LETTER TO GOV. ANDRew Johnson,

66

OF TENNESSEE, SEPT. 11, 1863.

"I see that you have declared ir. favor of emancipation in Tennessee, for which may God bless you. Get emancipation into your new State government Constitution and there will be no such word as fail for your case. The raising of colored troops, I think, will greatly help, every way."

CONVERSATION WITH A FRIEND.

"I am never easy, now, when I am handling a thought, until I have bounded it North, and bounded it South, and bounded it East and bounded it West."

CONVERSATION WITH HON. CASSIUS M. CLAY, 1862.

"Who ever heard of a reforme

reaping the reward of his labors in his lifetime!"

"Versatility is an injurious possession, since it never can be greatness. A versatile man, to be safe execration, should never

from soar."

LETTER, JUNE 12, 1863, TO CITIZENS OF NEW YORK.

"Yet, thoroughly imbued with a reverence for the guaranteed rights of individuals, I was slow to adopt the strong measures which by degrees I have been forced to regard as being within the exceptions of the Constitution, and as indispensable to the public safety. Nothing is better known to history than that courts of justice are utterly incompetent in such cases."

LETTER TO DEMOCRATS OF OHIO,
JUNE 29, 1863.

"You ask, in substance, whether I really claim that I may override

all the guaranteed rights of individuals on the plea of conserving the public safety when I may choose to say the public safety requires it. This question, divested of the phraseology calculated to represent me as struggling for an arbitrary personal prerogrative, is either simply a question who shall decide, or an affirmation that nobody shall decide what the public safety does require in cases of rebellion or invasion. The Constitution contemplates the question as likely to occur, but it does not expressly declare who is to decide it. By necessary implication, when rebellion or invasion comes, the decision is to be made, from time to time, and I think the man whom, for the time, the people have, under the Constitution, made the Commander-in-chief of their army and navy, is the man who holds the power and bears the re

sponsibility o1 making it. If he uses the power justly, the same people will probably justify him; if he abuses it, he is in their hands to be dealt with by all the modes they have reserved to themselves in the Constitution."

LETTER TO HENRY W. HOFFMAN, OF MARYLAND, OCT. 10, 1864.

"I presume the only feature of the instrument (the new Constitution of Maryland) about which there is serious controversy, is that which provides for the extinction of slavery. It needs not to be a secret, and I presume it is no secret, that I wish success to this provision. I desire it on every consideration. I wish all men to be free. I wish the material prosperity of the already free, which I feel sure the extinction of slavery would bring. I wish to see in process of disappearing that only thing

which ever could bring this nation to civil war. I attempt no argument. Argument upon the question is already exhausted."

LETTER TO MRS. BIXBY, OF BOSTON, WHOSE FIVE SONS HAD FALLEN IN BATTLE: NOV. 21, 1864.

"I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom."

COOPER INstitute adDRESS, 1860.

"Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored-contrivances, such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong; vain is the search for a man who