If nominated by either party, I should peremptorily decline, and even if unanimously elected, I should decline to serve.

You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about.

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will.

I see every chance of a long, confused and disorganizing civil war, and I feel no desire to take a hand therein.

My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.

In our Country... one class of men makes war and leaves another to fight it out.