Curated playlist
19th-century United States senators
- Waitman T. WilleyWaitman Thomas Willey walked out of his home on Christmas Day 1827 with all his belongings wrapped in a single handkerchief. He was seventeen years old, and he was heading to college on foot. His family had only been able to spare him…
- Benjamin HarrisonBenjamin Harrison holds a peculiar distinction in American history: he is the only person to have served as president between two terms of the same opponent. In 1888, he defeated the incumbent Grover Cleveland. Four years later, Cleveland…
- Andrew JacksonAndrew Jackson refused to polish a British officer's boots, and the officer slashed him with a sword. The blade left scars on his left hand and head. Jackson was a boy then, captured with his brother Robert in April 1781 during the…
- 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…
- 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…
- William H. SewardWilliam Henry Seward spent eight months traveling Europe and the Middle East in 1859, trying to project the calm of a statesman. Back home, his friends were predicting he would be the next president of the United States. His rivals were…
- Simon CameronSimon Cameron died on the 26th of June 1889, six days after suffering a stroke, at the same Pennsylvania town where he had been born ninety years earlier. He had outlived nearly every political rival he ever made, and the machine he built…
- Carl SchurzCarl Schurz was born on the 2nd of March, 1829, in a small town called Liblar in the Rhine Province of Prussia, the son of a schoolteacher and a woman who was herself a journalist and public speaker. He died in New York City on the 14th of…
- 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…
- John C. FrémontJohn Charles Frémont was born on the 21st of January 1813, the illegitimate son of a French-Canadian schoolteacher and a Virginia planter's daughter who had fled her elderly husband. He died destitute in New York City in 1890. Between…
- Ambrose BurnsideAmbrose Burnside is best remembered for two catastrophic failures, but the word his name spawned is used every day by people who have never heard of him. Born on the 23rd of May, 1824, in Liberty, Indiana, Burnside rose from a tailor's…