''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
Thanks Trippler for the links.
ReplyDeleteYou bet!
ReplyDeleteI wish that somehow I could go back in time to exchange a few ideas with those brilliant folks in the T's. How would the nation and world have changed if they were aware of what was to come? I think it would be a very different world, indeed.
184-year-old Adams letter found
ReplyDeleteSixth president wrote about parents’ burial
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/04/21/184_year_old_adams_letter_found/?s_campaign=yahoo
"Adams penned the letter, dated Sept. 8, 1826, two months after his father died on the young nation’s Independence Day. He was seeking permission from the supervisors of the church, which he called a “temple,’’ to bury his father and mother there.
“I have considered it a duty devolving upon me to erect a plain and modest monument to his memory: and my wish is that divested of all ostentation it may yet be as durable as the walls of the Temple to the erection of which he has contributed, and as the Rocks of his native Town which are to supply the materials for it,’’ Adams wrote."
I will have to check but I wonder of JQA had any influence upon the T's or vice versa. He was religiously orthodox while most of them were not so this may have had some impact on their exchanges, if any.
ReplyDelete