Curated playlist
19th-century United States representatives
- Abraham LincolnAbraham Lincoln was born in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky on the 12th of February 1809, and he died with a bullet in the back of his head at twenty-two minutes past seven on a April morning in 1865. Between those two facts sits the most…
- William McKinleyWilliam McKinley stepped onto the front porch of his Canton, Ohio, home in the summer of 1896 and met the world. Delegations arrived by train, marching through the streets to hear him speak. The railroads had subsidized the excursion rates…
- Rutherford B. HayesRutherford B. Hayes became the 19th president of the United States under a cloud so thick that his critics called him "Rutherfraud" and "His Fraudulency" for every day of his four years in office. He had won the presidency by a single…
- James A. GarfieldJames A. Garfield arrived at the presidency having never once sought the job. At the 1880 Republican National Convention in Chicago, delegates spent 35 ballots locked in a stalemate between Ulysses S. Grant and James G. Blaine. On the 36th…
- Andrew JohnsonAndrew Johnson was acquitted in the United States Senate by a single vote. That vote, cast in May 1868, saved his presidency from becoming the first to end in removal from office. Yet the trial itself exposed everything that had gone…
- James BuchananJames Buchanan was born on the 23rd of April 1791, in a log cabin at the Stony Batter farm near Cove Gap in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania. He died on the 1st of June 1868, ranked by historians as one of the worst presidents the…
- Joseph E. JohnstonJoseph Eggleston Johnston died of pneumonia on the 21st of March, 1891, one month after refusing to put on his hat in the rain at a funeral. The funeral belonged to William Tecumseh Sherman, the Union general who had spent the better part…
- Jefferson DavisJefferson F. Davis was born on the 3rd of June, 1808, in a village his father had established in Kentucky, and he died in a borrowed New Orleans home on the 6th of December, 1889, at the age of 81, holding his wife Varina's hand. In the…
- Horace GreeleyHorace Greeley could not breathe for the first twenty minutes of his life. He was born on the 3rd of February 1811, on a small farm about five miles from Amherst, New Hampshire, to poor farmers Zaccheus and Mary Greeley. From that…
- Benjamin ButlerBenjamin Butler earned two completely different reputations in the same war. The white South called him a beast and a felon worthy of execution if captured. Black newspapers, when he died in 1893, described him as "a staunch and…
- Howell CobbOn the 9th of July 1850, President Zachary Taylor died and the line of presidential succession ran directly to Howell Cobb. Vice President Millard Fillmore stepped up, leaving no vice president. For a brief period, the Senate also had no…
- Nathaniel P. BanksNathaniel Prentice Banks spent his boyhood pulling empty bobbins from textile machines in the mills of Waltham and Lowell, Massachusetts. That unglamorous childhood job earned him the nickname Bobbin Boy Banks, a label he carried for the…
- John C. BreckinridgeJohn C. Breckinridge announced Abraham Lincoln as the winner of the 1860 presidential election on the 13th of February 1861. He had run against Lincoln in that same race. He came in second in the Electoral College with 72 votes to…
- Sterling PriceSterling Price commanded Confederate forces in the Trans-Mississippi West. Confederate President Jefferson Davis rendered a private verdict on him after a wartime meeting in Richmond: "the vainest man I ever met." Davis was not given to…
- William RosecransWilliam Starke Rosecrans was born on the 6th of September 1819, on a farm near Little Taylor Run in Kingston Township, Ohio, and by the time he died on the 11th of March 1898, his casket lay draped by the same headquarters flag that had…