Curated category
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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…
- 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.
- 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…
- William H. SewardWilliam Henry Seward spent eight months traveling Europe and the Middle East in 1859, trying to project the calm of a statesman.
- 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.
- 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…
- John C. BreckinridgeJohn C. Breckinridge announced Abraham Lincoln as the winner of the 1860 presidential election on the 13th of February 1861.
- 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…
- 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.