John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

... In 1856 the Democratic leaders beyond the Potomac threatened that, in the event of the choice of Fremont, they would not submit to his administration, but would appeal to the sword. The great majority of our citizens then regarded this as empty gasconade; but when, in 1860, on the election of Lincoln, they attempted to reverse the decision of the ballot-box by a resort to the battle-field, we saw that their declaration of 1856 was no idle threat. The Spanish-American mode of retrieving the loss of a Presidential campaign has been once tried by the Southern Democracy. The experiment has cost the nation seven thousand millions of dollars and one million of lives, and has entailed upon us and our posterity a debt of three thousand millions of money, with its necessary accompaniment of remorseless taxation, putting the democratic theory of government to the severest tests ever endured by any people in all history.

Not accepting in quietude and submission the scathing retribution that followed their great crime, many of these ex-rebels and ex-traitors-surviving as they do through the generosity of General Grant, whom they pursue with their malignant hate, and through the clemency of the government, of which they have proved themselves so unworthy — again threaten that, in case they suffer a defeat at the polls in the coming autumn, they will, heedless of their recent discomfiture, once more appeal from the verdict of the hustings to the arbitrament of arms; while, on the other hand, they declare with marked emphasis that, if they are successful in the pending struggle, they will, under the protection of the administration, and in spite of recent amendments to the Federal Constitution, and of the new constitutions of their several States, and of the enactments both of Congress and their legislatures, restore the Lost Cause by forcibly resuming and exercising all the rights they forfeited by the Rebellion.

The main question, then, involved in the present contest, and by the side of whose colossal proportions all matters concerning reconstruction and finance dwindle into insignificance, is whether our citizens will tolerate in this country the Spanish-American mode of setting aside the legitimate result