Ted Widmer > Quotes

“The lessons of history were hard to ignore. Every democracy ever known had failed, beginning with the Greeks twenty-four centuries earlier. They had succumbed, one by one, to all the well-known vices of the people: corruption, greed, lust, ethnic hatred, distractibility, or simply a fatal indifference.”
― Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington

“It was difficult to know which part of the government would ignite first. The Supreme Court had plenty of dry kindling: most of its justices were old men born in the previous century. Congress was eternally bickering. And no executive had ever underperformed quite as spectacularly as James Buchanan.”
― Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington

“What if all the difficulties anticipated in the Federalist Papers—regional tensions, unscrupulous leaders, and a dysfunctional Congress—happened at precisely the same moment?”
― Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington

“They had felt their own power and saw in Lincoln the means of delivery from an administration that had brought “treachery, imbecility, and rascality” into their lives. It was time to rescue the republic from “the anarchy which has disgraced this great people in the eyes of the whole world.”121”
― Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington

“Artificial passions” could be easily stoked, he wrote, raising the temperature. A self-absorbed president, catering to the “worst caprices” of his supporters, could easily distract their attention from plodding matters of governance, and whip their enthusiasms into a frenzy, especially if he divided his supporters and his critics into “hostile camps.”
― Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington

“A self-absorbed president, catering to the “worst caprices” of his supporters, could easily distract their attention from plodding matters of governance, and whip their enthusiasms into a frenzy, especially if he divided his supporters and his critics into “hostile camps.”
― Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington

“In 1858, during his debate with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln predicted a future crisis over “the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants.” But he also saw hope for a solution, right in front of all Americans: “When in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began.”56 In other words, Lincoln came to Independence Hall with as clear a purpose as Thomas Jefferson had in 1776. He had spent his entire life approaching this stage.”
― Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington

“It almost seemed as if Buchanan’s regime was leasing the country’s name, as his friends enriched themselves and presided over a machinery of government that was lubricated with bribery, brandy, and insider deals. In New York, a lawyer, George Templeton Strong, wrote in his diary that he felt like he was reliving “the Roman Empire in its day of rotting.”
― Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington

“Foreign observers had marveled at the chaotic way in which Americans elected their presidents. The French writer, Alexis de Tocqueville, saw it as a quadrennial “crisis,” like a recurring fever in an otherwise healthy patient. “Artificial passions” could be easily stoked, he wrote, raising the temperature. A self-absorbed president, catering to the “worst caprices” of his supporters, could easily distract their attention from plodding matters of governance, and whip their enthusiasms into a frenzy, especially if he divided his supporters and his critics into “hostile camps.” With the cooperation of the press, all conversation would turn to the present rather than the future, until the”
― Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington

“If the Confederacy succeeded in starting a new country, based on slavery, it would destroy the special hope that the world’s millions had vested in America.”
― Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington

“For all the noise and heat generated by the 1840 campaign, its most lasting legacy may have been one of the shortest words in the English language. In the spring of 1839, the phrase “OK” began to circulate in Boston as shorthand for “oll korrect,” a slangy way of saying “all right.” Early in 1840, Van Buren’s supporters began to use the trendy expression as a way to identify their candidate, whom they labored to present as “Old Kinderhook,” perhaps in imitation of Jackson’s Old Hickory. Van Buren even wrote “OK” next to his signature. It spread like wildfire, and to this day it is a universal symbol of something elemental in the American character—informality, optimism, efficiency, call it what you will. It is spoken seven times a day by the average citizen, two billion utterances overall. And, of course it goes well beyond our borders; if there is a single sound America has contributed to the esperanto of global communication, this is it.”
― Ted Widmer, Martin Van Buren

“Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud? Like a swift-fleeting meteor, a fast-flying cloud A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave He passeth from life to his rest in the grave.166”
― Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington

“Memorably, he said, “I had rather have live vermin on my back than the tongue of one of these Washington women on my reputation.”
― Ted Widmer, Martin Van Buren

“Lincoln was born on a Kentucky farm called Sinking Spring, which, a neighbor explained, was “uneven” and “disagreeable to work for farming.”82 At age two, his family moved to Knob Creek, named after the steep hills called “knobs” that surrounded it, and made the ravine dark and subject to flooding.”
― Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington

“First, the panic had struck a death blow at his presidency. Now the slavery debate was turning acrimonious, making normal politics impossible.”
― Ted Widmer, Martin Van Buren

“In one of the most memorable lines that he ever put on paper, Van Buren wrote, “You might as well turn the current of the Niagara with a ladies fan as to prevent scheming and intrigue at Washington.”
― Ted Widmer

“Was the country simply too big to govern itself? Were the regions too far apart? These were legitimate questions, going back to the founding of the republic, when many wondered”
― Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington

“Human nature will not change,” Lincoln said in response to a serenade in 1864. “In any future great national trial,” he predicted, Americans would find people who were exactly “as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good” as those who lived in his day.”
― Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington

“fit on the day he arrived in Troy, clad in a heavy buffalo skin. But Lincoln was not an earth-giant, or a tree. He was simply a clear thinker who studied his country’s past, charted the best course he could, and stayed true to it. His moral compass worked.”
― Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington

“fissiparous,”
― Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington

“Among them was a recent widow, roughly twenty-seven, who had succeeded in convincing Pinkerton that women could be just effective as men, and often more so. Pinkerton later remembered Kate Warne as “a commanding person, with clear-cut, expressive features, and with an ease of manner that was quite captivating at times.” She was a “brilliant conversationalist” who could be “quite vivacious” but also understood “that rarer quality: the art of being silent.” For all of these reasons, she was a perfect spy. Like Dorothea Dix, Warne would play a large but unsung role in protecting Lincoln.119”
― Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington

“Mr Abe Lincoln if you don’t Resign we are going to put a spider in your dumpling and play the Devil with you you god or mighty god dam sunnde of a bith go to hell and buss my Ass suck my prick and call my Bolics your uncle Dick god dam a fool and goddam Abe Lincoln who would like you goddam you excuse me for using such”
― Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington

“the Southern states were seceding; they were also spreading contempt for the basic assumptions of democracy. Hostility to the Declaration of Independence, with its soaring claim of human rights, was as fundamental”
― Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington

“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”:”
― Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington