James Iredell’s careful apologia for the American cause—a teaching which he developed in a series of essays and public letters written from 1773-1778—clearly contains a foreshadowing of what he thought should be in a constitution for the United States… James Iredell was born at Lewes, Sussex County, England. He was the eldest of the [...]
The lesson of William Faulkner’s “Gold Medal” speech is both in the teaching it offers and in the method we must employ to grasp that meaning. It is a work of political imagination, drawing its rhetoric from the same fountainhead as poetry… The Summer of 1971, we Americans were removed by only half a decade [...]
Richard Weaver claimed his homeland was the “last nonmaterialistic civilization in the western world.” Modernity to him meant at bottom institutionalizing most of the Seven Deadly Sins… Though his worth and stature were early established among them, while yet living Richard M. Weaver was something of a puzzle for his friends within the American [...]
Thomas Jefferson’s fire bell sounded in the legislative darkness, tolling the “knell” of the Union he had so much helped to shape… This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve [...]
Controversy surrounds the story of John Sullivan’s life. Yet he is among the representative Americans of his time—generous to a fault, jealous of his personal honor, optimistic, gregarious, ambitious, and “larger than life”… John Sullivan John Sullivan (1740-1795), lawyer, entrepreneur, soldier, and political leader of New Hampshire during and after the American [...]
The theater of modern America loves to shock but has overdone the trick so often that our nerves are jaded and immune to further outrage. The New York stage must be allowed to dry up and blow away, creating space for a rebirth… To act out, in concert, before an audience, an interpretation of [...]
Because he was an antique Englishman, the Iron Duke of Wellington was able to recognize his campaigns as “war to the knife” and therefore to communicate his own inflexible view of their desperate significance to the men who marched beneath his banner… The Great Duke, by Sir Arthur Bryant (William Morrow and Company, 1972). Wellington: [...]
The literature of the American West embodies a clear perception of the frailty of corporate freedom and of the importance of men who have learned on their own to face down the barbarian, even though no one backs their play… There are two important corporate myths that shaped the life of eighteenth and nineteenth century [...]
The “House Divided Speech” is the watershed of Abraham Lincoln’s political career.[56] In this address, given to the Republican state convention that nominated their tall compatriot from Springfield to take the Little Giant’s place, there are no echoes of Henry Clay. It was the opening gun of Lincoln’s campaign to deprive Stephen Douglas of his [...]
As a promising young centralist, Abraham Lincoln played the role of champion for what Professor Michael Oakeshott has called the “enterprise association” theory of the state.[21] While serving as the elected representative of Sangamon (1834—1842), he first made a name for himself by enacting this part. Joining with other soon-to-be forefathers of the Republican [...]
After over one hundred years, it continues to be almost impossible for us to ask certain basic questions about the role of Abraham Lincoln in the formation of a characteristically American politics. At every appropriate point of inquiry, the Lincoln myth obtrudes. Since 1865 no one has denied the extraordinary purchase of that imaginative construct upon the idiom [...]
Beware lest any man tempt you through philosophy and vain deceit. —Colossians 2:8 Quae est enim istorum oratio tam exquisita, quae sit anteponenda bene constitutae civiti publico jure et moribus? ("For what speech of theirs is excellent enough to be preferred to a state well provided with law and custom?") —Cicero's De Re Publica, I.3 Despite the fact that they [...]
With the time and manner of his death Abraham Lincoln, as leader of a Puritan people who had just won a great victory over “the forces of evil,” was placed beyond the reach of ordinary historical inquiry and assessment. Through Booth’s bullet he became the one who had “died to make men free,” who [...]
I Let us have no foolishness, indeed.* Equality as a moral or political imperative, pursued as an end in itself—Equality, with the capital "E"—is the antonym of every legitimate conservative principle. Contrary to most Liberals, new and old, it is nothing less than sophistry to distinguish between equality of opportunity (equal starts in the "race of [...]