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Bookplate inserted; inscribed in red ink on front endpaper: “From F.[?]M.G.”. Numerous pages earmarked and various passages highlighted in margin with pencil, including: [p. 32, earmarked] “Well, I doubt not that the people of Nebraska are and will continue to be as good as the average of people elsewhere. I do not say the contrary. What I do say is that no man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent. I say this is the leading principle, – the sheet-anchor of American republicanism.”; [p. 34] “Little by little, but steadily as man’s march to the grave, we have been giving up the old for the new faith. Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a sacred right of self-government. These principles cannot stand together. They are as opposite as God and Mammon; and whoever holds to the one must despise the other.”; [p. 35, earmarked] “Our political problem now is, “Can we as a nation continue together permanently – for ever – half slave, and half free?” The problem is too mighty for me. May God in his mercy superintend the solution.”; [p. 53] “In grave emergencies, moderation is generally safer than radicalism”; [p. 69] “We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object and confident promise of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the Operation of that policy, that agitation has only not ceased, but has been constantly augmented. In my opinion it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved, – I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.”; [pp. 77 – 78, earmarked] “Popular sovereignty! everlasting popular sovereignty. What is popular sovereignty? We recollect that at an early period in the history of this struggle, there was another name for the same thing, – squatter sovereignty.”; [p. 84, earmarked] “I have said a hundred times, and I have now no inclination to take it back, that I believe there is no right and ought to be no inclination in the people of the free States, to enter into the slave States and interfere with the question of slavery at all.”; [p. 98] “. . . I have said that I do not understand the Declaration to mean that all men were created equal in all respects . The negroes are not our equals in colour; but I suppose it does mean to declare that all men are equal in some respects; they are equal in their right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Certainly the negro is not our equal in colour, perhaps not in many other respects. Still, in the right to put into his mouth the bread that his own hands have earned, he is the equal of every other man, white or black.”; [pp. 170 – 171] “From questions of this class spring all constitutional controversies, and we divide upon them into majorities and minorities. If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the government may cease. There is no other alternative; for continuing the government is acquiescence on one side or the other. [/] If a minority in such case will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which in turn will divide and ruin them; for a minority of their own will secede from them whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such minority. For instance, why may not any portion of a new confederacy a year or two hence arbitrarily secede again, precisely as portions of the present Union now claim to secede from it? All who cherish disunion sentiments are now being educated to the exact temper of doing this. [/] Is there such perfect identity of interests among the States to compose a new Union, as to produce harmony only, and prevent renewed secession? [/] Plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.”; [p. 178] “The sophism itself is that any State of the Union may consistently with the national Constitution, and therefore lawfully and peacefully, withdraw from the Union without the consent of the Uinon or of any other State.” [p.180, earmarked] “[Much is said about the] “sovereignty of the States; but the word is not in the National Constitution, nor, as is believed, in any of the State constituents. What is sovereignty in the political sense of the term? Would it be far wrong to define it “a political community without a political superior?” Tested by this, no one of our States, except Texas, ever was a sovereignty.”; [pp. 219 – 220] “The world has never had a good definition of the word “liberty”; but in using the same word, we do not all mean the same thing. With some, the word “liberty” may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself and the product of his labour; while with others, the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men and the product of other men’s labour. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names, liberty and tyranny. The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty. Hence we behold the process by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty. Recently, as it seems, the people of Maryland have been doing something to define liberty, and thanks to them that, in what they have done, the wolf’s dictionary has been repudiated.”; [p. 224] “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, – let us strive on to finish the work we are in : to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan ; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”