Quotes from Jon Meacham

day, another takes to-morrow," Volney wrote. "Let us establish judges, who shall arbitrate our rights, and settle our differences. When the strong shall rise against the weak, the judge shall restrain him…and the life and property of each shall be under the guarantee and protection of all.

that no trumpets could totally drown out the uncertain notes of the boy who doubted his place in the world.

Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world? —Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address

when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.

It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost.

To seek vindication in the world but to suspect

Yet Lincoln could not rest. He could not stop. He ran the race. He could do no other.

The saga of race in America is a tragic one—and it unfolds still. In Lincoln's hour upon the stage, many hoped he would go farther along the road toward equality than he did; many feared any step at all. But on he walked.

As Lincoln remarked, "It is my private opinion that, if the Lord has been in Springfield once, he will never come the second time.

Mr. Lincoln had no faith and no hope in the usual acceptation of those words," Mary Lincoln recalled. "He never joined a Church; but still, as I believe, he was a religious man by nature.

We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition, and that every person may here worship God according to the dictates of his conscience.

The colonization proposals underscored a tragic reality. One could—and many white Americans did—oppose slavery while failing to engage the prospective creation of a multiracial democracy.

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!…I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us….If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide." The

No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as duty.

Six days later, the president named a postmaster for New Salem, Illinois, a twenty-four-year-old lawyer who had lost a race for the state legislature. He was a Clay man, but the post was hardly major, and Abraham Lincoln was happy to accept the appointment.

Cassius Marcellus Clay of Lexington, Kentucky, founder of the antislavery newspaper The True American, commanded a crowd of about fifteen hundred in a grove in Springfield. Lincoln, accompanied by his friend Orville Browning, was there. "Whittling sticks, as he lay on the turf, Lincoln gave me a most patient hearing," Clay recalled. "I shall never forget his long, ungainly form, and his ever sad and homely face.

It would not take much to have the throats of every Abolitionist cut. —Preston Brooks of South Carolina, 1856 Judge Taney can do many things, but he cannot perform impossibilities….He cannot change the essential nature of things—making evil good, and good evil. —Frederick Douglass, on the Dred Scott decision, 1857 I clearly see, as I think, a powerful plot to make slavery universal and perpetual in this nation. —Abraham Lincoln, 1858

mother. "Some men call it conscience," she replied, "but I prefer to call it the voice of God in the soul of man. If you listen and obey it, then it will speak clearer and clearer, and always guide you right, but if you turn a deaf ear and disobey it will fade out little by little, and leave you all in the dark and without a guide." He never forgot the conversation, or its implications.

Addison had written in words reproduced by Murray. "The philosopher, the saint, or the hero, the wise, the good, or the great man, very often lies hid and concealed in a plebeian, which a proper education might have disinterred, and have brought to light.

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it," the president said. "These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war." There was no escaping this central truth.

You can make friends by being honest, and you can keep them by being steadfast. You must keep in mind that friends worth having will in the long run expect as much from you as they give to you.

God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man'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.

In the wake of the British army's burning of the roughly 3,000 books belonging to Congress at Washington, Jefferson offered to sell the nation his own collection.42 There were 6,487 volumes in Jefferson's hands; in the words of the National Intelligencer, the library "for its selection, rarity and intrinsic value, is beyond all price."43,44 They formed the core of the new Library of Congress.

The distinctive feature of that religion lies in the meaning of the verse from Leviticus: that individual liberty for all—all, of any color or creed—is at the very center of the broad faith the Founders nurtured and passed on to us.