Virginian Quotes

Forgive my asking you to use your mind. It is a thing which no novelist should expect of his reader...

The boldness of his mind was sheathed in a scabbard of politeness.

I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.

The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I Am Not A Virginian, But An American!

Never, under any circumstances, let the Virginian wolfsnake near a typewriter.

When a man ain't got no ideas of his own, he'd ought to be kind o' careful who he borrows 'em from.

They are kind of queer about music and books and scenery. Mother says it’s because their grandfather came from Virginia. She says Virginians set quite a store by such things.

According to Adams, Jefferson proposed that he, Adams, do the writing [pf the Declaration of Independence], but that he declined, telling Jefferson he must do it. Why?" Jefferson asked, as Adams would recount. Reasons enough," Adams said. What can be your reasons?" Reason first: you are a Virginian and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second: I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third: You can write ten times better than I can.

When a man is kind to dumb animals, I always say he has got some good in him.

To endure is greater than to dare; to tire out hostile fortune; to be daunted my no difficulty; to keep heart when all have lost it; to go through intrigue spotless; to forgo even ambition when the end is gained - who can say this is not greatness?

I can't help always falling upon it, and cry out with particular loudness and wailing, and become especially melancholy, when I see a dead love tied to a live love.

Washington departed the planet as admirably as he had inhabited it. He had long hated slavery, even though he had profited from it. Now, in his will, he stipulated that his slaves should be emancipated after Martha’s death, and he set aside funds for slaves who would be either too young or too old to care for themselves. Of the nine American presidents who owned slaves—a list that includes his fellow Virginians Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—only Washington set free all of his slaves.

I thought there should in truth be heavy damages for malpractice on human souls.

Cotton says, “If God be the gardener, who shall pluck up what he sets down?” Hear that, Indians? No weeding of the white people allowed. Unless they’re Catholic. Or one of those Satan-worshipping Virginians.

Here in flesh and blood was a truth which I had long believed in words, but never met before. The creature we call a gentleman lies deep in the heart of thousands that are born without chance to master the outward graces of the type.

Here is a minute. It may be my love is dead, but here is a minute to kneel over the grave and pray by it.

I am not a Virginian, but an American.

Virginians don’t belong in Maryland for the same reason Marylanders don’t belong in Virginia. When we meet, it should be in DC where everyone is the same kind of nasty: feds.

I am an aristocrat," Virginian John Randolph would explain decades after the American Revolution. "I love liberty; I hate equality.

When you call me that, smile.

There was a burst of applause when George Washington entered and walked to the dais. More applause followed on the appearance of Thomas Jefferson, who had been inaugurated Vice President upstairs in the Senate earlier that morning, and "like marks of approbation" greeted John Adams, who on his entrance in the wake of the two tall Virginians seemed shorter and more bulky even than usual.

The cowboy has now gone to worlds invisible; the wind has blown away the white ashes of his campfires; but the empty sardine box lies rusting over the face of the Western earth.

We Virginians do not go to the storied shrines of the past to do worship but rather to gain inspiration.

Well--you know how the Wilkes are. They are kind of queer about music and books and scenery. Mother says it's because their grandfather came from Virginia. She says Virginians set quite a store by such things.

All America is divided into two classes - the quality and the equality. The latter will always recognize the former when mistaken for it.

But no earthly foot can step between a man and his destiny.

A gentleman sitting in spectacles before an old ledger, and writing down pitiful remembrances of his own condition, is a quaint and ridiculous object.

This is inevitable; Virginians and Bostonians to the contrary notwithstanding, an aristocracy founded sheerly on money postulates wealth in the particular.

I would mind it less," said Mrs. Westfall, "if you looked a bit sorry or ashamed." The Virginian shook his head at her penitently. "I'm tryin' to," he said

O blessed idleness! Divine lazy nymph! Reach me a novel as I lie in my dressing-gown at three o'clock in the afternoon; compound a sherry-cobbler for me, and bring me a cigar! Dear slatternly, smiling Enchantress! They may assail thee with bad names—swear thy character away, and call thee the Mother of Evil; but, for all that, thou art the best company in the world!

