Mr. Monroe, if you have come to tell me that you repent, that you are sorry, very sorry, for the misrepresentations and the slanders and the stories you circulated against my dear husband, if you have come to say this, I understand it. But otherwise, no lapse of time, no nearness to the grave, makes any difference.
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.
Franklin wanted a unicameral legislature and an executive council in lieu of a president. He also opposed a presidential veto on legislation, thinking it would lead to executive corruption “till it ends in monarchy.
The free school is the promoter of that intelligence which is to preserve us as a free nation. If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side – and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.
Hamilton alone seemed resigned as the end neared. At one point, speaking of politics, he said, “If they break this union, they will break my heart.”69 He could have left no more fitting political epitaph.
He dabbled in watercolors, attended the theater, and quoted liberally from Shakespeare and Dickens.
Despite Grant’s best efforts at Appomattox, the breach of the Civil War never healed but became deeply embedded in American political culture.
When someone asked if he had ever doubted the North’s final victory, he shot back, “Never for a moment.” He quoted Seward, saying “that there was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare, but still enough to meet the emergency, and he agreed with Mr. Seward in this view.
Like her youngest son, Julia administered stern lectures on republican virtue. Before supper, two noblewomen stopped by to school her in palace etiquette. “Mrs. Grant,” one said, “I hope you will not feel fatigued. Our Queen always receives standing.” Julia replied breezily, “Oh, I am sure I will not feel the fatigue. You must remember I too have received for the last eight years and always standing.”32 Julia was at pains to remind the two women that they were dealing with American royalty. The.
My family is American,” Ulysses later declared proudly, “and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral.
He has no desire to rise by the fall of others; no glorying over another’s abasement;.
By the end of four years at West Point, he had capitulated to the tyranny of the clerical error and adopted Ulysses S. Grant as his new moniker for life.
Americans today know little about the terrorism that engulfed the South during Grant’s presidency. It has been suppressed by a strange national amnesia. The Klan’s ruthless reign is a dark, buried chapter in American history. The Civil War is far better known than its brutal aftermath.
By the end of Grant’s second term, white Democrats, through the “redeemer” movement, had reclaimed control of every southern state, winning in peacetime much of the power lost in combat. 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.
Frederick Douglass paired Grant with Lincoln as the two people who had done most to secure African American advances:.
Confederate forces were being whittled down and could not be replaced by the South’s smaller population.
Burr is said to have remarked, “Had I read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.”61.
Frederick Douglass, who had entertained hopes for the Haitian post, graciously conceded defeat. “Your appointment,” he told Bassett, “is a grand achievement for yourself and for our whole people.
Many of the real scenes in early California life exceed in strangeness and interest any of the mere products of the brain of the novelist,” he declared.
Grant had overwhelmingly won the electoral vote, and had garnered the largest popular majority of the century, nearly 56 percent of the vote, the biggest percentage between Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt.