Douglas understood what the Republicans failed to see—that Southerners were serious in their threats to secede from the Union if Lincoln won the election.
As ever, books remained a medium through which Theodore and Edith connected and interpreted the larger world. Like Edith, Theodore filled pages of his letters with talk of authors and their creations....
An uncommon intuitive capacity and interpersonal intelligence allowed him as a child to read the intentions and desires of his parents, to react appropriately to shifting household moods—gifts that he...
The biggest danger to American stability, Johnson argued, is the politics of principle, which brings out the masses in irrational fights for unlimited goals, for once the masses begin to move, then th...
In the long sentences of the president’s message, semicolons followed by yet or but separated clauses that balanced each side of an issue, reflecting Roosevelt’s characteristic on the one hand, on the...
How had Lincoln been able to lead these inordinately prideful, ambitious, quarrelsome, jealous, supremely gifted men to support a fundamental shift in the purpose of the war? The best answer can be fo...
From the time he had first spoken out against the extension of slavery into the territories in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincoln had insisted that while the spread of slavery must be fairly...
Clay had been able, decade after decade, to quell rancor and bring opposing parties together in compromise. Time and again, he resisted extremes of opinion in both North and South. Whatever he did, he...
Act like you’re talking to those folks, he counseled his students. Look one of them in the eye and then move on and look another one in the eye. During competitions, he utilized all his supple array o...
A finely developed sense of timing—knowing when to wait and when to act—would remain in Lincoln’s repertoire of leadership skills the rest of his life.
In Louisiana, a group of nine Negro GIs boarded a train for transfer from the hospital at Camp Claiborne to the hospital at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. The train was delayed for twelve hours. The only p...
I made the discovery long ago that very few people made a great difference to me, but that those few mattered enormously. I live surrounded by people, and my thoughts are always with the few that matt...
American troops stationed in the Philippines suppressed the native uprising that had followed the treaty. Known as the Philippine Insurrection, that conflict had erupted when the Filipinos learned, af...
Admiral Dahlgren’s twenty-one-year-old son, Ulric, had lost a leg at Gettysburg. When he appeared at a Washington party, he was surrounded by pretty girls. They stayed by his side all night, refusing...
Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued in another context many years later, the grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endu...