Luke White

“As the season is now fast approaching when every man must expect to be drawn into the field of action, it is highly necessary that he should prepare his mind, as well as everything necessary for it. It is a noble cause we are engaged in, it is the cause of virtue and mankind, every temporal advantage and comfort to us, and our posterity depends upon the vigor of our exertions. . . . But it may not be amiss for the troops to know that if any man in action shall presume to skulk, hide himself, or retreat from the enemy, without the orders of his commanding officer, he will be instantly shot down, as an example of cowardice. On”
― David McCullough, 1776

“At length Lincoln climbed onto the end platform of a train composed just for this first leg of his journey, a small but cheery “Special” with a locomotive and wood-filled tender, baggage car, and a single bright-yellow passenger car. The locomotive was a tried-and-true 4-4-0—four unpowered small wheels on a guide “bogie” up front, four giant fifty-four-inch-diameter drive wheels under the cab and body—built by the Hinkley Locomotive Works of Boston, and, per custom, given a name: “L. M.Wiley.” Whether Lincoln knew it at the time or not, the engine’s namesake, Leroy M. Wiley, sixty-six, a wealthy director of the Great Western Railroad, was a slaveholder from Alabama with plantations in Eufaula and Macon County. He would soon be declared an “alien enemy.”
― Erik Larson, The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

“All that gives me most pleasure in the retrospect,” he preached to his older son, “is connected with others, an evidence that we are not placed here to live exclusively for ourselves.”
― David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback

“Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side / Thy every action let the goddess guide.”
― David McCullough, 1776