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)

“You have to know some facts, but the most interesting things are uncertain.”

–Kenneth Jackson

George Washington’s birthday ran a surprising close third to Thanksgiving and Christmas in soldiers’ affections. The holiday likely assumed greater importance in war than in peace because it reminded soldiers that they were fighting to preserve the nation’s Revolutionary heritage.

—Defeating Lee: A History of the Second Corps, Army of the Potomac, Lawrence A. Kreiser

(image/Library of Congress)

It was a thing to brood over, this war with its terrible cost and its veiled meanings, and the wisest man could perhaps do little more than ask searching questions about it.

Bruce Catton, The American Heritage New History of the Civil War

Many of the monuments have cost from $10,000 to $100,000; and marble and truth have been tortured to transform the vices of the living into the virtues of the dead.

Junius Henri Browne, The Great Metropolis (1869)