Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
The Senate, William S. White, the body’s most prominent chronicler, wrote in 1956, is “the South’s unending revenge upon the North for Gettysburg.”
Robert A. Caro • Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III
Moreover, Harriet Stowe had made a black man her hero, and she took his race seriously, and no American writer had done that before. The fundamental fault, she fervently held, was with the system. Every white American was guilty, the Northerner no less than the slaveholder, especially the churchgoing kind, her kind.
David McCullough • Brave Companions
Abraham Lincoln. Dude was president at a time when half the country preferred war to abandoning slavery. His life was under constant threat by his enemies. In his personal life, two of his sons had died in childhood and he was struggling with crippling depression.
And yet, during his second inaugural address in 1865, he called for “malice towards n... See more
And yet, during his second inaugural address in 1865, he called for “malice towards n... See more
History as an antidote to despair
What won the war, for the Americans, was a Machiavellian insight: that a constitutional monarchy’s humiliation of an absolute monarchy could cause the latter, years later, to rescue a republican revolutionary upstart. Still bitter over France’s loss of North America to the British in 1763, Louis XVI welcomed rebel emissaries to Paris in 1776. The A
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