Quotes from Ted Widmer

It was difficult to know which part of the government would ignite first. The Supreme Court had plenty of dry kindling: most of its justices were old men born in the previous century. Congress was eternally bickering. And no executive had ever underperformed quite as spectacularly as James Buchanan.

The lessons of history were hard to ignore. Every democracy ever known had failed, beginning with the Greeks twenty-four centuries earlier. They had succumbed, one by one, to all the well-known vices of the people: corruption, greed, lust, ethnic hatred, distractibility, or simply a fatal indifference.

What if all the difficulties anticipated in the Federalist Papers—regional tensions, unscrupulous leaders, and a dysfunctional Congress—happened at precisely the same moment?

Artificial passions" could be easily stoked, he wrote, raising the temperature. A self-absorbed president, catering to the "worst caprices" of his supporters, could easily distract their attention from plodding matters of governance, and whip their enthusiasms into a frenzy, especially if he divided his supporters and his critics into "hostile camps.

It almost seemed as if Buchanan's regime was leasing the country's name, as his friends enriched themselves and presided over a machinery of government that was lubricated with bribery, brandy, and insider deals. In New York, a lawyer, George Templeton Strong, wrote in his diary that he felt like he was reliving "the Roman Empire in its day of rotting.

A self-absorbed president, catering to the "worst caprices" of his supporters, could easily distract their attention from plodding matters of governance, and whip their enthusiasms into a frenzy, especially if he divided his supporters and his critics into "hostile camps.

They had felt their own power and saw in Lincoln the means of delivery from an administration that had brought "treachery, imbecility, and rascality" into their lives. It was time to rescue the republic from "the anarchy which has disgraced this great people in the eyes of the whole world."121

Lincoln was born on a Kentucky farm called Sinking Spring, which, a neighbor explained, was "uneven" and "disagreeable to work for farming."82 At age two, his family moved to Knob Creek, named after the steep hills called "knobs" that surrounded it, and made the ravine dark and subject to flooding.

Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud? Like a swift-fleeting meteor, a fast-flying cloud A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave He passeth from life to his rest in the grave.166

In one of the most memorable lines that he ever put on paper, Van Buren wrote, "You might as well turn the current of the Niagara with a ladies fan as to prevent scheming and intrigue at Washington.

Memorably, he said, "I had rather have live vermin on my back than the tongue of one of these Washington women on my reputation.

First, the panic had struck a death blow at his presidency. Now the slavery debate was turning acrimonious, making normal politics impossible.

If the Confederacy succeeded in starting a new country, based on slavery, it would destroy the special hope that the world's millions had vested in America.

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd":

Human nature will not change," Lincoln said in response to a serenade in 1864. "In any future great national trial," he predicted, Americans would find people who were exactly "as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good" as those who lived in his day.

fissiparous