Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day: Being narratives of the lives and deeds of statesmen, generals, and orators. Including biographical sketches and anecdotes of Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Sumner, Chase, Wilson, Greeley, Farragut, Andrew, Colfax, Stanton, Douglass, Buckingham, Sherman, Sheridan, Howard, Phillips and Beecher.Stowe, Harriet Beecher
History
Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day: Being narratives of the lives and deeds of statesmen, generals, and orators. Including biographical sketches and anecdotes of Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Sumner, Chase, Wilson, Greeley, Farragut, Andrew, Colfax, Stanton, Douglass, Buckingham, Sherman, Sheridan, Howard, Phillips and Beecher.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
United States -- Biography; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Biography
No race has stronger characteristics, bodily or mental, than that
powerful, obstinate, fiery, pious, humorous, honest, industrious,
hard-headed, intelligent, thoughtful and reasoning people, the
Scotch-Irish. The vigorous qualities of the Scotch-Irish have left
broad and deep traces upon the history of the United States. As if
with some hereditary instinct, they settled along the great Allegheny
ridge, principally from Pennsylvania to Georgia, in the fertile valleys
and broader expanses of level land on either side, especially to the
westward. In the healthy and genial air of these regions, renowned for
the handsomest breed of men and women in the world, the Scotch-Irish
acted out with thorough freedom, all the vigorous and often violent
impulses of their nature. They were pioneers, Indian-fighters,
politicians, theologians; and they were as polemic in everything else
as in theology. Jackson and Calhoun were of this blood. An observant
traveller in Tennessee described to the writer the interest with which
he found in that state literally hundreds of forms and faces with
traits so like the lean erect figure, high narrow head, stiff black
hair, and stern features of the fighting old President, that they might
have been his brothers. Many of our eminent Presbyterian theologians
like the late Dr. Wilson, of Cincinnati, have been Scotch-Irish too,
and with their spiritual weapons they have waged many a controversy as
unyielding, as stern and as unsparing as the battle in which Jackson
beat down Calhoun by showing him a halter, or as that brutal knife
fight in which he and Thomas H. Benton nearly cut each other's lives
out.
Horace Greeley is of this Scotch-Irish race, and after a rule which
physiologists well know to be not very uncommon, he presents a direct
reverse of many of its traits, more especially its physical ones.
Instead of a lean, erect person, dry hard muscles, a high narrow
head, coarse stiff black hair, and a stern look, he tends to be
fat, is shambling and bowed over in carrying himself, thinskinned
and smooth and fair as a baby, with a wide, long, yet rounded head,
silky-fine almost white hair, and a habitually meek sort of smile,
which however must not be trusted to as an index of the mind within.
Meek as he looks, no man living is readier with a strong sharp answer.
Non-resistant as he is physically, there is not a more uncompromising
an opponent and intense combatant in these United States. Mentally, he
shows a predominance of Scotch-Irish blood modified by certain traits
which reveal themselves in his readiness to receive new theories of
life.
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