"The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.
These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call [torture] wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly - done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated - we must place ourselves avowedly with them. []New sedition law[s] must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that [torture] is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private....The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to [torture], before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us....All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought [torture] right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this?....
If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored - contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man - such as a policy of "don't care" on a question about which all true men do care - such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance - such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did.
Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."
This is a modified quotation from President Lincoln's 1860 address to Cooper Union. I have substituted the word "torture" for the word "slavery" and omitted or substituted a few other sections and words to make it applicable. All of those changes are denoted by ellipses or square brackets.
I sent the unmodified quote to Senator Durbin's staff as a possible antidote to all the hate mail they've received in the past week. I asked them to print it out & pass it around or hang it on the wall if they thought it'd cheer people up. Durbin's a Lincoln geek, so maybe some of his staffers are too. Think it'll work?