Here are some quotes from different people who were around during the WBS, I thought you might all be interested.
"Lincoln is the single-minded son of the working class, who has lead his country to the matchless sruggle for the rescue of the communist revolution and the reconsruction of the social order" -Karl Marx
"If you bring these leaders to trial, it will condemn the North, for by the Constitution, secession is not rebellion...His (Jeff Davis') capture was a mistake. His trial will be a greater one. We cannot convict him of treason." -Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase to Edwin Stanton
Jefferson Davis wrote: "After studying more than 270,000 Confederate documents, seeking evidence against Davis, the court discouraged the War Department: 'Davis will be found not guilty,' Lieber reported 'and we shall stand there completely beaten'."
"The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states." -Charles Dickens
"The real object of those who resorted to secession, as well as those who sustained it, was not to overthrow the Government of the United States; but to perpetuate the principles upon which it was founded.
The object of quitting the Union was not to destroy, but to save the principles of the Constitution." -Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy
"President Lincoln zealously and persistently devised schemes for the deportation of the negroes, which the latter deemed cruel and atrocious in the extreme." -Close friend and Federal Marshal Ward Hill Lamon
"I believe the practice of slavery in the South is the mildest and best regulated system of slavery in the world now or heretofore."
-William Tecumseh Sherman (1861)
"Our Union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in a civil war. If it cannot live in the affections of the people, it must one day perish. Congress possesses many means of preserving it by conciliation, but the sword was not placed in their hands to preserve it." -President James Buchanan December 6, 1860
"No real statesman could ever contemplate so sweeping and serious a measure as sudden and general emancipation without looking to the future and providing for its consequences." -George McClellan
"I can touch a bell on my right hand, and order the arrest of a citizen of Ohio. I can touch the bell again, and order the imprisonment of a citizen in New York; and no power on earth, except that of the President, can release them. Can the Queen of England do so much?" -Secretary of State William Seward
"If I tap that little bell, I can send you to a place where you will never hear the dogs bark." -Secretary of War Edwin Stanton
"Measures, however unconstitutional, might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation." -Abraham Lincoln