For out of the eyes of every stranger looks either a friend or an enemy, waiting to be known.

Ah, me," she sighed. "If marriage were as simple as love!

By 1770, fewer than 10 percent of white Virginians laid claim to over half the land in the colony; a small upper echelon of large planters each owned slaves in the hundreds. More than half of white men owned no land at all, working as tenants or hired laborers, or contracted as servants.

Why, I've seen Kentuckians who hated whiskey, Virginians who weren't descended from Pocahontas, Indianians who hadn't written a novel, Mexicans who didn't wear velvet trousers with silver dollars sewed along the seams, funny Englishmen, spendthrift Yankees, cold-blooded Southerners, narrow- minded Westerners, and New Yorkers who were too busy to stop for an hour on the street to watch a one-armed grocer's clerk do up cranberries in paper bags. Let a man be a man and don't handicap him with the label of any section.

I reckon some parsons have a right to tell you to be good. The bishop of this hyeh territory has a right. But I'll tell yu' this: a middlin' doctor is a pore thing, and a middlin' lawyer is a pore thing; but keep me from a middlin' man of God.

It was through the Declaration of Independence that we Americans acknowledged the eternal inequality of man. For by it we abolished a cut-and-dried aristocracy. We had seen little men artificially held up in high places, and great men artificially held down in low places, and our own justice-loving hearts abhorred this violence to human nature. Therefore, we decreed that every man should thenceforth have equal liberty to find his own level. By this very decree we acknowledged and gave freedom to true aristocracy, saying, "Let the best man win, whoever he is." Let the best man win! That is America's word. That is true democracy. And true democracy and true aristocracy are one and the same thing

the letter means nothing until the spirit gives it life

I don't think I like you," said she. "That's all square enough. You're goin' to love me before we get through

What he learned from his favorite teacher was not obedience to authority but delight in the exercise of his mind.

Providence makes use of instruments I'd not touch with a ten-foot pole.

she would watch him with eyes that were fuller of love than of understanding.

When a man ain't got no ideas of his own," said Scipio, "he'd ought to be kind o' careful who he borrows 'em from.

Of the nine American presidents who owned slaves—a list that includes his fellow Virginians Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—only Washington set free all of his slaves.

and to never, under any circumstances, let the Virginian Wolfsnake near a typewriter.

Here was a tranquil, sunshiny day of a life that was to be agitated and stormy—a happy hour or two to remember. Not much happened during the happy hour or two. It was only sweet sleep, pleasant waking, friendly welcome, serene pastime.

So, you’re probably wondering what I do for a living. I actually take care of this sweet old lady every day. She lives across the holler,” he said in an exaggerated West Virginian drawl. “You’d really like her, I think. She’s eighty-seven but you’d swear she ate firecrackers for breakfast with as much spunk as she has.

That there would be a political advantage in having the declaration written by a Virginian was clear, for the same reason there had been political advantage in having the Virginian Washington in command of the army. But be that as it may, Jefferson, with his "peculiar felicity of expression," as Adams said, was the best choice for the task, just as Washington had been the best choice to command the Continental Army, and again Adams had played a key part. Had his contributions as a member of Congress been only that of casting the two Virginians in their respective, fateful roles, his service to the American cause would have been very great.

For a nation steeped in this self-image, it is embarrassing, guilt-producing, and disillusioning to consider the role that race and slavery played in shaping the national narrative.”38 To address these discomfiting facts, we have created a founding mythology that teaches us to think of the “free” and “abolitionist” North as the heart of the American Revolution. Schoolchildren learn that the Boston Tea Party sparked the Revolution and that Philadelphia was home to the Continental Congress, the place where intrepid men penned the Declaration and Constitution. But while our nation’s founding documents were written in Philadelphia, they were mainly written by Virginians.

(One bag contained the Confederate flag and a pouch filled with Virginia soil. Georgiana intended to give birth with the flag draped symbolically above the bed and the soil placed underneath to ensure that the baby was a true Virginian.)

