Various

“ We are engaged in a life-and-death struggle for our national existence—for the preservation of the Union, for these are synonymous. To succeed, we need an animating spirit that shall carry us through all obstacles; that shall smile at repeated defeat; that shall ever buoy us up with strong hope and confidence in the ultimate success of our efforts. Such a spirit cannot flow from a simple love of opposition, excited by the wicked bravado of our opponents; nor from a desire to prove ourselves the stronger: neither can it flow from the mere wish to destroy slavery. ”

“ That dread of negro equality which is perpetually haunting the imaginations of the American people, is, therefore, wholly without foundation in any reality. It is a delusion, which has already driven us, in a sort of madness, far on the road to ruin. It is, I fear, a judicial blindness, which the all-wise and righteous Ruler of the universe has sent upon us for the punishment of our sins. The negro does not aspire to political or social equality with the white man. He has evidently no such destiny, no such hope, no such possibility. He is weak, and constantly becoming weaker ”

“ If we mean, as practical men and statesmen, to seek our country's salvation by means of emancipation, we must, in some way, relieve the national mind from the pressure of this objection. Till we do so, the masses of the people will say to us: 'We do not approve of slavery; we abhor it; but if we are to have the negro among us, we believe in keeping him in slavery.' All of us, who are in the habit of talking with the people on this subject, know that almost in these very words we are met at every street corner. ”

“ Do you tell me that we cannot conquer so united, so brave, and so desperate a people? I answer, WE MUST. In the whole wide world of human destiny there is no other road left open for us; the path to defeat is blocked by our own dead bodies. Unless the people of the North arouse and take hold of the work with an energy, an earnestness of purpose, to which the past bears no parallel, too late will they repent the folly of their own supineness, their own blindness. ”

“ A new sense of their value springs up, and a severe contest for their preservation stamps their true worth indelibly on the heart. Threaten to cut off the air a man breathes, the food and drink that sustains him, and you rouse all his energies into new life; and he now prizes these common but unthought-of blessings as he never did before. And so it will be one effect of this contest, to arouse us as a nation to see clearly our vantage ground in the world's progress, and to stir us up as individuals, to lead higher and truer lives, each for his own and for his country's sake. ”

“ Experience has shown that he was right, and shown us, too, that if, in this our day, a second compromise be adopted, and a peace patched up upon a basis ignoring the true cause of dispute, or of oblivion to the past, or, worst of all, of yielding, on our part, one jot or tittle to the demands of our antagonists, as sure as there is a God in heaven—as sure as that retribution follows the sinner, the war will have to be fought over again, more savage, more bloody, and more desolating than ever, by our posterity, if not even in our own time. ”

“ Not to the institution of slavery, for however great a curse it maybe to our people and soil, however brutalizing in its tendencies, however unjust to the negro race, and opposed to all the principles of enlightenment and human progress—of whatever crimes it may have been guilty, this last and greatest of crimes cannot be laid at its door: for the bitterness of feeling between North and South existed long before the agitation of slavery was dreamed of, and the latter has only been seized upon as the ready means of accomplishing a greater design. ”

“ Under no government that the world has ever known could the South have enjoyed so much freedom, such unexampled prosperity, such a rapid growth in wealth and power, in a word, so much real happiness—which is the sum of all earthly gifts—as under this which they are so earnestly endeavoring to tear down and blot from the face of the earth. Men's minds do not eagerly grasp and sternly pursue an abstract idea divorced from every consideration of self-interest, such as this would be. ”

“ The material support must not be given without the moral—that is one form of slavery.
But of these two elements of national strength, a despotism, a government of force, possesses and commands only the physical or material, viz., military service and revenue. It controls only the body of the national powers. Not resting upon the broad basis of the free choice and consent of the people, it is like a master who can force the body of another to do his bidding, while the spirit is in concealed rebellion. ”

“ The Indian, as an Indian, has no foothold in the State; and the negro, even in the guise of born and skilled laborer in the production of the crops which form the wealth of the country, and of the new ones which are to be transplanted hither in consequence of the war, is forbidden, under heavy penalties, to set foot within her boundaries—the threat of slavery, like a flaming sword, guarding the entrance of this paradise of the laborer. ”

