Sublime

By dint of his youth, foreign birth, and cosmopolitan outlook, he was spared prewar entanglements in provincial state politics, making him a natural spokesman for a new American nationalism.

When our ancestors, Rousseau wrote, made the fatal decision to divide the earth into individually owned plots, creating legal structures to protect their property, then governments to enforce those laws, they imagined they were creating the means to preserve their liberty. In fact, they ‘ran headlong to their chains’.

Nineteenth-century political audiences were extremely well-informed—it was the age’s mass entertainment—and Lincoln’s listeners perfectly understood whom he was talking about. Slavery’s apologists often spoke of the need for a social “mudsill”—“a class to do the mean duties, to perform the drudgeries of life,” as a South Carolinian put it. Slavery

do not fear that in their chiefs they will find tyrants, but rather schoolmasters.

If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.

palisades,

Washington looked favorably upon William Gordon’s history, as long as Congress first gave him license to open up his papers. A dissenting minister from Roxbury, Massachusetts, Dr. Gordon had been a staunch supporter of the independence movement. When Congress gave Washington its approval to unseal his papers, the indefatigable Gordon spent more tha

grandstanding,

Jefferson