He looked pleased. "I reckon," he said, "I couldn't be so good if I wasn't bad onced in a while

Who is he?" "Nobody!" cried Molly, with indignation. "Then you shouldn't answer so loud," said the great-aunt

They're pretty near the color of your eyes." "Never mind my eyes." "Can't help it, ma'am. Not since South Fork

Often when I have camped here, it has made me want to become the ground, become the water, become the trees, mix with the whole thing. Not know myself from it. Never unmix again.

But if I had lived to be twenty-nine years old like I am, and with all my chances made no enemy, I'd feel myself a failure.

Washington, like most scholarly Virginians of his time, was a Deist... Contemporary evidence shows that in mature life Washington was a Deist, and did not commune, which is quite consistent with his being a vestryman. In England, where vestries have secular functions, it is not unusual for Unitarians to vestrymen, there being no doctrinal subscription required for that office. Washington's letters during the Revolution occasionally indicate his recognition of the hand of Providence in notable public events, but in the thousands of his letters I have never been able to find the name of Christ or any reference to him. {Conway was employed to edit Washington's letters}

Science! He [Dr. MacBride] doesn't know what Christianity is yet. I've entertained many guests, but none - The whole secret," broke off Judge Henry, "Lies in the way you treat people. As soon as you treat men as your brothers, they are ready to acknowledge you - if you deserve it - as their superior. That's the whole bottom of Christianity, and that's what our missionary will never know.

As a Virginian, Scott deplored the cry of many Republican politicians and newspapers for an invasion to “crush the rebels.” Even if successful, he wrote, an invasion would produce “fifteen devastated provinces [that is, the slave states] not to be brought into harmony with their conquerors, but to be held for generations, by heavy garrisons.

The creature we call a GENTLEMAN lies deep in the hearts of thousands that are born without chance to master the outward graces of the type.

You are speakin' low like me," he answered. "But we have no dream we can wake from

Stand on your laigs you polecat, and admit you're a liar!

In no company had I ever felt so much an outsider. Yet I liked the company, and wished that it would like me.

He possessed that quality in his profanity of not offending by it.

Nothing's queer," stated the Virginian, "except marriage and lightning. Them two occurrences can still give me a sensation of surprise.

They were not, I am certain almost, first-rate gentlemen. (How different from our other officers.) But they are gone to Virginia, where they may sing, dance, and eat turkey hash and fry'd hominy all day long, if they choose.

He was whipped in front of an assembled audience of Black and white Virginians, to show everyone what the punishment would be for “abusing himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians, by defiling his body in lying with a negro.

Where is truth, forsooth, and who knoweth it? Is Beauty beautiful, or is it only our eyes that make it so? Does Venus squint? Has she got a splay-foot, red hair, and a crooked back? Anoint my eyes, good Fairy Puck, so that I may ever consider the Beloved Object a paragon! Above all, keep on anointing my mistress's dainty peepers with the very strongest ointment, so that my noddle may ever appear lovely to her, and that she may continue to crown my honest ears with fresh roses!

In particular, three slaveowning politicians loom large in our narrative as principal enablers of the territorial expansion of slavery and, consequently, of the slave-breeding industry: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and James K. Polk—a Virginian and two Tennesseans. All three were slaveholders, and like all slaveholders, their wealth was primarily stored in the form of captive human beings, so their entire financial base—personal, familial, social, and political—depended on

We all know what birds of a feather do. And it may be safely surmised that if a bird of any particular feather has been for a long while unable to see other birds of its kind, it will flock with them all the more assiduously when they happen to alight in its vicinity.

Has any botanist set down what the seed of love is? Has it anywhere been set down in how many ways this seed may be sown? In what various vessels of gossamer it can float across wide spaces? Or upon what different soils it can fall, and live unknown, and bide its time for blooming?

