Harold Holzer Quotes

One of the cost of holding a Federal office was geographic isolation in the nation's capital.

President-elect Lincoln to his confidants: "The people of the South do not know us. They are not allowed to receive Republican papers down there.

The revelers in the State House, however, had no intention of retiring for the night. Instead they emptied into the streets and massed outside the telegraph office, shouting "New York 50,000 majority for Lincoln - whoop, whoop hurrah!" The entire city "went off like one immense cannon report, with shouting from houses, shouting from stores, shouting from house tops, and shouting everywhere.

The Bible and newspapers, to both Lincoln and Greeley, they represented equally compelling gospel.

A writer at the time said, "Lincoln means to sink the man in the public officer.

At times, said the founder of the Chicago Tribune, Lincoln seemed to reach into the clouds and take out the thunderbolts.

When a grizzled yeoman worker appeared one morning to complain that as a state legislator many years earlier, in hard times, young Lincoln had inexcusably voted to raise his government salary from two to all of four dollars a day," Lincoln listened to the reproach calmly. "Now, Abe, I want to know what in the world made you do it?" demanded the old Democrat. With deadpan seriousness, Lincoln explained: "I reckon the only reason was that we wanted the money.

The firmament breaks up. In black eclipse Light after light goes out. One evil star, Luridly glaring through the smoke of war, As in the dream of the Apocalypse, Drags others down.

Superficial and emotional subject might sway undecided voters.

Lincoln again got his name prominently mentioned in the New York Tribune, though this time it was for allegedly pumping up his expense account.

Lincoln must have welcomed the chance that evening to escape from such friends, if only to submit to a final fitting for the recently delivered inaugural suit from the Chicago tailors Titsworth & Brother.

As of Election Day, Lincoln had successfully avoided not only his three opponents, but also his own running mate, Hannibal Hamlin. Republicans had nominated the Maine senator for vice president without Lincoln's knowledge, much less his consent - true to another prevailing political custom that left such choices exclusively to the delegates - in an attempt to balance the Chicago convention's choice of a Westerner for the presidency.

Southern newspapers hungry for fodder to roil the secession debate fed their subscribers the most inciteful material they could unearth in the Northern press. Northern journals scoured Southern papers for similarly provocative reports designed to confirm hotheaded Southern disloyalty.

It is a newspaper's duty to print the news and raise hell. Wilbur Storey

The infant New York Times boasted that no newspaper printing what was really worth reading ever perished for lack of readers.

Almost from the moment votes are counted, lame-duck chief executives invariably recede into superfluity, but Lincoln's hapless predecessor, James Buchanan, made procrastination into an art form. He could not have excused himself from responsibility at a more portentous moment, or left his successor with graver problems to address once he was constitutionally entitled to do so.

We need to know not only what is done but what is purposed and said by those who shape the destines of states and realms." Horace Greeley

One of Lincoln's intimates as a presidential candidate urged him to make no promises and not to part with those kind words which could be interpreted as promises.

Harvard students rallied on campus to offer formal, but "cordial," congratulations to their fellow student, Robert T. Lincoln, son of the president-elect and newly dubbed - in honor of the Prince of Wales's recent triumphant American tour - the "Prince of Rails.

Fighting newspaper editors for the last word was a losing proposition.

Horace Greeley's conversation inevitably becomes a speech.

So great was the quest for patronage that Lincoln came to hope that Southerners would never leave the Union and abandon the plum government jobs they might retain if they remained loyal. As he joked rather cynically to the Ohio editor and politician Donn Piatt over a chicken dinner at the Lincoln home: "Were it believed that vacant places could be had at the North Pole, the road there would be lined with dead Virginians.

Just a week earlier, coincidentally, he had quietly terminated a little known year-and-a-half-long stint as silent co-owner of Springfield's German language newspaper. Lincoln had invested $400 in the publication in 1859 to ensure its total loyalty to the Republican party. Mission accomplished, he now turned over full ownership of the Illinois Staats-Anzeiger, presses, type, and all, to his neighbor, editor Theodore Canisius. (Later, Lincoln further rewarded Canisius with a more valuable commodity: the consulate in Vienna.)

