Sublime

In the middle of the last century, Lewis marched into the line of fire to summon a nation to be what it had long said it would be but had failed to become. Arrested forty-five times over the course of his life, Lewis suffered a fractured skull and was repeatedly beaten and tear-gassed. He led by example more than by words. He was a peaceful soldier

When the police captured McVeigh, he was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Abraham Lincoln and the words “Sic Semper Tyrannis.” The same words John Wilkes Booth shouted after he assassinated Lincoln, they mean “Thus always to tyrants” and are the words attributed to Brutus after he and his supporters murdered Caesar.

At Gettysburg in the spring of 1963, the centennial year of President Lincoln’s address at the dedication of the cemetery there, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson went to the Pennsylvania battlefield to speak at a Memorial Day commemoration. “One hundred years ago, the slave was freed,” Johnson said. “One hundred years later, the Negro remains in

Once in office, and freed from Southern obstructionism after the attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and his Republican majority unleashed a blitz of prodevelopment legislation almost without parallel in American history—a “second American Revolution,” in the words of historians Charles and Mary Beard. The Republican achievement has been obscured by the

August 1876, and Walker died two months later. He was seventy-seven years old. The cause of death, says Bil Gilbert, was nothing more or less than ‘having lived long enough’. How to distil that life into six lines, containing

Andy Jackson and Abe Lincoln!”