"The American Revolution presents the first example of slaveholders themselves not just questioning slavery's morality but considering doing something to end the system."  -Historian Christopher L Brown

 

"Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race."  -Thomas Jefferson

 

"We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go."  -Thomas Jefferson

 

"The spirit of freedom which at the commencement of this contest would have gladly sacrificed every thing to the attainment of its object has long since subsided and every selfish passion has taken its place.  It is not the public but the private interest which influences the generality of mankind nor can the Americans any longer boast of an exception."  -George Washington

 

"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect and defend” it.

I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."  -Abraham Lincoln

 

Book:  A Disease in the Public Mind, Fleming (2014)