and injustice, and that the Grimgribber of Westminster Hall is a more fertile and a much more formidable source of imposture than the Abracadabra of magicians."—Epea Pteroenta.
"He finds the Republicans insisting that the Declaration of Independence includes all men, black as well as white, and forth with he boldly denies that it includes negroes at all, and proceeds to argue gravely that all who contend that it does, do so only because they want to vote, eat and sleep, and marry with negroes! He will have it that they cannot be consistent else. Now, I protest against the counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave, I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either: I can just leave her alone. In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands, without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal and the equal of all others."—Lincoln.
"For the moment he [Lincoln] was dealing with two mighty forces of national destiny,—civil war and public opinion; forces which paid little heed to theories of public, constitutional, or international law where they contravened their will and power. In fact, it was the impotence of legislative machinery, and the insufficiency of legal dicta to govern or terminate the conflicts of public opinion on this identical question of slavery, which brought on civil strife."—Nicolay and Hay.
"The vehemence and asperity, the downright bare-faced imposture, the alarming hypocrisy, the solemn restless grimace of jurisprudence, when it makes a convulsive backward step to give to party what was meant for mankind."—Bolingbroke.
"If this be not a sound construction of the Fourteenth Amendment, then that race is left, in respect of civil rights in question, practically at the mercy of corporations and individuals wielding power under the States."—Mr. Justice Harlan.
Dissenting opinion in Civil-Rights Cases, 109 U. S. Rep.
"I insist that the national legislature may, without transcending the limits of the Constitution, do for human liberty and the fundamental rights of American citizenship what it did, with the sanction of this court, for the protection of slavery and the rights of the masters of fugitive slaves."—Id.
Emancipation.
"The way these measures were to help the cause was not by magic or miracles, but by inducing the colored people to come bodily over from the rebel side to ours."—Lincoln.
