Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization; 6 January 1872

Except for his stealing, Tweed would have been a great man; but had he been honest, he wouldn’t have been Tweed and would not have left nearly so great a mark.

–Kenneth D. Ackerman, Boss Tweed: The Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York

(image/NYPL)

One of the most tender and compassionate of men, he was forced to give orders which cost thousands of lives; by nature a man of order and thrift, he saw the unutterable waste and destruction which he could not prevent. The cry of the widow and the orphan was always in his ears; the awful responsibility resting upon him as the protector of an imperilled republic kept him true to his duty, but could not make him unmindful of the intimate details of that vast sum of human misery involved in civil war.

–John Hay on Lincoln

You don’t understand anything about this. You have no idea what it feels like to stand on a battlefield pretending to fight for something you believe in.

–Everybody Loves Raymond’s Frank Barone on Civil War reenacting

(image/Alan Light)

There was a cheering crowd at the Auburn train station in August 1870 to send Seward and the Risleys on their way. In Salt Lake City, Brigham Young introduced them to eleven of his sixteen wives and almost all of his forty-nine living childrem.

–Walter Stahr, Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man

Lincoln inaugural at the unfinished U.S. Capitol Building, March 1861

From April 1850 until the day he abandoned Washington to become president of the Confederacy eleven years later, [Jefferson] Davis would be the new Capitol’s political champion, benefactor, and shepherd. Without him the modern Capitol, recognized throughout the world as an enduring symbol of republican democracy would never have existed.

–Guy Gugliotta, Freedom’s Cap: The United States Capitol and the Coming of the Civil War

A litte irony to go with your coffee

(image/Library of Congress)

“I hope no one takes it strictly as a history lesson,” he said. “There’s much more to the movie than that. It gives you an opportunity to think about the fact that politics is still dirty. And that great things are done by people, working hard. Great things are not hurled from the heavens like lightning bolts by an old man with a gray beard in a white robe. They don’t spring from the earth full-blown. Great things are the achievement of sometimes lowly people working very hard.”

–Tommy Lee Jones discussing Lincoln, opening nationwide today

(Hat tip: the Hayfoot)

(image courtesy Dreamworks and Twentieth Century Fox)