I need not say I
don't want to come. There can be no satisfaction to me in being drawn into the
vortex of confusion in which public affairs seem to be. I cannot do or say
anything that will influence either the President or Congress. If the President
be impeached and the South reduced to Territories, the country will, of course,
relapse to a state of war or quasi war, and what good it is to do passes my
comprehension. Our debt is already as much as the country can stand, and we shall,
with Indians and local troubles, have full employment for all the regular army.
I suppose the Southern States will then require a standing army of an hundred
thousand men, and it would be prudent to provide them before the emergency is
created.
SOURCE: Rachel
Sherman Thorndike, Editor, The Sherman Letters: Correspondence Between
General and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891, p. 287-8
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