Life and Public Services of Abraham Lincoln: Sixteenth President of the United States; and Commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy of the United States

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T.B. Peterson & brothers, 1864 - 171 pages

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Page 95 - Whereas, The laws of the United States have been for some time past, and now are opposed, and the execution thereof obstructed, in the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in the marshals by law...
Page 89 - It follows from these views that no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances.
Page 92 - 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?
Page 92 - This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
Page 132 - ... that the executive will on the first day of january aforesaid by proclamation designate the states and parts of states if any in which the people thereof respectively shall then be in rebellion against the united states and the fact that any state or the people thereof shall on that day be in good faith represented in the congress of the united states by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such...
Page 93 - By the frame of the government under which we live, this same people have wisely given their public servants but little power for mischief; and have, with equal wisdom, provided for the return of that little to their own hands at very short intervals. While the people retain their virtue and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government in the short space of four years.
Page 106 - Must a government of necessity be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?
Page 132 - That, on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever, free...
Page 91 - At the same time, the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.
Page 81 - I have often inquired of myself what great principle or idea it was that kept this confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land, but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence, which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time.

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