And romance is just the place for creating mythic figures doing mythic things. Like carving 'civilzation' out of the wilderness. Like showing us what a hero looks life, a real, American, sprung-from-the soil, lethal-weapon-with-leggings, bona fide hero. And for a guy who never marries, he has a lot of offspring. Shane. The Virginian. The Ringo Kid. The Man with No Name. Just think how many actors would have had no careers without Natty Bumppo. Gary Cooper. John Wayne. Alan Ladd. Tom Mix. Clint Eastwood. Silent. Laconic. More committed to their horse or buddy than to a lady. Professional. Deadly. In his Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence waxes prolix on Natty's most salient feature: he's a killer. And so are his offspring. This heros can talk, stiltedly to be sure, but he prefers silence. He appreciates female beauty but is way more committed to his canoe or his business partner (his business being death and war) or, most disturbingly, his long rifle, Killdeer. Dr. Freud, your three-o'clock is here. Like those later avatars, he is a wilderness god, part backwoods sage, part cold-blooded killer, part unwilling Prince Charming, part jack-of-all-trades, but all man. Here's how his creator describes him: 'a philosopher of the wilderness, simple-minded, faithful, utterly without fear, yet prudent.' A great character, no doubt, but hardly a person. A paragon. An archetype. A miracle. But a potentially real person--not so much.

This was the inauspicious background for the nomination by John Adams of John Marshall, his secretary of state, to be the nation’s fourth chief justice. Marshall, a Virginian and combat veteran of the Revolutionary War, was forty-five years old, until this day the youngest person ever to assume the office

Profitable as it was to him, Jefferson hated slavery. He regarded it as a curse to Virginia and wished to see it abolished throughout the United States. Not, however, in his lifetime. He said that his generation was not ready for such a step. He would leave that reform to the next generation of Virginians, and was sure they would make Virginia the first southern state to abolish slavery. He thought the young men coming of age in postwar Virginia were superbly qualified to bring the American Revolution to this triumphant conclusion because, as he said, these young men had “sucked in the principles of liberty as if it were their mother’s milk.”18

Many an act that man does is right or wrong according to the time and place which form, so to speak, its context; strip it of its surrounding circumstances, and you tear away its meaning. Gentlemen reformers, beware of this common practice of yours! Beware of calling an act evil on Tuesday because that same act was evil on Monday!

More than a million of our public schoolchildren are homeless, living in motels, cars, shelters, and abandoned buildings. After arriving in prison, many incarcerated Americans suddenly find that their health improves because the conditions they faced as free (but impoverished) citizens were worse. More than 2 million Americans don’t have running water or a flushing toilet at home. West Virginians drink from polluted streams, while families on the Navajo Nation drive hours to fill water barrels. Tropical diseases long considered eradicated, like hookworm, have reemerged in rural America’s poorest communities, often the result of broken sanitation systems that expose children to raw sewage.

There can be no doubt of this: All America is divided into two classes,- the quality and the equality.

Dr. MacBride had a manner of saying "pardon me," which rendered forgiveness well-nigh impossible.

Go on so! I don't reckon yu' know what you're sayin'. Yu' might as well ask fruit to stay green. If the way we are now can keep bein' enough for you, it can't for me. A pleasure to you, is it? Well, to me it is—I don't know what to call it. I come to yu' and I hate it, and I come again and I hate it, and I ache and grieve all over when I go. No! You will have to think of some other way than just invitin' me to keep green

So great was the quest for patronage that Lincoln came to hope that Southerners would never leave the Union and abandon the plum government jobs they might retain if they remained loyal. As he joked rather cynically to the Ohio editor and politician Donn Piatt over a chicken dinner at the Lincoln home: “Were it believed that vacant places could be had at the North Pole, the road there would be lined with dead Virginians.

A self-proclaimed “Jackson Democrat” wrote to warn Lincoln directly: “Beware the Ides of March…the Suthron people will not Stand your administration,” while a Virginian demanded he resign outright, darkly adding, “for your wife and children sake don’t take the Chair” or risk being “murdered.” Fearing a “servile rebellion,” yet another anonymous correspondent predicted that if Lincoln did not relinquish the presidency, the South would surely “take your life.

