Benjamin Robbins Curtis 1899 Gift_for_Bears_Fan William Cabell Rives

William Cabell Rives

the Father and the Saviour of Our Country

side streets pooling into dusk

this memorial tract carries the long mourning cadence of a republic still rehearsing how to bury its leaders

mourning the Whig general whose thirty-one days in office turned an inaugural into an elegy and handed the Tyler presidency a country still arguing over what Harrison was supposed to mean

Benjamin Robbins Curtis 1899 Gift_for_Bears_Fan William Cabell RivesBenjamin Robbins Curtis 1899 a posthumous portrait of the Supreme Court Justice whose dissent in Dred Scott broke ranks and whose name was thereafter spoken with the weight of a man who chose conscience over comity, engraved here in the long aftermath of the war his words had tried to forestall. About the Source Bella Frye sources artifacts from the great American historical archive the Library of Congress, the National Archives, regional historical