Life of Schuyler Colfax

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Funk & Wagnalls, 1886 - Biography & Autobiography - 535 pages

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Page 129 - I do not expect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all 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 the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.
Page 195 - If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it ; 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.
Page 179 - States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution, and to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired; and that as soon as these objects are accomplished the war ought to cease.
Page 146 - The point of danger is the temptation in different localities to "platform" for something which will be popular just there, but which, nevertheless, will be a firebrand elsewhere, and especially in a national convention. As instances, the movement against foreigners in Massachusetts; in New Hampshire, to make obedience to the Fugitive Slave law, punishable as a crime; in Ohio, to repeal the Fugitive Slave law; and squatter sovereignty in Kansas.
Page 282 - An Act to protect all persons in the United States in their civil rights, and furnish the means of their vindication...
Page 387 - I was the worst beaten man who ever ran for high office," he wrote Colonel Tappan, " and I have been assailed so bitterly that I hardly knew whether I was running for President or the Penitentiary. In the darkest hour my suffering wife left me, none too soon, for she had suffered too deeply and too long. I laid her in the ground with hard, dry eyes. Well, I am used up; I cannot see before me. I have slept little for weeks, and my eyes are still hard to close, while they soon open again.
Page 146 - My main object in such conversation would be to hedge against divisions in the Republican ranks generally, and particularly for the contest of 1860. The point of danger is the temptation in different localities to "platform...
Page 222 - Arnold and proposes to surrender us all up, body and spirit, the nation and the flag, its genius and its honor, now and forever, to the accursed traitors to our country.
Page 230 - Captol in which we are assembled. The city of "Washington is to-day, as it has been for three years, guarded by Federal troops in all the forts and fortifications with which it is surrounded...
Page 171 - I will suffer death before I will consent or advise my friends to consent to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege of taking possession of the Government to which we have a constitutional right...

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