American Quotations by William J. Federer 2024

James Thomas Fields (December 31, 1817-April 2, 1881) was the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, 1862-70. His father was a sea captain and died before Fields was three. Fields was friends with William Wordsworth, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and others. He was also a contemporary of Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Edwin Percy Whipple, James Russell Lowell, and Samuel Gridley Howe. After Fields's death, his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem called "Auf Wiedersehen" dedicated to him. In The Captain's Daughter; or The Ballad of the Tempest, written in 1858, James...

Mississippi (December 10, 1817) was the 20th State admitted to the Union. The U.S. Congress, March 1, 1817, during the administration of President James Monroe, passed The Enabling Act for Mississippi, which required the government being formed in that territory to be: <...not repugnant to the principles of the [Northwest Ordinance].> 1817MS001 The Northwest Ordinance stated: <Article III. Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.> 1817MS002 The Constitution of the State of Mississippi, adopted 1817, stated: <Article IX, Section 16. Religion, morality, and knowledge,...

John Jay (June 23, 1817-May 5, 1894) was an American lawyer and diplomat. He was the son of Judge William Jay and the grandson of John Jay, the Founding Father who was the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He was the manager of the New York Young Men's Anti-Slavery Society in 1834; secretary of the Irish Relief Commission during the potato famine in 1847; U.S. Minister to Austria, 1869-75; and the vice-president of the Civil Service Reform Association of the State of New York. He served as the president of the American Historical Society, 1890; as well as being an...

Frederick Douglass (February 1817-February 20, 1895) was a commanding abolitionist and spokesman for slaves, having been a former slave himself. Thousands of people were brought out of their indifferent attitude toward the value of human life by his powerful orations exposing the silent scream of the slaves. Many were deeply moved away from the opinion that it was a person's choice whether or not to enslave another person, and multitudes began supporting the right to life for all humans, regardless of their race or circumstances. Frederick Douglass included this story in retelling his conversion: <I loved all mankind, slaveholder not excepted,...

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817-May 6, 1862) was an American anti-slavery author, naturalist, and transcendentalist philosopher from Concord, Massachusetts. A Harvard graduate, he was a contemporary of authors Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, Ellery Channing, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Among his best known writings were: Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), which influenced the environmentalism movement; and Civil Disobedience (1849), which influenced Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In Civil Disobedience (1849), Henry David Thoreau wrote: <"That government is best which governs least"...Government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got...