries and in all ages been judged worthy the gallows. ”

“ Shall a minority be permitted to destroy the Union, and to imperil those who were its first benefactors, and without whom it would never have existed? If this does not constitute an impious revolt, then any whim that seizes a people is just and right. It is not only political reasons that oppose a separation; geography, the positions of places force the United States to form a single nation. ”

“ Bill, poor Bill, lies far away in the Crimea, with the bullet of a gray-coated Russian in his heart. And Lucy—but it is to her I owe what I am, and what I am about to do.
I loved her—love her still. Will she know what these words mean, when she finds them here? I cannot tell. They are enough for me. Not for you are they written, ball-room lounger, whispering of endless devotion between every qaudrille; not to you, proud beauty, taking and absorbing declarations as you would an ice ”

“ The qualities of a great debater—unshaken presence of mind, tact in adapting himself to his audience, the power of arranging facts in a form at once simple and coherent, and yet most favorable to his own cause, the strange influence by which one mind compels from others the recognition of its supremacy—have long been conceded to the late Senator from Illinois, but never did he exhibit these qualities with greater effect than before the excited populace of Montgomery. ”

“ Davis should stand, was pushed aside, to give place to those unwinking faces which pressed to every loophole of observation. The ladies, who appeared here and there in the crowd, sparkling with jewels, and dressed in the rich robes naturally suited to the occasion, only increased by their presence the rude incongruities of the gathering. Men were surprised at the manifestations on every hand of a vulgarity and coarseness which they had been accustomed to think the natural products and exclusive characteristics of a state of society farther north. ”

“ With Missouri as a Free State by her consent, and her cordial coöperation and sympathy, slavery would soon disappear from the whole region west of the Mississippi, and Louisiana cordially be reunited to the Republic. With such a result, holding New Orleans and the mouth of the Mississippi and all the region west of that great stream, how could Tennessee or Mississippi remain in the Southern confederacy? The truth is, Missouri is the pivot upon which the rebellion turns. Had she gone with the South, and given to its cause a cordial support, it would have been difficult to subdue the rebellion. ”

“ It inspires courage in war, but it also teaches blind resignation to defeat and disgrace: it teaches morality, but sensuality and ferocity are not inconsistent with its doctrines. Eat, drink, smoke—indulge all the passions to-day, for immortality begins to-morrow! No Turk is so high that he has not a master, none so low that he has not a slave; the grand vizier kisses the sultan's foot, the pasha kisses the vizier's, the bey the pasha's, and so on. ”