Well, he took dying as naturally as he took living. Like a man should. Like I hope to." Again he looked at the pictures in his mind. "No play-acting nor last words. He just told good-by to the boys as we led his horse under the limb

Particularly in the military. According to General Scott, our best army officer is a Virginian named Lee.” “The man who caught John Brown?” “The same. Old Mr. Blair is a great friend of his. On Thursday, when Mr. Blair offered Colonel Lee the command of our army, Lee said that although he believes secession is wrong, and slavery worse, he can be no party to an invasion of his native state. I don’t understand Southerners, do you, Mr. Cooke?” “I can’t say I ever tried.

pounds….” Thomas Jefferson had written a paragraph of the Declaration accusing the King of transporting slaves from Africa to the colonies and “suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.” This seemed to express moral indignation against slavery and the slave trade (Jefferson’s personal distaste for slavery must be put alongside the fact that he owned hundreds of slaves to the day he died). Behind it was the growing fear among Virginians and some other southerners about the growing number of black slaves in the colonies (20 percent of the total population) and the threat of slave revolts as the number of slaves increased. Jefferson’s paragraph was removed by the Continental Congress, because slaveholders themselves disagreed about the desirability of ending the slave trade. So even that gesture toward the black slave was omitted in the great manifesto of freedom of the American Revolution.

But this I can say: to call any act evil, instantly begs the question. Many an act that man does is right or wrong according to the time and place which form, so to speak, its context; strip it of its surrounding circumstances, and you tear away its meaning.

In three years of backbreaking studies that, according to Madison, "exacted perhaps the most severe of Jefferson's public labors," Jefferson had almost single-handedly provided "a mine of legislative wealth" that provided Virginians with a modern republic built on the foundations of Greece and Rome. It became a model for other states and the pattern after which the federal republic of the United States was modeled. Jefferson, in short, in his legal laboratory atop Monticello, invented the United States of America.

Roosevelt had inspired Americans to return to honest public men, and after decades of shirking and evasion of their civic duty, Americans had begun “to look at themselves and their institutions straight; to perceive that Firecrackers and Orations once a year, and selling your vote or casting it for unknown nobodies, are not enough attention to pay to the Republic.’’ To celebrate this new, principled America, Wister had written The Virginian. “If this book be anything more than an American story, it is an expression of American faith.

She spoke in accents light and well intrenched. "I wish to say that I have never liked any man better than you. But I expect to!" He must have drawn small comfort from such an answer as that. But he laughed out indomitably: "Don't yu' go betting on any such expectation!

Jefferson was a genius, the historian Joseph Ellis has noted, at concealing contradictions within abstractions. The Virginian who insisted “that all men are created equal” arrived in Philadelphia attended by opulently attired slaves. 36 His declaration coupled universal principles with an implausibly long list of offenses—twenty-seven in all—committed personally by George III: that’s why the complete document can’t be quoted today without sounding a little silly. Nor did Jefferson, any more than Paine, say anything about what kind of government might replace that of the British tyrant. Details weren’t either patriot’s strength. Had they been, independence might never have been attempted, for details dim the flames fireships require. They disconnect ends of arguments from their beginnings. That’s why Paine and Jefferson thought it necessary first to tilt history, and only at that point to begin to make it. Rhetoric, their lever, had to be clearer than truth, even if necessary an inversion of it. 37 George III was no Nero, not even a James II. Jefferson nonetheless struck from his indictments the charge that the king had supported the slave trade, for this would have slandered slavery’s reputation. And that would have made the vote for freedom less than unanimous. 38

I would recommend it to you to reflect, and remark on, and digest what you read; to enter into the spirit and design of your author; to observe every step he takes to accomplish his end; and to dwell on any remarkable beauties of diction, justness or sublimity of sentiment, or masterly strokes of true wit which may occur in the course of your reading.