By mid-November, his protests notwithstanding, whiskers began sprouting from his face. A few weeks later, his assistant private secretary, John Hay, approvingly punned: Election news Abe's hirsute fancy warrant - Apparent hair becomes heir apparent.44

As a host, Lincoln was "never at a loss as to the subjects that please the different classes of visitors and there is a certain quaintness and originality about all he has to say, so that one cannot help feeling interested. His 'talk' is not brilliant," Villard observed. "His phrases are not ceremoniously set, but pervaded with a humorousness and, at times, with a grotesque joviality, that will always please. I think it would be hard to find one who tells better jokes, enjoys them better and laughs oftener than Abraham Lincoln.

Historian David M. Potter pointed out in 1942 that as president-elect, Lincoln was no more than "simply a lawyer from Springfield, Illinois - a man of great undeveloped capacities and narrowly limited background. He was more fit to become President than to be President.

James Gordon Bennett said he aimed to be, "serious in my aims but full of frolic in my means.

THE APPROACH OF Thanksgiving on November 29 sent Springfield into a panic - not over the nation-imperiling crisis plaguing its leading citizen, but the apparently more dismaying prospect of a local turkey shortage.

James M. McPherson spoke for a later generation of scholars when he asserted in 1988 that Lincoln's entire, public inaugural journey might have been a "mistake," because in his effort to avoid "a careless remark or slip of the tongue" that might "inflame the crisis further," the president-elect "indulged in platitudes and trivia," producing "an unfavorable impression on those who were already disposed to regard the ungainly president-elect as a commonplace prairie lawyer.

The author observers that better technology actually increased division because rival outlets funded by rival parties could get their slant to the partisans

And Indiana's John Defrees expressed his belief that the inclusion of Winfield Scott of Virginia, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, and Edward Bates of Missouri "would do much to bring about a re-action among the people of all the Southern States except S. Carolina, which is insane beyond hope of cure."134 (Stephens himself later branded as "totally groundless" the "rumor" that he had ever discussed a cabinet appointment with the president-elect.

Greeley knew no language but his, but of that, he possessed a most extraordinary mastery. An employee

John J. Hendee of Blackman, Michigan, argued that he was entitled to a job simply because he was "governed by the principles" outlined on an enclosed card. Labeled, "God's Commands," the manifesto called on its bearers to worship God, tell the truth, abstain from "intoxicating drinks," and avoid marrying "blood relation[s]." The list of commandments ended with the warning: "Waste not your strength in any unnatural manner" - in other words, do not masturbate.

Any journalist who holds the office writes in a straitjacket.

But no opposition grumbling could spoil the moment for the new president-elect. He donned his overcoat, thanked the telegraph operators for their hard work and hospitality, and stuffed the final dispatch from New York into his pocket as a souvenir. It was about time, he announced to one and all, that he "went home and told the news to a tired woman who was sitting up for him.

The author said Frederick Douglass described himself as a "graduate" of slavery with the marks of his diploma on his back.

Not everyone was laughing. Ascribing "incapacity, stupidity, imbecility, gross ignorance and habitual venality" to the stalemated Congress, the New York Herald angrily concluded that "no remedy whatever is to be looked for from their representatives." Sounding eerily like President Buchanan in his December annual message, it blamed not Southern extremism but "republican fanaticism" for the current "avalanche of destruction.

He not only fumbled badly in his attempts at impromptu oratory en route to the capital, but worst of all, ended his journey in the dead of night, embarrassingly fearful for his safety, after encouraging unseemly partisan demonstrations in friendly Northern cities. He was too conspicuous. He was too sequestered. He was too careless. He was too calculating. He was too conciliatory. He was too coercive. He was too sloppy.

I'm the only English thing they can vent their anger on.

Still, their affection for each other remained strong: while Baker was serving in Washington, the Lincolns honored him by naming their second-born son for the congressman. (Edward Baker Lincoln died tragically at age three in 1850.) When Baker finished his term, he dutifully handed off his House seat to Lincoln.

