I will be satisfied if my epitaph shall be written thus: "Here lies one who never rose to any eminence, who only courted the low ambition to have it said that he striven to ameliorate the condition of the poor, the lowly, the downtrodden of every race and language and color."

Speech (13 January 1865), as quoted in History of the Antislavery Measures of the Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth Congress (1865) by Henry Wilson, p. 388