While slaveowners worked vigorously to allow slaves only so much biblical teaching as to make them good, docile, submissive slaves, even the most basic moral elements of Christian truth proved revolutionary. This phenomenon arises clearly with the commandment against theft. Reading the proslavery defenses from the antebellum era, one encounters consistent references to slaves stealing and "pilfering" from their masters' stores and livestock, etc. This is always held up as evidence of their incapacity for civilization. Yet it was hardly any lack of capacity; it was resistance and restitution in their keen understanding of their masters' hypocrisy. "While white preachers repeatedly urged 'Don't steal,' slaves just as persistently denied that this commandment applied to them, since they themselves were stolen property." Former slave Josephine Howard retorted to those slaveholders who preached against theft: "[T]hen why did de white folks steal my mammy and her mammy? . . . Dat de sinfulles' stealin' dey is." A Virginian slave preached back at his master, "You white folks set the bad example of stealing—you stole us from Africa, and not content with that, if any got free here, you stole them afterward, and so we are made slaves." Former Georgian slave George Womble agreed: "Slaves were taught to steal by their masters." [...] It is no wonder that whole audiences full of slaves were known to get up and leave the preaching services of missionaries when they began to preach on stealing. They simply could not stomach the hypocrisy.

He learned from the Greek poets "not to expect too much from life; not to dream of a chimerical bliss, ... but to do his duty, without expecting to be rewarded ..., to cultivate his friends and love his country even to the point of self sacrifice." From ancient writers he learned the possibility of courageous resignation, and under their inspiration he worked out for himself a program which was little short of the heroic.

The rights of nullification and secession, Lincoln believed, had been thus settled. Henry Clay had helped resolve the crisis of 1832–33, and the Union had endured. The same had happened in 1820 and in 1850. History therefore suggested that a resolution short of war was within the realm of possibility. “My own impression is at present (leaving myself room to modify the opinion if upon a further investigation I should see fit to do so) that this government possesses both the authority and the power to maintain its own integrity,” the president-elect observed. Lincoln hoped for the best. “I am told that Mr. Lincoln considers the feeling at the South to be limited to a very small number, though very intense,” the New York Tribune wrote. White Southerners “won’t give up the offices,” Lincoln remarked in November. “Were it believed that vacant places could be had at the North Pole, the road there would be lined with dead Virginians.” The

Lamentations about the tribulations of public life, followed by celebrations of the bucolic splendor of retirement to rural solitude, had become a familiar, even formulaic, posture within the leadership class of the revolutionary generation, especially within the Virginia dynasty. Everyone knew the classical models of latter-day seclusion represented by Cincinnatus and described by Cicero and Virgil. Declarations of principled withdrawal from the hurly-burly of politics to the natural rhythms of one’s fields or farms had become rhetorical rituals. If Washington’s retirement hymn featured the “vine and fig tree,” Jefferson’s idolized “my family, my farm, and my books.” The motif had become so commonplace that John Adams, an aspiring Cicero himself, claimed that the Virginians had worn out the entire Ciceronian syndrome: “It seems the Mode of becoming great is to retire,” he wrote Abigail in 1796. “It is marvellous how political Plants grow in the shade.” Washington

George Washington clearly shared the foundational Virginian concern to “Christianize the savages” dwelling in the Virginia Colony. On July 10, 1789, in response to an address from the directors of the Society of The United Brethren for Propagating the Gospel Among the Heathen, Washington stated: In proportion as the general Government of the United States shall acquire strength by duration, it is probable they may have it in their power to extend a salutary influence to the Aborigines in the extremities of their Territory. In the meantime, it will be a desirable thing for the protection of the Union to co-operate, as far as circumstances may conveniently admit, with the disinterested [unselfish] endeavours of your Society to civilize and Christianize the Savages of the Wilderness.28 A Deist, by definition, rejected Christianity and accepted the equivalence of all religions’ worship of God. So no Deist could see the plan for the “conversion of the heathen” outlined by Bishop Ettwein and the Brethren as both “laudable” and “earnestly desired.” Yet those are Washington’s words.

Every good man in this world has convictions about right and wrong. They are his soul's riches, his spiritual gold. When his conduct is at variance with these, he knows that it is a departure, a falling; and this is a simple and clear matter. If falling were all that ever happened to a good man, all his days would be a simple matter of striving and repentance. But it is not all. There come to him certain junctures, crises, when life, like a highwayman, springs upon him, demanding that he stand and deliver his convictions in the name of some righteous cause, bidding him do evil that good may come.

