Abraham Lincoln Quotes

Believe me, then, that the great mass of the people of the North do not uphold the Administration on the principle of abolishing slavery, but that the restoration of the Union is the grand incentive; and while such is the fact, every nerve and every sinew will be strained to bring about a victorious end.--Would to Heaven that the blood already spilled was a sufficient sacrifice for this great result.

Whereas, serious and alarming dissensions have arisen between the Northern and Southern States, concerning the rights and security of the rights of the slaveholding States, and especially their rights in the common territory of the United States; and whereas it is eminently desirable and proper that these dissensions, which now threaten the very existence of this Union, should be permanently quieted and settled by constitutional provisions, which shall do equal justice to all sections, and thereby restore to the people that peace and good will which ought to prevail between all the citizens of the United States: Therefore,…

Shall I tell you what this collision means? They who think it is accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means the United States must and will, sooner or later, become entirely a slave-holding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.

The question of what actually caused the Civil War is secondary to the result of the Civil War, which is that after the war was over, slavery was ended, and the North and the South reconciled. And I think we need to respect that.

I never was an Abolitionist, not even what could be called anti slavery, but I try to judge fairly & honestly and it become patent to my mind early in the rebellion that the North & South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without Slavery.

No solid South, no solid North, save when solid for the flag and the Union.

These are solemn times. It is not a struggle for national salvation; for the nation, as such, seems doomed beyond recovery. The reason why the South rules, and the North falls prostrate in servile terror, is simply this: With the South, the preservation of Slavery is paramount to all other considerations--above party success, denominational unity, pecuniary interest, legal integrity, and constitutional obligation. With the North, the preservation of the Union is placed above all other things--above honor, justice, freedom, integrity of soul, the Decalogue and the Golden Rule--the Infinite God himself. All these she is ready to discard for the Union.

The Civil war made us a nation rather then an association of states.

The Free States have a majority of 44 in that House. Under the new census, they would have 53. The cause of the slaveholding States is getting weaker and weaker, and what are we to do? What would the South have to rely on, if the Union were dissolved? Suppose the dissolution could be peaceably … what had the South to depend upon? All the crowned heads [of Europe] were against her. A million of slaves are ready to rise and strike for freedom at the first tap of the drum. If the South is cut loose from their friends at the North … whither are they to look for protection? How are they to sustain an assault from England or France, with the cancer at their vitals? The more the South reflected, the more clearly she must see that she has a deep and vital interest in maintaining the Union.

“We, the People of Providence demand federal suppression of the abolitionist movementon the grounds that it threatens the sacred rights of property as well as the existing relations of friendship and of business between different sections of our country.

We are fairly engaged in a war which cannot be a short one, even though our enemies should before long lay down their arms; for it is a war not merely to support and defend the Constitution and to retake the property of the United States, not merely to settle the question of the right of a majority to control an insolent and rebellious minority in the republic, nor to establish the fact of the national existence and historic unity of the United States; but it is also and more essentially a war for the establishment of civilization in that immense portion of our country in which for many years barbarism has been gaining power. It is for the establishment of liberty and justice, of freedom of conscience and liberty of thought, of equal law and of personal rights, throughout the South. If these are not to be secured without the abolition of slavery, it is a war for the abolition of slavery.

The long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States has at length produced its natural effects.

I have fought against the people of the North because I believed they were seeking to wrest from the South its dearest rights. But I have never cherished toward them bitter or vindictive feelings, and I have never seen the day when I did not pray for them.

A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.

Only in South Africa could you have a change in government without civil war. If there wasn't the depth of love and caring among our people, this would not have happened.

If Lincoln is among history's truly great men, he didn't achieve that stature until his final three years. This was when his long-held antipathy to slavery cohered into a dedicated hostility that gave larger purpose to the Civil War and also confirmed the logic of Lincoln's destiny.

To the best of my judgment, I have labored for, and not against, the Union. As I have not felt, so I have not expressed any harsh sentiment towards our Southern brethren. I have constantly declared, as I really believed, the only difference between them and us is the difference of circumstances.

President Abraham Lincoln never lost his ardor for the United States to remain united during the Civil War.

Lincoln emancipated nobody. The man freed not a single slave.

The Civil War always moves me.

Perhaps most perniciously, neo-Confederates now claim that the South seceded over states' rights. Yet when each state left the Union, its leaders made clear that they were seceding because they were for slavery and against states' rights.

It seems impossible that the South can be mad enough to dissolve the Union.

Our people now, one and all, are determined to sustain the Government and demand a vigorous prosecution of the war inaugurated by the disunionists. All sympathy with them is dead.

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.

The people of the North are not enemies but friends and brethren of the South, faithful and true as in the days when death has dealt his arrows promiscuously among them on the common battlefields of freedom.