“ Such artists love not the mighty arches of gothic architecture, in whose vast curves and dim recesses lurks the mystic idea of the infinite; they take no interest in the ascetic faces which the old masters loved to picture, worn into deep furrows of care by penitence and holy sorrow, though lighted with the triple ray of Faith, Hope, and Love. They have no sympathies with the saints and heroes who have been great through self-abnegation, for such lives are a constant reproach to their own sybaritical tendencies. Constantly mistaking the effervescence of passion for the fire of genius ”

“ Asking no favors of the world, they will pursue the even tenor of their way, undisturbed by the mutterings and growlings of their impotent foes, while their little republic, like a city set upon a hill, continues to reflect from her glittering pinnacles the sunlight of heaven to all quarters of the earth. The petty vengeance which the disunionists of to-day are attempting to wreak upon her will recoil upon their own heads, and they themselves may yet be forced some day to look to little New England as their redeemer from anarchy. ”

“ Man is chiefly taught through symbolism. Living in a symbolic world of sensuous emblems, he seeks in them a substitute for the wondrous powers of immediate cognition which he lost in his fall. His highest destination is symbolical, for is he not made in the Divine image? Through the symbolism of the matter is the soul taught its first lessons in the school of life: when it is known and felt that nature is but the symbol of the Great Spirit, the instinct of our own immortality awakes. In the Old Covenant, the twilight of faith was studded with the starry splendor of a marvellous symbolism ”

“ Men look upon art as if it were to be pursued merely for the sake of art, for the egotistic pleasure of the artist, and not as a moral power full of responsibility and dignity. We might as well suppose that science is to be pursued merely for the sake of science, that we are to think only that we may think. But while everything has its determinate end in the lower world of matter, concurring in its degree to the life of the whole; can there exist faculties and tendencies without aim in the soul ”

“ They will always resist it, as carrying with it, by inevitable consequence, that social equality to which they are determined never to submit. If the doctrine of political equality, so fundamental, to our system of government, is ever to be extended so as to embrace the colored man, it can only be done by overcoming and utterly obliterating this social aversion.
If it were proved to be ever so desirable to effect such a change in the tastes and prejudices of the American people, history does not lend any countenance to the belief that it is possible. ”

“ See, then, the issue involved: in our success lie all our hopes of future stability and prosperity; in our failure lies simply—inevitable ruin. With such a prospect before them—with existence itself hanging in the balance—why are the people of the North asleep? Why will they not see the true bearings of the war in this light, and arise in all their power and strength, determined to crush out this infamous rebellion, even at the cost of the last dollar and the last drop of blood! Shall we grumble at the cost of the war? ”

“ Millions on millions shall here be banded together into one vast, free, yet orderly community, where each individual shall enjoy all the liberty to which he is entitled by his moral character, and possess all possible facilities for the full and healthy development of his entire nature. Here, under the combined influence of true religion, intelligence, and freedom—and these must go hand in hand—the millions composing this great nation must become ever more and more united, prosperous, and happy. ”

“ Here was no place for indolence and luxurious ease. Only by the most persevering and painful labors could the bleak hills and gorge-like valleys be made to yield the fruits of life. Only by unremitting energy and the most patient self-denial could starvation be kept from his door, while constant watchfulness and never-flinching courage were required to ward off the many dangers that beset his path. Nature herself seemed pitted against him to contest every inch of his progress. ”

“ But from them must come the sibylline response, for the true artist has no home upon earth save the heart of humanity! The kingdom of the Beautiful belongs not exclusively to the luxurious, nor to any aristocracy of the refined and cultivated, but, like the blue depths of God's heaven arch, spans the world, everywhere visible, and everywhere beneficent!
As they may not formulate for us a definite reply, let us place our ears close to the throbbing heart of the masses, that we may hear what effect the Beautiful, as manifested in art, has upon the electric pulses. ”

“ All these blessings on the one hand are guaranteed in the Union, and only there—all their opposite horrors are involved as inevitably and certainly in the Southern lunacy, resting on slavery and secession as its corner stones! Madness most unparalleled!
We will look now at a singular and beautiful fact—for fact it is, account for it as we may. It is this: The course of civilization upon this globe has apparently followed the course of the sun. Sunlight and warmth travel from east to west. The moral and intellectual illumination of the nations has travelled the same route. ”

