-- Political Quotations on Secession

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"Disunion will be her ruin--for if there is war--it will surely be in the South and the whole land desolated and laid in waste and slavery will certainly go if the Union is dissolved."

Johanna Underwood, Kentucky.

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"The traitor deserves hemp, and South Carolina is a traitor."

Reverend George Junkin, president of Washington College (later Washington and Lee) in Lexington, Virginia, on the secession of South Carolina, 1860.

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"Every clause of Jefferson's tremendous indictment of King George in 1775 was true of Lincoln in 1861-1865." --John Tyler Gardner in The Confederate Catechism, Section 10, Pg. 5

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"In one single blow our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it is now. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One-half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all of its immense profits. Our manufactories would be in utter ruins. Let the South adopt the free-trade system, or that of a tariff for revenue, and these results would likely follow." --Chicago Times Daily, Dec. 10, 1860

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"In the contingency that consultation shall not produce concert, what then? Shall we, too, like the delaying States, linger in the portals of the government? Shall we remain and all be slaves? Shall we wait to bear our share of the common dishonor? God forbid! Let us act for ourselves. I have good reason to believe the action of any State will be peaceable, will not be resisted under the probable future administration of public affairs. I believe there not be power to direct a gun against a sovereign State. Certainly there will be no will to do so during the present administration. If the action of the State be resisted, bloodshed will appeal to blood throbbing in Southern hearts. Our brethren from every Southern State will flock to defend a sister State threatened by mercenary bayonets. To do one's duty is the highest aim in life." --William L. Yancey

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"When certain sovereign and independent states form a union with limited powers for some general purpose, and any one or more of them, in the progress of time, suffer unjust and oppressive grievances for which there is no redress but in a withdrawal from the association, is such withdrawal an insurrection? If so, then of what advantage is a compact of union to states? Within the Union are oppressions and grievances, the attempt to go out brings war and subjugation. The ambitious and aggressive states obtain possession of the central authority which, having grown strong in the lapse of time, asserts its entire sovereignty over the states. Whichever of them denies it and seeks to retire is declared to be guilty of insurrection, its citizens are stigmatized as "rebels", as if they revolted against a master, and a war of subjugation is begun. If this action is once tolerated, where will it end? Where is constitutional liberty? What strength is there in bills of rights-in limitation of power? What new hope for mankind is to be found in written constitutions, what remedy which did not exist under kings or emperors? If the doctrines thus announced by the government of the United States are conceded, then look through either end of the political telescope, and one sees only an empire, and the once famous Declaration of Independence trodden in the dust of as a "glittering generality," and the compact of the union denounced as a "flaunting lie"." --President Jefferson Davis

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"To expect to hold fifteen States in the Union by force is preposterous. The idea of a civil war, accompanied a it would be, by a servile insurrection, is too monstrous to be entertained for a moment." --Edward Everett, who ran on the Constitutional Union Party ticket in 1860 with John Bell.

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"I have no idea that the Union can be maintained or restored by force. Nor do I believe in the value of a Union which can only be kept together by dint of a military force." -- United States Senator James Alfred Pearce of Maryland

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"Any attempt to preserve the Union between the States of this Confederacy by force would be impracticable, and destructive of republican liberty." --Maryland Congressman Jacob M. Kunkel (Nearly all the wealthy and influential citizens of Baltimore favored peaceable secession, as did four of Maryland's former governors.)

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"We sympathize with and justify the South because their rights have been invaded to the extreme." If they wish to secede, "we would wish them God-Speed."--Albany Atlas and Argus