Horace Greeley Quotes

I pledged California to a Northern Republic and to a flag that should have no treacherous threads of cotton in its warp, and the audience came down in thunder.

The importance of this decision in the highest legal tribunal established under our Federal Constitution is a sufficient reason for devoting to it so much of the space in our columns. The questions upon which these opinions have been rendered are among those which have shaken our Union from centre to circumference, and threatened imminently its dissolution. The points adjudicated are more strictly political than legal, and affect materially the status of political parties throughout the confederacy…. The importance of the decision is greatly enhanced by its immediate effect upon two of the great political parties of the country. At a single blow it shatters and destroys the platform of the Republican party. It annihilates the issue which was made paramount in the recent Presidential election, and takes away from the Democratic party all the advantages of its advocacy of popular sovereignty in the Territories. It leaves both of these great parties all abroad, without a single plank of their late platforms upon which to rest.

He distinguished himself by his opposition to the Mexican war, taking the side of the common enemy against his own country; and when he returned home he found that the indignation of the people followed him everywhere and he was again submerged or obliged to retire into private life, forgotten by his former friends. He came up again in 1854, just in time to make his Abolition or Black Republican platform, in company with Giddings, Lovejoy, Chase and Fred Douglas for the Republican party to stand upon.

Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1. Those who fear and distrust the people and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them.... In every country these two parties exist.... Call them, therefore, liberals and serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, Whigs and Tories, republicans and federalists, aristocrats and democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same party still and pursue the same object.

Gentlemen, radical abolitionism must be put down. This great and glorious country will be shattered into fragments if it is not, or else we shall find ourselves at last brought under the iron rule of military despotism.

Every man that lowered our flag was a Democrat.... Every preacher that said slavery was a divine institution was a Democrat. Recollect it! Every man that shot a Union soldier was a Democrat. Every wound borne by you Union soldiers is a souvenir of a Democrat.

Resolved, that our duty to the country, and our Southern brethren in particular, render it improper and inexpedient to agitate a question pregnant with peril and difficulty to the common weal. Resolved, That we take this opportunity to express to our Southern brethren our fixed and unalterable determination to resist every attempt that may be made to interfere with the relations in which master and slave now stand, or guarantied to them by the Constitution of the United States

Repudiating all previous party attachments, names and predilections, we unite ourselves together in defense of the liberty and constitution of the country, and will hereafter co-operate as the Republican party, pledged to the accomplishment of the following purposes: to bring the administration of the government back to the control of first principles; to restore Nebraska and Kansas to the position of free Territories; that, as the constitution of the United States, vests in the States, and not in Congress, the power to legislate for the extradition of fugitives from labor, to repeal and entirely abrogate the fugitive slave law; to restrict slavery to those States in which it exists; to prohibit the admission of any more slave States into the Union; to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia; to exclude slavery from all the territories over which the general government has exclusive jurisdiction; and to resist the acquirements of any more Territories unless the practice of slavery therein forever shall have been prohibited.

American history is the story of Democratic malefactors and Republican heroes.

If it wasn't for Abe Lincoln, I'd still be on the open market.

If Lincoln were alive today, he'd be turning over in his grave.

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.

The irrepressible conflict propounded by abolitionism has produced now its legitimate fruits - disunion.

The Civil War always moves me.

School-houses are the republican line of fortifications

You ask me if I am in favor of admitting a slave state to the union. Whenever it becomes necessary for us to acquire more territory for our growth and progress, I am for it.

We went in ... Whigs, Free Soilers, and Democrats. We came out of it Republicans.

We have assembled, as a union of freedom for the sake of freedom, forgetting all past differences in a common resolve to maintain the rights of free labor against the aggressions of Slave Power, and to secure a free soil for a free people.... Our calm but final answer is, no more slave states, and no more slave territory. Let the soil of our extensive domain be kept free.

I do not believe in the anti-slavery of Abraham Lincoln … Two years ago I went to … prominent Republicans … to Abraham Lincoln and Lyman Trumbull, and neither of them dared to sign that petition to give me the right to testify in a court of justice.

If we sent our children to school, Abraham Lincoln would kick them out, in the name of Republicanism and anti-slavery.

There can be no neutrals in this war [the Civil War]—only patriots or traitors.

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.

If the State cannot survive the anti-slavery agitation, then let the State perish.

In New York, the opposite of a Democrat is not a Republican; it’s a Fascist.

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