Sublime

“No speech in the English language, perhaps no speech in modern times, had ever been as widely diffused and widely read as Webster’s Second Reply to Hayne,” an historian of the period was to write. That speech “raised the idea of Union above contract or expediency and enshrined it in the American heart.” It made the Union, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wo

A couple of days later Washington returned to the Senate, which approved the three commissioners to negotiate with the Creeks. It proved his farewell appearance in the Senate chamber. In a decision pregnant with lasting consequences, Washington decided that he would henceforth communicate with that body on paper rather than in person and trim “advi

Rayburn would say, “I’m not for sale”—and then he would walk away without a backward glance, as he had walked away from a President. His integrity was certified by his bankbook. At his death, at the age of seventy-nine, after decades as one of the most powerful men in the United States, a man courted by railroad companies and oil companies, his sav

Walker soon became disgusted by Frémont’s self-promoting histrionics and rank cowardice in the field – a combination he found particularly loathsome. They

A curb on the practice was enacted in 1917, after President Wilson had added a phrase to the American political lexicon by denouncing “a little group of willful men” (actually eleven senators, including La Follette and his fellow liberal George Norris) who had talked to death Wilson’s proposal to arm American merchantmen against German submarine at