Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 7.djvu/50

CONFEDERATE MILITARY HISTORY. When some of the Northern people, alarmed at the prospect, held meetings and passed resolutions urging concessions to be made, Mr. Lincoln said: "I will suffer death before I will consent or advise my friends to consent to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege of taking possession of the government to which we have a constitutional right." And Horace Greeley used these words to prove to the Southern people that it was useless to expect concessions from the dominant party, and these so-called concessions were matters pending before Congress, all of which were simply efforts to uphold the Constitution. Mr. Lincoln did not attempt to deny that the concessions referred to were right, but gives his refusal to entertain them in these words: "Whatever I might think of the merits of the various propositions before Congress, I should regard any concession in the face of menace as the destruction of the government itself and a consent on all hands that our system shall be brought down to a level with the existing disorganized state of affairs in Mexico."