Many opportunities have been lost and hundreds of valuable lives uselessly sacrificed for want of a strict observance of discipline. Its object is to enable an army to bring promptly into action the largest possible number of its men, in good order and under the control of their officers. Its effects are visible in all military history, which records the triumphs of discipline and courage far more frequently than those of numbers and resources.

So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished.

The enemy never sees the backs of my Texans!

Mr. Blair, I look upon secession as anarchy. If I owned the four millions of slaves in the South, I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native State?

The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy.

A Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets, and in which strife and civil war are to take the place of brotherly love and kindness, has no charm for me.

I have always observed that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find the white man, you see everything around him improving.