Word: lawyers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...American writer's words are more admired than those of Abraham Lincoln. By the time of his assassination in 1865, he had written passages by which everything that followed would be measured. But such an ability was the last thing the American public expected from the obscure prairie lawyer who took office just four years earlier. "We have a President without brains," wrote the country's leading historian, George Bancroft. Bancroft was, admittedly, a Democrat, but many self-respecting Republicans were also concerned about the implications of having an untried, self-educated "rail splitter" as a leader in time...
...demeanor, that he was a rube. His obvious discomfort in formal clothes on ceremonial occasions and his constant fidgeting with his ill-fitting kid gloves did little to dispel those misgivings. Moreover, he insisted on entertaining sophisticated visitors by telling country stories in a broad hoosier accent. Wall Street lawyer George Templeton Strong wrote in his diary after their first meeting that the President was a "barbarian," a "yahoo." And Strong liked...
Still, as I look at his picture, it is the man and not the icon that speaks to me. I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. As a law professor and civil rights lawyer and as an African American, I am fully aware of his limited views on race. Anyone who actually reads the Emancipation Proclamation knows it was more a military document than a clarion call for justice. Scholars tell us too that Lincoln wasn't immune from political considerations and that his temperament could be indecisive and morose...
Lincoln's political resume was meager, his learning derided, and his election considered a stroke of luck. And yet the prairie lawyer from Springfield would emerge the undisputed captain of his distinguished Cabinet, earning the respect of colleagues who had originally disdained him, and become, as Whitman wrote, "the grandest figure yet, on all the crowded canvas of the Nineteenth Century...
...entire national political experience consisted of a single term in Congress that had come to an end nearly a dozen years earlier and two failed Senate races. He had absolutely no administrative experience and only one year of formal schooling. Newspapers described him as "a third-rate Western lawyer" and a "fourth-rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar...