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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Erik Larson
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January 22 - February 3, 2025
At one point during the day Lincoln said that elections in America were like “ ‘big boils’—they caused a great deal of pain before they came to a head, but after the trouble was over the body was in better health than before.”
‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ ”
“I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.”
“I know, and all the world knows, that revolutions never go backward.”
Seward
Lincoln then exclaimed, “Just think of such a sucker as me as President!”
“If I had been a man in this great revolution,” she wrote, “—I should have either been killed at once or made a name and done some good for my country. Lord Nelson’s motto would be mine—Victory or Westminster Abbey”—meaning
Washington City (the U.S. capital’s formal name until it became the District of Columbia in 1871).
Crawford wrote; if anything, the women were more ardent than the men. “The time for argument my dear brother is past and past forever, and you and I have lived to see the saddest sight that will ever be witnessed by man. I never knew, I never felt how much I loved my country until now.”
Observing the festivities, James L. Petigru, the staunch unionist, was said to quip, “South Carolina is too small for a Republic, and too big for an insane asylum.” His mood, however, was somber. “I have seen the last happy day of my life,” he told a friend.
“When men come under the influence of fanaticism, there is no telling where their impulses or passions may drive them.”
“It seems to me the inauguration is not the most dangerous point for us. Our adversaries have us more clearly at disadvantage, on the second Wednesday of February, when the votes should be officially counted.”
Compromises based on the idea that the preservation of the Union is more important than the Liberty of nearly 4,000,000 human beings cannot be right—The alteration of the Constitution to perpetuate slavery—the enforcement of a Law to recapture a poor, suffering fugitive—giving half of the Frontier of a free Country to the curse of Slavery—these compromises cannot be approved by God or supported by good men.”
Seward's wife to Seward.
Indeed, I said a great many very unpleasant truths, in the most pleasant manner possible.”
Eba anderson
“Let us believe, as some poet has expressed it:— “ ‘Behind the cloud the sun is still shining.’
Lincoln
“Americans, all, we are not enemies, but friends—We have sacred ties of affection which, though strained by passions, let us hope can never be broken.” —
Lincoln
“I have seen the pavements of Paris covered, and her gutters running with fraternal blood: God forbid that I should see this horrid picture repeated in my own country.”
Rives, William Cabell
As famed historian Samuel Eliot Morison observed, “I wish that some of our evasive historians, our mufflers of great passionate issues, who are trying to persuade the American public that Negro slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War, would read the debates in this Peace Convention.” —
“I am loth to close,” he wrote. “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 battle-field, 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 in our nature.”
Lincoln
From Lincoln’s home state of Illinois, however, came renewed confidence that time would heal all, with the Vermilion County Press projecting that “secession will play itself out in less than six months if left to itself.” In a breezy aside the paper added: “There may be some bloodshed but it will not be much.”
As Doubleday saw it, he was fighting for the survival of the United States. “The only alternative was to submit to a powerful oligarchy who were determined to make freedom forever subordinate to slavery.”