In 1984, Science published a study of almost 15,000 Danish adoptees age fifteen or older, their adoptive parents, and their birth parents. Thanks to Denmark’s careful record keeping, the researchers knew whether any of the people in their study had criminal convictions. Since few female adoptees had legal problems, the study focused on males—with striking results. As long as the adoptee’s biological parents were law abiding, their adoptive parents made little difference: 13.5 percent of adoptees with law-abiding biological and adoptive parents got convicted of something, versus 14.7 percent with law-abiding biological parents and criminal adoptive parents. If the adoptee’s biological parents were criminal, however, upbringing mattered: 20 percent of adoptees with law-breaking biological and law-abiding adoptive parents got convicted, versus 24.5 percent with law-breaking biological and adoptive parents. Criminal environments do bring out criminal tendencies. Still, as long as the biological parents were law abiding, family environment made little difference. In 2002, a study of antisocial behavior in almost 7,000 Virginian twins born since 1918 found a small nurture effect for adult males and no nurture effect for adult females. The same year, a major review of fifty-one twin and adoption studies reported small nurture effects for antisocial attitudes and behavior. For outright criminality, however, heredity was the sole cause of family resemblance.

It was through the Declaration of Independence that we Americans acknowledged the eternal quality of man. For by it we abolished a cut-and-dried aristocracy. We had seen little men artificially held up in high places, and great men artificially held down in low places, and our own justice-loving hearts abhorred this violence to human nature. Therefore, we decreed that every man should thenceforth have equal liberty to find his own level. By this very decree we acknowledged and gave freedom to true aristocracy, saying, "Let the best man win, whoever he is." Let the best man win! That is America's word. That is true democracy. And true democracy and true aristocracy are one and the same thing. If anybody cannot see this, so much the worse for his eyesight.

What the “geniuses [who] went to Philadelphia” wanted remains the subject of endless debate—a debate fueled by the real differences among them and the very real ambiguities of the compromises they forged. But James Madison did not go to Philadelphia seeking gridlock. Quite the opposite: The Virginian who played such a critical role in the nation’s founding led the charge for a powerful national government. He pushed for a new constitution specifically because its predecessor, the Articles of Confederation, adopted in 1777, had been a catastrophe—a decentralized arrangement too weak to hold the country together or confront pressing problems that needed collective solutions. Madison arrived at the convention with one firm conviction: Government needed the authority to govern.29 In the deliberations that followed, Madison stayed true to that cause. He argued tirelessly for the power of the federal government to be understood broadly and for it to be decisively superior to the states. He even supported an absolute federal veto over all state laws, likening it to “gravity” in the Newtonian framework of the new federal government.30 Most of the concessions to state governments in the final document were ones that Madison had opposed. He was a practical politician, and he ultimately defended these compromises in the public arena—the famed Federalist Papers Madison penned with his colleagues Alexander Hamilton and John Jay are an advertisement, not a blueprint—but he did so because he saw them as necessary, not because he saw them as ideal.31 Throughout, Madison kept his eyes on the prize: enactment of the more vital and resilient government he regarded as a national imperative.

