Quotes from David S. Reynolds

In Mary's view, Trumbull should have given Lincoln his votes, not the other way around. Lincoln was relieved that at least the senatorship had gone to the like-minded Trumbull, whom he congratulated and continued to befriend.

Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that genius lies in "being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.

In Emerson's words, "A great style of hero draws equally all classes, all the extremes of society, till we say the very dogs believe in him.

Grant oversaw some enslaved people his wife had inherited. He disliked abolitionism, but he realized that slavery threatened to destroy the Union, which he wanted to save. Once he was in place as an officer in the Northern army, he devoted his energy to preserving the nation. Part of that devotion included an openness to using African American troops.

In 1820, Americans spent $ 12 million on liquor, an amount that exceeded the total expenditure of the US government.

As Lincoln later told a friend, "I don't like to hear cut-and-dried sermons. No—when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees!

Poetry became his favorite genre; he memorized poetic lyrics and recited them often. For him, poetry organized and crystalized experience as no other type of language did.

Lincoln once said that his father taught him how to work but not how to enjoy it.

Wendell Phillips declared: "Only by unintermitted agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.… Republics exist only on the tenure of being constantly agitated.

The Richmond Enquirer, the South's leading paper, called antislavery senators "a pack of curs" who "have become saucy, and dare to be impudent to gentlemen" and thus "must be lashed into submission…. Let them understand, that for every vile word spoken against the South, they will suffer so many stripes, and they will soon learn to behave themselves like decent dogs—they never can be gentlemen.

Whitman was coming to think that he, above all, was the one chosen to agitate the country. He wrote in his 1856 notebook: "Agitation is the test of the goodness and solidness of all politics and laws and institutions.—If they cannot stand it, there is no genuine life in them, and shall die." He once declared, "I think agitation is the most important factor of all—the most deeply important. To stir, to question, to suspect, to examine, to denounce!

He decimated many Democratic arguments but replaced them with virtually nothing. To expose Franklin Pierce's "ludicrous and laughable" record as a brigadier general in the Mexican War

It is an empty joy to appear better than you are; but a great blessing to be what you ought to be.

Lincoln managed to both respect religion and parody it

He had a wide-ranging knowledge of antislavery activism. He shared the loathing of slavery that was the common denominator among all its varieties, including Garrisonian radicalism, the evangelicalism of the Beechers and Finneys, Transcendentalist individualism, and the political approach of the Liberty and Free Soil Parties. Of the varieties, he strongly preferred the latter

Baboon, ape, gorilla: such epithets were used to describe him by adversaries and even by some allies. The Union general George McClellan, for instance, called him "the original gorilla.

The old Pilgrim barks, borne as by a miracle over the angry ocean

Americans are accustomed to seeing the subversive impact of popular music. Blues, jazz, rock, punk, rap, and so on—popular music has been like the prow of an icebreaker, bursting through the frozen sea of convention.

There were larger reasons for Walter Whitman's travails. He was a blunt-spoken worker accustomed to honest self-sufficiency in a time when the market was calling for new traits: slickness and self-promotion, with more than a dash of craft. He might love cattle, children, and living under his own roof, but what he needed in the new environment was an eye for the deal.

As a result of economic change and family planning, fertility rates dropped precipitously during the nineteenth century. The number of children for white American women sank from more than 7 in 1800 to fewer than 6 by 1825, 5.42 by 1850, 4.24 by 1880, to 3.54 by 1900.

He would once say that he wanted Leaves of Grass to be published as a pocket book, to be carried around everywhere: "That would tend to induce people to take me along with them and read me in the open air: I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air.

without immortality all would be sham and sport of the most tragic nature.

Melancholy Shakespearean passages provided him with relief. They offered structured, resonant versions of gloom. They organized sad topics and made them meaningful. Reciting dark writings aloud let him project his depression outward so that it was filtered through the improving lens of poetry. The rhythms and images of verse crystallized his private experience in a manner similar to the way his finest speeches crystallized and uplifted the national experience.

he allegedly told his host, "If this is coffee, please bring me some tea, but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.