"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 that it will
cease to be divided. It will become all the one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further
spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates
will push it forward until it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, north as well as south."
Abraham Lincoln, June 16, 1858, Address to the Republican Convention
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"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous
issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being
yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government,
while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it.
I am loath to close. 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 battlefield 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."
Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1861,
From His First Inaugural Address.
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"Executive Mansion
Washington, August 22, 1862
Hon. Horace Greeley:
Dear Sir.
I have just read yours of the 19th. addressed to myself through the New-York Tribune. If there be
in it any statements, or assumptions of fact, which I may know to be erroneous, I do not, now and
here, controvert them. If there be in it any inferences which I may believe to be falsely drawn,
I do not now and here, argue against them. If there be perceptible in it an impatient and dictatorial
tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.
As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing" as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. I would
save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority
can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save
the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who
would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My
paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If
I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the
slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.
What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I
forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall
believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help
the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they
shall appear to be true views.
I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my
oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.
Yours,
A. Lincoln" [23]
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"Without slavery, the rebellion could never have existed. Without slavery, it could not
continue."
Abraham Lincoln, December 1, 1862, Message to Congress, James Ford Rhodes, "History of the
Civil War, 1861–1865", 1917, page 198.
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"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are
created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any
nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that
war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who
here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we
should do this.
But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.
The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power
to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can
never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the
unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for
us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we
take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of
devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this
nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the
people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863, The Gettysburg Address.
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A. G. Hodges, Esq. Executive Mansion,
Frankfort, Ky. Washington, April 4, 1864.
My dear Sir:
You ask me to put in writing the substance of what I verbally
said the other day, in your presence, to Governor Bramlette and Senator
Dixon. It was about as follows:
I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I
can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never
understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to
act officially upon this judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took
that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the
Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without
taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power,
and break the oath in using the power. I understood, too, that in ordinary
civil administration this oath even forbade me to practically indulge my
primary abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery. I had publicly
declared this many times, and in many ways. And I aver that, to this day, I
have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and
feeling on slavery. I did understand however, that my oath to preserve the
constitution to the best of my ability, imposed upon me the duty of
preserving, by every indispensable means, that government---that nation---of
which that constitution was the organic law.
Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution? By
general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be
amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I
felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by
becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through the
preservation of the nation. Right or wrong, I assumed this ground, and now
avow it. I could not feel that, to the best of my ability, I had even tried
to preserve the constitution, if, to save slavery, or any minor matter, I
should permit the wreck of government, country, and Constitution all
together. When, early in the war, Gen. Fremont attempted military
emancipation, I forbade it, because I did not then think it an indispensable
necessity. When a little later, Gen. Cameron, then Secretary of War,
suggested the arming of the blacks, I objected, because I did not yet think
it an indispensable necessity. When, still later, Gen. Hunter attempted
military emancipation, I again forbade it, because I did not yet think the
indispensable necessity had come. When, in March, and May, and July 1862 I
made earnest, and successive appeals to the border states to favor
compensated emancipation, I believed the indispensable necessity for
military emancipation, and arming the blacks would come, unless averted by
that measure. They declined the proposition; and I was, in my best judgment,
driven to the alternative of either surrendering the Union, and with it, the
Constitution, or of laying strong hand upon the colored element. I chose the
latter. In choosing it, I hoped for greater gain than loss; but of this, I
was not entirely confident. More than a year of trial now shows no loss by
it in our foreign relations, none in our home popular sentiment, none in our
white military force,---no loss by it any how or any where. On the contrary,
it shows a gain of quite a hundred and thirty thousand soldiers, seamen, and
laborers. These are palpable facts, about which, as facts, there can be no
caviling. We have the men; and we could not have had them without the
measure.
And now let any Union man who complains of the measure, test himself by
writing down in one line that he is for subduing the rebellion by force of
arms; and in the next, that he is for taking these hundred and thirty
thousand men from the Union side, and placing them where they would be but
for the measure he condemns. If he can not face his case so stated, it is
only because he can not face the truth.
I add a word which was not in the verbal conversation. In telling this tale
I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity. I claim not to have controlled
events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end
of three years struggle the nation's condition is not what either party, or
any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending
seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also
that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our
complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to
attest and revere the justice and goodness of God. Yours truly
A. LINCOLN"
Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 7.
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"Fellow-Countrymen:
This second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the
first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years,
during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs
the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all
else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all.
With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded
it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union
without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by
negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would
accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern
part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To
strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the
Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the
magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even
before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.
Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should
dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not
judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe
unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we
shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued
through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those
by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always
ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that
it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every
drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must
be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to
finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and
his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1865, From His Second Inaugural Address.
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"Whenever I hear any one arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on
him personally."
Abraham Lincoln, March 17, 1865, Speech to 140th Indiana Regiment.
Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 8.
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"Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man
who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself."
Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 2.
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"I was in Richmond when my Soldier fought the awful battle of Five Forks, Richmond surrendered, and the
surging sea of fire swept the city. News of the fate of Five Forks had reached us, and the city was full of
rumors that General Pickett was killed. I did not believe them. I knew he would come back, he had told me so.
But they were very anxious hours. The day after the fire, there was a sharp rap at the door. The servants had
all run away. The city was full of northern troops, and my environment had not taught me to love them. The
fate of other cities had awakened my fears for Richmond. With my baby on my arm, I answered the knock, opened
the door and looked up at a tall, gaunt, sad-faced man in ill-fitting clothes who, with the accent of the
North, asked:
"Is this George Pickett's place?"
"Yes, sir," I answered, "but he is not here."
"I know that, ma'am," he replied, "but I just wanted to see the place. I am Abraham Lincoln."
"The President!" I gasped.
The stranger shook his head and said, "No, ma'am; no, ma'am; just Abraham Lincoln; George's old
friend."
"I am George Pickett's wife and this is his baby," was all I could say. I had never seen Mr. Lincoln
but remembered the intense love and reverence with which my Soldier always spoke of him.
My baby pushed away from me and reached out his hands to Mr. Lincoln, who took him in his arms. As he
did so an expression of rapt, almost divine, tenderness and love lighted up the sad face. It was a
look that I have never seen on any other face. My baby opened his mouth wide and insisted upon giving
his father's friend a dewy infantile kiss. As Mr. Lincoln gave the little one back to me, shaking his
finger at him playfully, he said:
"Tell your father, the rascal, that I forgive him for the sake of that kiss and those bright eyes."
He turned and went down the steps, talking to himself, and passed out of my sight forever, but in my
memory those intensely human eyes, that strong, sad face, have a perpetual abiding place—that face
which puzzled all artists but revealed itself to the intuitions of a little child, causing it to hold
out its hands to be taken and its lips to be kissed."
Sally Corbell Pickett, Wife of Major General George E. Pickett, April 1865
"The Heart of a Soldier, As Revealed in the Intimate Letters of Genl. George E. Pickett C.S.A."
Pickett, George Edward, 1825 -1875