From Walt: The Grapes of Wrath, Les Misérables, To Kill a Mockingbird, Moby-Dick, The Ox-Bow Incident, A Tale of Two Cities, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Three Musketeers, Don Quixote (where your nickname came from), The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and anything by Anton Chekhov. From Henry: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Cheyenne Autumn, War and Peace, The Things They Carried, Catch-22, The Sun Also Rises, The Blessing Way, Beyond Good and Evil, The Teachings of Don Juan, Heart of Darkness, The Human Comedy, The Art of War. From Vic: Justine, Concrete Charlie: The Story of Philadelphia Football Legend Chuck Bednarik, Medea (you’ll love it; it’s got a great ending), The Kama Sutra, Henry and June, The Onion Field, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Zorba the Greek, Madame Bovary, Richie Ashburn’s Phillies Trivia (fuck you, it’s a great book). From Ruby: The Holy Bible (New Testament), The Pilgrim’s Progress, Inferno, Paradise Lost, My Ántonia, The Scarlet Letter, Walden, Poems of Emily Dickinson, My Friend Flicka, Our Town. From Dorothy: The Gastronomical Me, The French Chef Cookbook (you don’t eat, you don’t read), Last Suppers: Famous Final Meals From Death Row, The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Something Fresh, The Sound and the Fury, The Maltese Falcon, Pride and Prejudice, Brides-head Revisited. From Lucian: Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, Band of Brothers, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Virginian, The Basque History of the World (so you can learn about your heritage you illiterate bastard), Hondo, Sackett, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Bobby Fischer: My 60 Memorable Games, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Quartered Safe Out Here. From Ferg: Riders of the Purple Sage, Kiss Me Deadly, Lonesome Dove, White Fang, A River Runs Through It (I saw the movie, but I heard the book was good, too), Kip Carey’s Official Wyoming Fishing Guide (sorry, kid, I couldn’t come up with ten but this ought to do).

There can be no doubt of this: All America is divided into two classes--the quality and the equality. The latter will always recognize the former when mistaken for it. Both will be with us until our women bear nothing but kings. It was through the Declaration of Independence that we Americans acknowledged the ETERNAL INEQUALITY of man. For by it we abolished a cut-and-dried aristocracy. We had seen little men artificially held up in high places, and great men artificially held down in low places, and our own justice-loving hearts abhorred this violence to human nature. Therefore, we decreed that every man should thenceforth have equal liberty to find his own level. By this very decree we acknowledged and gave freedom to true aristocracy, saying, "Let the best man win, whoever he is." Let the best man win! That is America's word. That is true democracy. And true democracy and true aristocracy are one and the same thing. If anybody cannot see this, so much the worse for his eyesight.

extent, Polly Lear took Fanny Washington’s place: she was a pretty, sociable young woman who became Martha’s closest female companion during the first term, at home or out and about, helping plan her official functions. The Washingtons were delighted with the arrival of Thomas Jefferson, a southern planter of similar background to themselves, albeit a decade younger; if not a close friend, he was someone George had felt an affinity for during the years since the Revolution, writing to him frequently for advice. The tall, lanky redhead rented lodgings on Maiden Lane, close to the other members of the government, and called on the president on Sunday afternoon, March 21. One of Jefferson’s like-minded friends in New York was the Virginian James Madison, so wizened that he looked elderly at forty. Madison was a brilliant parliamentary and political strategist who had been Washington’s closest adviser and confidant in the early days of the presidency, helping design the machinery of government and guiding measures through the House, where he served as a representative. Another of Madison’s friends had been Alexander Hamilton, with whom he had worked so valiantly on The Federalist Papers. But the two had become estranged over the question of the national debt. As secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton was charged with devising a plan to place the nation’s credit on a solid basis at home and abroad. When Hamilton presented his Report on the Public Credit to Congress in January, there was an instant split, roughly geographic, north vs. south. His report called for the assumption of state debts by the nation, the sale of government securities to fund this debt, and the creation of a national bank. Washington had become convinced that Hamilton’s plan would provide a strong economic foundation for the nation, particularly when he thought of the weak, impoverished Congress during the war, many times unable to pay or supply its troops. Madison led the opposition, incensed because he believed that dishonest financiers and city slickers would be the only ones to benefit from the proposal, while poor veterans and farmers would lose out. Throughout the spring, the debate continued. Virtually no other government business got done as Hamilton and his supporters lobbied fiercely for the plan’s passage and Madison and his followers outfoxed them time and again in Congress. Although pretending to be neutral, Jefferson was philosophically and personally in sympathy with Madison. By April, Hamilton’s plan was voted down and seemed to be dead, just as a new debate broke out over the placement of the national capital. Power, prestige, and a huge economic boost would come to the city named as capital. Hamilton and the bulk of New Yorkers and New Englanders