Henry Clay Quotes

I can anticipate no greater calamity for the nation than the dissolution of the Union.

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.

To exercise self-determination through secession is to blow apart the union, to pit peoples against one another and to sow discord, bloodshed and death. This is precisely the goal of secessionists in all republics.

The English, as most of the Scots are, seem to be weary of the Union …. If we saw a possibility of getting free of the Union without a civil war, we would have some comfort, but that I’m afraid is impossible.

This, then, is the position in which we stand. A small majority of the citizens of one State in the Union have elected delegates to a State convention; that convention has ordained that all the revenue laws of the United States must be repealed, or that they are no longer a member of the Union. The governor of that State has recommended to the legislature the raising of an army to carry the secession into effect, and that he may be empowered to give clearances to vessels in the name of the State. No act of violent opposition to the laws has yet been committed, but such a state of things is hourly apprehended, and it is the intent of this instrument to PROCLAIM, not only that the duty imposed on me by the Constitution, “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed," shall be performed to the extent of the powers already vested in me by law or of such others as the wisdom of Congress shall devise and Entrust to me for that purpose; but to warn the citizens of South Carolina, who have been deluded into an opposition to the laws, of the danger they will incur by obedience to the illegal and disorganizing ordinance of the convention-to exhort those who have refused to support it to persevere in their determination to uphold the Constitution and laws of their country, and to point out to all the perilous situation into which the good people of that State have been led, and that the course they are urged to pursue is one of ruin and disgrace to the very State whose rights they affect to support. Fellow-citizens of my native State! let me not only admonish you, as the first magistrate of our common country, not to incur the penalty of its laws, but use the influence that a father would over his children whom he saw rushing to a certain ruin. In that paternal language, with that paternal feeling, let me tell you, my countrymen, that you are deluded by men who are either deceived themselves or wish to deceive you. Mark under what pretenses you have been led on to the brink of insurrection and treason on which you stand! First a diminution of the value of our staple commodity, lowered by over-production in other quarters and the consequent diminution in the value of your lands, were the sole effect of the tariff laws. The effect of those laws was confessedly injurious, but the evil was greatly exaggerated by the unfounded theory you were taught to believe, that its burdens were in proportion to your exports, not to your consumption of imported articles. Your pride was aroused by the assertions that a submission to these laws was a state of vassalage, and that resistance to them was equal, in patriotic merit, to the opposition our fathers offered to the oppressive laws of Great Britain. You were told that this opposition might be peaceably-might be constitutionally made-that you might enjoy all the advantages of the Union and bear none of its burdens. Eloquent appeals to your passions, to your State pride, to your native courage, to your sense of real injury, were used to prepare you for the period when the mask which concealed the hideous features of DISUNION should be taken off. It fell, and you were made to look with complacency on objects which not long since you would have regarded with horror.

No State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union;

If this bill passes, it is my deliberate opinion that it is virtually a dissolution of the Union; that it will free the States from their moral obligation; and, as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some, definitely to prepare for a separation,—amicably if they can, violently if they must.

The argument is exhausted. All hope of relief in the Union through the agency of committees, congressional legislation or constitutional amendments, is extinguished. We are satisfied the honor, safety, and independence of the Southern people require the organization of a Southern confederacy.

God forbid that the day should ever come when to be true to my constituents is to be hostile to the Union.

If it is a crime to love the South, its cause and its President, then I am a criminal. I would rather lie down in this prison and die than leave it owing allegiance to a government such as yours.

If the Union is once severed, the line of separation will grow wider and wider, and the controversies which are now debated and settled in the halls of legislation will then be tried in fields of battle and determined by the sword.

Our Northern brethren will discover that the Southern States intended to be equals in the Union, or independent out of it!

Any division of the United States through secession of individual States from the Union inevitably must lead to civil wars.

You know how absurd is the fiction put forward by our enemies in the Northern states that the great Civil War which raged between 1861 and 1865 would never have taken place but for Jefferson Davis and myself. Such mighty convulsions, which amount indeed to revolutions, are never the work of individuals, but of divided nations.

The present Administration had no alternative but to accept the war initiated by South Carolina or the Southern Confederacy. The North will sustain the Administration almost to a man, and it ought to sustain it at all hazards.

Disunion by armed force is treason.

I can scarcely contemplate a more incalculable evil than the breaking of the Union into two or more parts.

I will pardon Jeff Davis, if he asks for it.

The Union we intend to keep, and loyal states will not let disloyal ones break it.

I will vote the Republican ticket next Tuesday…. The North must assert its rights, now, and take the consequences…. Let South Carolina and Georgia secede. We will coerce and punish the traitorous seceders if we can; but if we can’t, we are well rid of them.

the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy.

Make common cause with the South and refuse to allow passage of Union troops through the city.

The only safety of the South from abolition universal is to be found in an early dissolution of the Union

In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course. Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

We cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country cannot do this.