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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Erik Larson
Read between
February 8 - February 9, 2025
“but there was a nervous twitch on his countenance when the messenger from the telegraph office entered, that indicated an anxiety within that no coolness from without could repress.”
Karma yogi in training
“It seemed as if he suddenly bore the whole world upon his shoulders, and could not shake it off.”
Responsibility
Shortly before this, however, as he was walking home, a friend heard him say, “God help me, God help me.”
Ram Ram Ram
To Lincoln all this rancor was a mystery. He could not fathom South Carolina’s reaction. An election had taken place; he had won; America’s greatest democratic tradition had been upheld.
Elections determine leaders
A Kentuckian by birth and a former owner of enslaved laborers, Anderson was sympathetic to the South but staunchly loyal to the U.S. Army.
Man of internal "inconsistencies", typical i think.
perhaps a sign of intelligence to hold two opposing thoughts in mind
passenger steamships
Didnt know of such a thing.
in the ocean?
harbor pilot.
Interesting job
that strength was the best deterrent. “I need not say how anxious I am—indeed, determined, so far as honor will permit—to avoid collision with the citizens of South Carolina,” he wrote. “Nothing, however, will be better calculated to prevent bloodshed than our being found in such an attitude that it would be madness and folly to attack us.”
Peace through force
The students developed a hair-trigger sensitivity to abrasions of honor, and with it a corollary penchant, and reputation, for violence.
Hicks
rednecks
“We shall not fail—if we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise counsels may accelerate or mistakes delay it, but sooner or later the victory is sure to come.”
Great line
“The insanity of the act does not impeach the rectitude of the motive.”
How to think of this?
do i agree?
“for we had hoped that such a man as he without the least knowledge of state affairs, without any polish of manner would not be chosen to represent this great nation, but so it
Stuff people thought
Lincoln had one more paragraph, startlingly naïve, that he’d wanted Trumbull to include.
Even great presidents can be naive
At least such is my present feeling and purpose.”
Commitment to consistency escape
The prospect of a war did not worry him; he doubted secession would lead to violence.
Wow
But he did harbor the concern that once having exited the Union, the Southern states might descend into a political free-for-all dominated by radicals—“the little great men”—seeking only power and personal gratification.
Wise
“What she desires,” he wrote, exercising his penchant for deploying feminine pronouns to refer to the state, “is a Southern Slaveholding Confederacy and to exemplify to the world the perfection of our civilization, the immensity of our resources and that the wonderful progress of these United States is mainly due to us.”
He wanted recognition of not being backward but virtuous and good
The fort was part of a network of large coastal fortresses meant to prevent a repeat of the humiliation inflicted on America by Britain in 1814 when its navy burned the U.S. Capitol and the “President’s House,” as the White House was known at the time. Construction began in 1829, but now, thirty years later, the fort was still far from complete.
Island forts to prevent being bullied by naval power Great Britain
this wall was Sumter’s weakest and least-heavily armed; here, too, as at Moultrie, the fort’s designers never anticipated having to defend against an attack from behind by a rebellious state.
Attack vector is assumed
This perplexed Buchanan. “How your state—what is it to Georgia whether a fort in Charleston harbor is abandoned?” “Sir,” Toombs answered, “the cause of Charleston is the cause of the South.” “Good God Mr. Toombs, do you mean that I am in the midst of a revolution?” “Yes Sir—more than that—you have been there for a year and have not yet found it out.”
Truth comes as a conqueror only to those who have lost the art of receiving her as a friend
“No echo seemed to come back from the loyal North to encourage us. Our glasses in vain swept the horizon; the one flag we longed to see was not there.”
Hope not visible
like the unrelenting surge of petitioners seeking patronage jobs in his administration. Journalist Henry Villard called them “place-wanting cormorants.”
Leaders / winners are expected to pay off
when it reported earnestly on New
Why is something erroneous and inflammatory called earnest ?!?!?!
Citing scripture, he told his friend, “My cup of bitterness is full and overflowing.”
Cup of bitterness is full and overflowing
“A word fitly spoken by you now would be like ‘apples of gold in pictures of silver,’ ” this last a reference to Proverbs 25:11 in the Old Testament of the Bible.
Apples of gold in picture of silver
“If you did there would be more brains in your belly than there ever will be in your head!”
Great line
“When men come under the influence of fanaticism, there is no telling where their impulses or passions may drive them.”
Great line
Varina did not share her husband’s harsh disavowal of Buchanan. “I love the dear old man,” she wrote, “and would like to forget that I do.”
Sometimes wives or spouses see things that the other can't
The convention opened at noon and, after various preliminary actions, approved a motion to allow Ruffin to take a seat in the hall itself among the delegates. He was escorted to the floor by two deputies in an ostentatious manner. “I would have preferred a less ceremonious introduction,” he wrote in his diary, “but I could not avoid it.” His sincerity here is doubtful, for he loved nothing more than being the object of elaborate public attention.
He fools himself .
why?
vasanas. Do fhey like to hide?
If slavery was good, then slaveowners were good, and anyone who said otherwise abraded their honor, something no Southerner could forgive.
Slavery became their Lord
Honor became their Lord
“You think our system an evil—a sin, and one that, therefore, cannot last,” Hammond wrote. “We think the same precisely of yours, but while we don’t trouble ourselves about yours, you make all sorts of war on us about ours in which we see no evil, no sin, and nothing but good. We think it far better than yours—at least for us—in all respects. “Can you not let us alone?”
An attempt to understand .
but not a profound one. No exposition nor analysis of the reasons
She vowed that she would “never be found in the same Confederacy with South Carolina…that really, for the first time in my life, I was ashamed of being a Southerner, since the whole North was crying out at the little pitiful, contemptible course his State was pursuing towards the fort in her harbor. Indeed, I said a great many very unpleasant truths, in the most pleasant manner possible.” She did hope for an amicable resolution to the crisis, she told her husband, but she added that if he and his garrison were made to abandon the fort and cede it to South Carolina, “I, for one, will not be
...more
The wife influences
To him I commend you all—permit me to ask that with equal security and faith you all will invoke His wisdom and guidance for me.”
Please pray for guidance and wisdom from Him for me
‘Behind the cloud the sun is still shining.’ ”
Hope
Longfellow
Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining
Crawford expressed a degree of bitterness, leavened with pride, and made it clear that he had no illusions about the subtext of what was occurring. “We are to be left to ourselves and our own exertions as a sacrifice to turn public opinion against those who attack us, and then if possible save the border states and the Union,” he wrote.
People get it.
they get it
Lincoln, he told her, “is determined that he will have a compound Cabinet; and that it shall be peaceful, and even permanent”—a reference to the fact that Lincoln’s cabinet choices not only had clashing personalities but that a number of them, including Seward himself, had competed against him for the Republican presidential nomination.
When does it mke sense to hear competing counsel?
“The first notion he acquires in life is, that he was born to command, and the first habit he contracts is that of ruling without resistance. His education tends, then, to give him the character of a haughty and hasty man,—irascible, violent, ardent in his desires, impatient of obstacles but easily discouraged if he cannot succeed upon his first attempt.”
Thomas Sowell: hicks from Scotland
May he now deserve and achieve success, and acquire justly an honorable reputation, if not distinction and glory. But if not—an early and honorable death in fighting for his county’s rights and defense is preferable to a useless and inglorious life extended to old age.”
Interesting request
