Quotes About Legacy

They promulgated a view of the Civil War as a righteous cause that had nothing to do with slavery but only states' rights—to which an incredulous James Longstreet once replied, "I never heard of any other cause of the quarrel than slavery.

Despite Grant's best efforts at Appomattox, the breach of the Civil War never healed but became deeply embedded in American political culture.

So long as we are a young and virtuous people, this instrument will bind us together in mutual interests, mutual welfare, and mutual happiness. But when we become old and corrupt, it will bind us no longer.

My family is American, Ulysses later declared proudly, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral.

Frederick Douglass paired Grant with Lincoln as the two people who had done most to secure African American advances:

May we not justly say . . . that the liberty which Mr. Lincoln declared with his pen General Grant made effectual with his sword—by his skill in leading the Union armies to final victory?

old Abe is through with his next four years, we will put him [i.e., Grant]

How this seemingly dull, phlegmatic man, in a stupendous act of nation building, presided over the victorious Continental Army and forged the office of the presidency is a mystery to most Americans. Something essential about Washington has been lost to posterity, making him seem a worthy but plodding man who somehow stumbled into greatness.

Paranoid thinking seems to be a legacy of all revolutions, with purists searching for signs of heresy, and the American experience was no exception.

Wherever our flag floats, it is the flag of slavery

In addition to his better-known title of Father of His Country, Washington is also revered in certain circles as the Father of the American Mule.

elite pedigree on both sides of his family, Jefferson was anything but common. His father, Peter, was a tobacco planter, a judge of the court of chancery, and a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, while his mother, Jane Randolph, came from a prominent family. By the time Peter Jefferson died, he bequeathed to his children more than 60 slaves, 25 horses, 70 head of cattle, 200 hogs, and 7,500 acres; two-thirds of this bountiful legacy went to his eldest son, Thomas.

Rockefeller's philanthropy was relatively discreet.

Se John Kirwan Venton tinha esperanças de pôr as mãos na herança de Ann, foi frustrado pela prudência do sogro, que deixou dois sétimos de seu patrimônio para Ann, mas especificou que Venton estaria excluído do dinheiro, referindo-se a ele como pessoa "lamentável em sua conduta".

Instead of making isolated gifts, Rockefeller wanted to finance institutions whose research would have a pervasive influence.

At twenty-eight, he married a young widow, Martha Wayles Skelton, who inherited 135 slaves after her father's death. This loving ten-year marriage was marred by childhood mortality—only two of their six children reached maturity—and in September 1782 Martha herself died at thirty-four. Only thirty-nine at the time, Jefferson survived his wife

Only in such passages do we see that Hamilton, for all his phenomenal success in the Continental Army, still felt unlucky and unlovely, still cursed by his past.

More than one person who was refused later accused Rockefeller of having ruined him.

his massive shadow dominated his son's life.

His faculties stayed intact until about fifteen minutes before the end. Then, at 2:00 P.M. on Thursday, July 12, 1804, thirty-one hours after the duel, forty-nine-year-old Alexander Hamilton died gently, quietly, almost noiselessly.

One day the king asked West whether Washington would be head of the army or head of state when the war ended. When West replied that Washington's sole ambition was to return to his estate, the thunderstruck king declared, "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.

Perhaps if Rockefeller had made himself available at the beginning of his career as he now did at the end, he might not have been sitting in the witness stand.

when John Rockefeller dies," Archbold said, "the world is going to be surprised to learn what a very great man he has been in every way.

Yet Gates was groomed by Rockefeller, and if he was granted a large measure of freedom, it was partly because Rockefeller had trained him as his proxy.