It is a revolution; a revolution of the most intense character; in which belief in the justice, prudence, and wisdom of secession is blended with the keenest sense of wrong and outrage, and it can no more be checked by human effort for the time than a prairie fire by a gardener's watering pot.

On the secession movement in the South (1860). Reported in Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln (1950), p. 387.