1) Abraham Lincoln Cooper Union Speech (2/27/1860)
"Your purpose, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe & enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you & us. You will rule or ruin in all events."
2) "You'll not abide the election of a Republican President! In that event, you will destroy the Union; & then the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon US! A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear & mutters 'Stand & deliver, or I shall kill you & YOU will be a murderer!'"
3) "Let us not be diverted by any of those sophistical contrivances by which we are so industriously plied & belabored - contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right & the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither living nor dead ...
4) " ... such as a policy of "don't care" on a question about which all true men do care - such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule & calling not the sinners but the righteous to repentance ...
5) " ... - such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said & undo what Washington did.
"Let us not be slandered from our duty by false accusations,, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves."
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