“ Slavery once destroyed, an unimagined Future dawns upon the republic. The Southern rebellion, and the utterly unavoidable civil war thence arising—as these are the two instrumentalities by which slavery will be cut clean away from the vitals of the nation, and the Union left untrammelled, to follow its great destiny—these twin events, we say, will, in after ages, be looked back upon as blessings in disguise—as the knife of the surgeon, that gives the patient a new lease of a long, prosperous, and happy life. ”

“ We are fighting, not alone for the stability of any particular form of government, not alone for the sustaining of an administration, not alone for the upholding of those God-given ideas which have made America the most favored land on earth; but against a PRECEDENT, which involves and would destroy them all. Precedent which is, and ever has been, all powerful to overturn theories and systems, to topple kings from their thrones, and plunge nations into slavery. ”

“ We have regarded the Union as the culmination of a long series of endeavors, so to call them, on the part of Providence, to bring men from a social condition characterized by the multiplicity, diversity, separation, antagonism, and hostility of independent, warring, petty states, into that larger, higher form of political and social life, that shall combine in itself the three conditions of unity—variety in unity, and of the utmost liberty with order—as the soul and life of the political body. ”

“ And herein lies the secret of the sympathy of the English aristocracy with the confederates in their struggle for independent existence.
The Puritan, guided by the hand of God, planted his future abode on the shores of New England, a land truly congenial to him, whose whole mental and physical life had hitherto been one of storm and tempest. Nor could a fitter type in the human race have been found than he to tame the rock-crowned hills, to brave the rigors of such winters as Old England never knew, and the lurking dangers at the hands of a powerful and jealous race. ”

“ Because God's justice, even when it condemns themselves, is one of the Divine attributes for whose enjoyment they were created; because it stands pledged that whatever may be the disorder visible upon earth, it will rule in awful majesty over the final ordering of all things. The soul, urged on by an unconscious yet imperative thirst for the Absolute, having in vain tried to find its realization in a world furrowed by vanities and scared by vices, takes its flight to the clime of the ideal, to find there the growth of eternal realities. ”

“ On every battle field she has poured out her blood, a willing sacrifice, and she still stands ready to do or die. She has sent out also the Angel of Mercy side by side with him who carries the flaming sword of War. On the battle field, amid the dying and the dead; in the hospital among the sick and wounded of our State, may be seen her sons and daughters, ministering consolation and shedding the blessings of a divine charity which knows no fear, which dreadeth not the pestilence that walketh by night or the bullet of the foe by day.' ”

“ And when this Southern insane wickedness is quelled, and the great American nation can rest and breathe freely once more, it will then calmly ponder the past, and survey the future. In the degree of its religion and virtue, and next of its intelligence and energy, it will, in the course of time, clearly perceive and wisely inaugurate a new social and industrial life, which will be as far in advance of the present system of free labor as the latter is itself in advance of slavery. ”

“ At length the signal gun pealed forth, the first shot was fired, the spell was broken. She wrote me, 'America calls her sons and daughters. Up! up! to work! all true-hearted men and women! live for me, die for me, and your reward shall be everlasting. There is a work for all, for all who love freedom, for all who love democracy, for all who love humanity, for all who love right law, union, and peace.'
'She felt that all her life had been preparing for this moment. ”

“ They do not mean to justify slavery; they abhor and hate it; they regard it as economically, socially, politically, and morally wrong. But they regard emancipation as tending directly and inevitably to incorporate the negro into the mass of American society, and compel us to treat him as homogeneous with it. To such a solution of the question they feel an unconquerable aversion. It shocks their taste; it violates their notions of propriety and fitness; they resist it by a sort of instinct, rather than from set conviction and purpose. ”

“ The South must be shown how entirely hopeless must be every effort, in all time, to overturn such a government as ours. They must be made to feel our immense superiority in power and resources; they must be shown in unmistakable colors the unconquerable might of nationality in strong contrast with the weakness of sectionalism, as well as their own dependence upon the North; in a word, every atom of resistance must be utterly and forever crushed out by brute force. ”