“Mister Toombs was willing to dissolve the Union to save slavery, Mister Phillips, to save liberty; while Mister Seward, denounced and derided by both, declared that the deepest instinct of the American people was for union. Reserved rights. State rights, limited powers, the advantages of union and disunion, were the cucumbers from which we were busily engaged in distilling light, overlooking the fact of nationality in discussing the conditions of union. We were speculating upon costume. We gravely proved that the clothes were the clothes of a woman, or of a child, without seeing that whatever the clothes might be there was a full-grown man inside of them. 'The Constitution is a contract between sovereign States', shouted Mister Toombs, 'let Georgia tear it and separate'. 'The Constitution is a league with hell', calmly replied Mister Phillips, 'let New York cut off New Orleans to rot alone'. 'Oh, dear! it's a dreadful dilemma', whimpered President Buchanan. 'States have no right to secede, and the United States have no right to coerce. Oh, dear me! it's perfectly awful! I'm the most patriotic of men, but what shall I do? what shall I do?”

— George William Curtis

Separate! Cut off! Secede! It was of a living body they spoke, which, pierced anywhere, quivered everywhere.
1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

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George William Curtis 78

American writer 1824–1892

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“We are constantly thinking of the great war … which which we think to-day as a war which saved the Union, and it did indeed save the Union, but it was a war that did a great deal more than that. It created in this country what had never existed before — a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union, it was the rebirth of the Union.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Memorial Day Address (31 May 1915)
1910s

“I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be ``the Union as it was.´´ If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Letter to Horace Greeley (1862)

“The war has revealed an overpowering national instinct. The conflicting theories of the exact nature and limitations of our government had blinded the shrewdest minds to the fact that we were a nation, with all the feelings and instincts of a nation, and that our quarrels must be settled inside and not outside of the Union.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

“This sophism derives much, perhaps the whole, of its currency from the assumption that there is some omnipotent and sacred supremacy pertaining to a State — to each State of our Federal Union. Our States have neither more nor less power than that reserved to them in the Union by the Constitution, no one of them ever having been a State out of the Union. The original ones passed into the Union even before they cast off their British colonial dependence, and the new ones each came into the Union directly from a condition of dependence, excepting Texas; and even Texas, in its temporary independence, was never designated a State. The new ones only took the designation of States on coming into the Union, while that name was first adopted for the old ones in and by the Declaration of Independence. Therein the "United Colonies" were declared to be "free and independent States;" but even then the object plainly was not to declare their independence of one another or of the Union, but directly the contrary, as their mutual pledge and their mutual action before, at the time, and afterwards abundantly show. The express plighting of faith by each and all of the original thirteen in the Articles of Confederation, two years later, that the Union shall be perpetual is most conclusive. Having never been States, either in substance or in name, outside of the Union, whence this magical omnipotence of "State rights," asserting a claim of power to lawfully destroy the Union itself? Much is said about the "sovereignty" of the States, but the word even is not in the National Constitution, nor, as is believed, in any of the State constitutions. What is a "sovereignty" in the political sense of the term? Would it be far wrong to define it "a political community without a political superior"? Tested by this, no one of our States, except Texas, ever was a sovereignty; and even Texas gave up the character on coming into the Union, by which act she acknowledged the Constitution of the United States and the laws and treaties of the United States made in pursuance of the Constitution to be for her the supreme law of the land. The States have their status in the Union, and they have no other legal status. If they break from this, they can only do so against law and by revolution. The Union, and not themselves separately, procured their independence and their liberty. By conquest or purchase the Union gave each of them whatever of independence and liberty it has. The Union is older than any of the States, and, in fact, it created them as States. Originally some dependent colonies made the Union, and in turn the Union threw off their old dependence for them and made them States, such as they are. Not one of them ever had a State constitution independent of the Union. Of course it is not forgotten that all the new States framed their constitutions before they entered the Union, nevertheless dependent upon and preparatory to coming into the Union.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Fourth of July Address to Congress (1861)

“To the old Union they had said that the Federal power had no authority to interfere with slavery issues in a state. To their new nation they would declare that the state had no power to interfere with a federal protection of slavery. Of all the many testimonials to the fact that slavery, and not states rights, really lay at the heart of their movement, this was the most eloquent of all.”

William C. Davis (1946) American historian

Source: Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002), pp. 97–98

“Iran, Cuba, Venezuela — these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying, `We're going to wipe you off the planet.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Campaign rally in Pendleton, Oregon (18 May 2008) http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5glI7UtjQLctRJGUYNpAuFHulunKgD90OUQ4O0
2008

“These who are represented here were men in whom courage had reached a high moral quality. They had been brave enough not to shrink from looking at facts and institutions. They had been honest enough to admit that they saw there much that was not good. They glossed over no wrongs, they hid away no skeletons. They did not pretend that wrong was right or ever could be right. They had put much thought to the lessons of hard experience, and had frankly acknowledged that they must deal with a crisis in the Nation's life. They were sure that union was a blessing, that slavery was a wrong, and that domestic war was the supreme human tragedy. This settled, they saw that one of three courses must be taken. They could have had peace with disunion, or they could have had peace and union, with slavery. Freedom with union, they saw at last, meant war. We know how they decided. We know at what fearful cost they supported their decision.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

“Why were the Europeans bothered about the Soviet Union at all? It was nothing to do with us. China had nothing to do with us. Why were we not building, without reference to the Soviet Union, a good society in our own countries? But no, we were all — in one way or another — obsessed with the bloody Soviet Union, which was a disaster. What people were supporting was failure. And continually justifying it.”

Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer

Salon interview (1997)

“The attempt by eleven southern—and slaveholding—states to secede from the Union in the winter and spring of 1860-61 presented the United States with the greatest internal political challenge it had ever faced. Because the Constitution had created a federal Union, secession (which broke the ties of Union) was a dagger at the heart of the American polity. The fact that this secession was motivated by Southerners' determination to protect their investment in human slavery added a cruel twist of the blade. Not only did secession fracture the Union, it did so on behalf of a practice which obliterated the fundamental natural right to liberty, which the federal Constitution was supposed to protect.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2000s, States' Rights and Wrongs (2008)

“The root problem is very simply stated: if there were no sovereign independent states, if the states of the civilized world were organized in some sort of federalism as the states of the American Union, for instance, are organized, there would be no international war as we know it. ... The main obstacle is nationalism.”

Norman Angell (1872–1967) British politician

Statement of 1933, as quoted in Journal of Peace Studies (1994), p. 54; also partly quoted in Logic (1989) by Robert Baum, p. 87

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George William Curtis 78

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