Only a writer "with Bennett's craft and brass could manage to praise and insult his readers at the same time.

Robert T. Lincoln, the president's eldest son, who won fame as the "Prince of Rails" during the secession winter, was the only one of his children to live to maturity. He became U.S. secretary of war, minister to Great Britain, and president of the Pullman Company following brief service on General Grant's staff at the end of the Civil War. Though frequently mentioned as a Republican candidate for president, Robert shunned electoral politics. He later brought his mother to trial in a successful effort to have her committed for insanity. Robert died an extremely wealthy man at age eighty-four in 1926.

Jefferson said he only read the advertisements in the newspaper, because it was there he was most likely to find the truth.

The letter is too belligerent. If I were you, I would state the facts as they were, without the pepper and salt. Abraham Lincoln

A female war correspondent so popular that she had some credibility in saying she controlled half of her newspaper's circulation approached General Winfield Scott during the Mexican War with information that could help him. He was unwilling to get help from someone in petticoats.

Soon thereafter, Lincoln glimpsed another "mysterious" and, he feared, "ominous" vision in his own bedroom mirror. While reclining on a lounge, he glanced up to notice a "double-image of himself in the looking-glass," one clear, the other pallid. For a moment, it was vivid; then it vanished - at first, two Lincolns side by side, then none at all.

It came as no surprise that another visitor to Springfield found Lincoln on November 14 "reading up anew" on the history of Andrew Jackson's response to the 1832 Nullification Crisis. While he made no effort to conceal "the uneasiness which the contemplated treason gives him," Lincoln assured his guest that, like Jackson, he would not "yield an inch.

Lincoln may have shown how relieved he was that there had been none of the "outrage and violence" some had predicted in New York when a giant of a man neared him, and someone in the crowd cried out, "That's Tom Hyer," the retired prizefighter who had won fame with a 101-round victory years before. To which the president-elect replied, to much laughter: "I don't care, so long as he don't hit me.

One editor during the Civil War got a grievous message to meet his brothers corpse, only to find out that the telegraph operator had garbled the message to meet his living brother's CORPS.

Samuel FB Morse's SECOND question over the telegraph was, "Have you any news?

From "boyhood up," as Lincoln once confided to his old friend Ward Hill Lamon, "my ambition was to be President.

Even more secretively, Lincoln took up his pen around this same time to write a deeply felt manifesto of principle that he shared with absolutely no one, certainly not sculptor Thomas Jones, in whose presence he likely composed it. Secret or not, it bracingly confirms Lincoln's steadfast determination to preserve - and ultimately, extend - not only the permanence of the Union, but also its guarantee of liberty. He had thought much about these questions in recent days, pondering concepts that went well beyond the planks of the Republican platform he so often cited. The result was an appeal not just to reason but also to emotion, a heartfelt justification for resisting any compromise that reneged on the original promise of American freedom.

Lincoln jibed that a general INVADED Canada without resistance and out-vaded it without pursuit.

The author says that though the Mexican War wound down, the interpretation of it was just beginning.

Lincoln had an almost childlike habit of regaling visitors with any sharp saying he'd uttered during the day, taking simple-hearted pleasure in some of his best hits.

Lincoln's "campaign" for president ended how and where it began: in adamant silence, and in the same Illinois city to which he had so tenaciously clung since the national convention. Like the solar eclipse that had obscured the Illinois sun in July, Lincoln remained in Springfield, hidden in full view.

His targets had little in common, other than that they had somehow aroused his enmity.

As the endlessly patient husband explained of his volatile wife's outbursts some years later: "If you knew how little harm it does me, and how much good it does her, you wouldn't wonder that I am meek.

Newspaper accounts must not only be studied, but, occasionally refuted.

Lincoln bought a German language newspaper.

After he "urged his way" to the voting table, Lincoln followed ritual by formally identifying himself in a subdued tone: "Abraham Lincoln."91 Then he "deposited the straight Republican ticket" after first cutting his own name, and those of the electors pledged to him, from the top of his preprinted ballot so he could vote for other Republicans without immodestly voting for himself.