Lincoln, Abraham

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"The time has come when I am for everybody fighting the rebels. Let Indians fight them; let the Negroes fight them; and if you have got any strong-legged jackasses in Iowa that can kick rebels to death, they have my hearty consent."

-- Abraham Lincoln on enlisting blacks as soldiers.
 
"The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty."

-- Abraham Lincoln
 
"Sending armies to McClellan is like shoveling fleas across a barnyard. Not half of them get there."

-- Abraham Lincoln
 
Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right - a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.
-- Abraham Lincoln January 12, 1848
 
"You are green, it is true; but they are green also. You are all green alike."

-- Abraham Lincoln gave this description of the Union Army to its commander, Irvin McDowell, while urging McDowell to attack the Confederates shortly before First Manassas.
 
"Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged." - President Abraham Lincoln
 
"...blood can not restore blood, and government should not act for revenge."

Lincoln in a letter to Secretary of War Stanton, on his final decision not to retaliate when Confederate officials threatened to shoot captured Negro soldiers.

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In his early years of practicing law, Lincoln often had to travel across Illinois in midwinter to get to trial. One bitter day in February, Lincoln rode into town where court was to be held. But when he checked into the inn next to the courthouse, he found the fireplace in the sitting room surrounded by all the other lawyers in town discussing their cases.

"Cold out there, eh?" remarked on of them.
"Colder than hell," agreed Lincoln affably.
"You've been there too, Mr. Lincoln?" asked another.
"Yup," Lincoln said with a smile, "and it's just like here--all the lawyers are standing next to the fire."

Unionblue
 
"I must confess I am afraid of 'Abe'...He is Southern by birth, Southern in his associations and southern, if I mistake not, in his sympathies...His wife, you know, is a Todd, of a pro-slavery family, and so are all his kin."

Charles H. Ray of the Chicago Tribune, on his view of Lincoln in 1854.

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In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Stephen A. Douglas accused Abraham Lincoln of being two-faced.

"I leave it to you, my friends," Lincoln retorted, turning toward his audience. "If I had two faces, would I be wearing this one?"

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From Germany came a letter applauding Lincoln's reelection in November 1864:

We congratulate you on your re-election by the American people. If resistance to slave power was the watchword of your first election in 1860, the triumphal war cry of your re-election is death to slavery.

The letter was signed by Karl Marx, who had recently published Das Kapital.

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