We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving Grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!

My Dear McClellan, if you don't want to use the army I should like to borrow it for a while. Yours respectfully.

Work, work, work, is the main thing.

Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets, and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionall y decided there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.

We shall yet acknowledge His wisdom and our own error therein.

Wise statesmen ... established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity should look up again at the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.