Sublime

When ardent Republicans heard Lincoln speak, they knew that if their beloved Seward could not win, they had in the eloquent orator from Illinois a man of considerable capacity whom they could trust, one who would hold fast on the central issue that had forged the party—the fight against extending slavery into the territories. Though Lincoln had ent

The very symbol and heart of that sovereignty was, to Lodge, the Senate’s power over treaties. “War can be declared without the assent of the Executive, and peace can be made without the assent of the House,” he had once pointed out. “But neither war nor peace can be made without the assent of the Senate.”

Nor did he have to devote much time to the question of Assistant Majority Leader, or “whip,” which was after all a job of even less significance. To Johnson’s request for a “leadership position,” he replied that the whip’s job was his if he wanted it. As a Senate historian was to summarize, “Johnson had no claim to the position, except that he had

But for the Virginia-born Wilson, the New Freedom was for whites only. The first southerner elected president since Zachary Taylor, Wilson immediately segregated the government’s workforce.

When Washington turned to Hamilton, he made plain that, unless he could vanquish the arguments of Randolph and Jefferson, he planned to veto the bank bill, telling him that he wished to “be fully possessed of the arguments for and against the measure before I express any opinion of my own.”27 By this point Washington knew the vigor of Hamilton’s mi

used the Abraham Lincoln approach. Lincoln used to argue both sides of the case when he was presenting it to the jury. He would take the opposition’s side, then he would take his client’s side. He was very careful to bring out more points in his own favor, but when he took the opposition’s side he was always fair, although he was undoubtedly not qu

The master salesperson takes a verbal paintbrush and instinctively uses full words like home instead of empty words like house.

He instructed Majority Leader Robinson to accept whatever changes were necessary. If a senator’s support could be obtained by adding his amendment, he said, add it. The resulting bill, said one Washington observer, “sought to legalize almost anything anybody could think up.”