Abraham Lincoln Quotes

Without a little blood-letting this Union will not, in my estimation, be worth a rush.

If you persist in your purpose of secession, there will be war - a bloody and cruel war. Not only will the North fight, but she will also triumph. The experiment of secession will fail, and the South, in ruin and desolation, will bitterly repent the day when she attempted to overthrow a wise and beneficent government.

North and South were equally confident that God was on their side, and appealed incessantly to Him.

I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.

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.

I am yet unprepared to give up the Union for a peace which, so achieved, could not be of much duration.--

The American Civil War was the wrangling of two armed mobs.

The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.

It is not to be disguised, that a war has broken out between the North and the South. - Political and commercial men are industriously striving to restore peace: but the peace, which they would effect, is superficial, false, and temporary.

That cause was one of the worst for which men have ever fought..

The civil war now being inaugurated will be as horrible as his Satanic Majesty could desire.

You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing!

Anything is better than a fruitless, hopeless, unnatural civil war.

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.

War would not only present the most effectual means of destroying [the Union] but would banish all hope of its peaceable reconstruction.

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,…

It must not be forgotten that the people of these States, without justification or excuse, rose in insurrection against the United States. They deliberately abolished their State governments so far as the same connected them politically with the Union.... They opened hostilities and levied war against the government. They continued this war for four years with the most determined and malignant spirit.... Whether legally and constitutionally or not, they did, in fact, withdraw from the Union and made themselves subjects of another government of their own creation. And they only yielded when they were compelled by utter exhaustion to lay down their arms ... expressing no regret, except that they had no longer the power to continue the desperate struggle The war thus waged was a civil war of the greatest magnitude. The people waging it were necessarily subject to all the rule which, by the law of nations, control a contest of that character, and to all the legitimate consequences following it. One of those consequences was that, within the limits prescribed by humanity, the conquered rebels were at the mercy of the conquerors. That a government thus outraged had a most perfect right to exact indemnity for the injuries done, and security against the recurrence of such outrages in the future, would seem too clear for dispute

…moderates were inexorably sucked into the vortexes of the sectional passions that led to the war. [American Civil War]

By 1860, a certain sense of inevitability had overtaken the nation. War seemed a foregone conclusion because there was no incentive to budge, to question one’s own righteousness, to create the grounds on which a compromise might occur.

The Civil War is a story about how some people clung to the past, while others sought the future.

The Civil War still remains the crossroads of our being.

The South will be forced to choose between abolition and secession.

My opinion is that the Northern States will manage somehow to muddle through.

The Civil War has a tremendous moral and emotional force.

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.