January 2011

John Adams: “Had I been chosen President again, I am certain I could not have lived another year.”

Jefferson: “No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it.”

John Q. Adams: “The four most miserable years of my life…”

Buchanan (to Abraham Lincoln): “If you are as happy, my dear sir, on entering this house as I am in leaving it and returning home, you are the happiest man in this country.”

Lincoln: “I feel like the man who was tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. To the man who asked him how he liked it, he said: ‘If it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk.’”

Garfield: “My God! What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get in it?”

In studying the growing complexity of the Presidency in its 175-year history, it occurred to us that simply contrasting an ordinary day in Washington’s administration with one in Lyndon Johnson’s might tell far more than a lengthy article. Consequently we took the average day in 1790, which is described directly below in Washington’s own words and annotated at right. We then sent this material to the press secretary at the White House, asking him to match it with the schedule of an equally ordinary day of President Johnson’s. The schedule he was kind enough to provide is printed at far right exactly as we received it, but the annotation beside it is that of the Editors.

PRESIDENT WASHINGTON:

BIOGRAPHIES OF THE PRESIDENTS

(Generally, only one modern, authoritative biography is listed for each President. Often this has necessitated a quite arbitrary selection from among many excellent volumes. In a few cases, where the standard “life” is a multivolume work or when there is no clearly dominant interpretation, two books have been included.)

GEORGE WASHINGTON: Douglas S. Freeman, George Washington , 7 vols. (1948–57); Marcus Cunliffe, George Washington: Man and Monument (1958).

JOHN ADAMS: Gilbert Chinard, Honest John Adams (1933).

THOMAS JEFFERSON: Nathan Schachner, Thomas Jefferson: A Biography (1957).

JAMES MADISON: Irving Brant, James Madison , 6 vols. (1941–61).

JAMES MONROE: W. P. Cresson, James Monroe (1946).

In the February, 1964, issue, I was particularly interested in the Mason and Swindler article on the Mason and Dixon Line. On page 29 the following sentence appears: “Horizontal measurements were taken with a Gunter’s chain of sixty-six links on level ground.…” Perhaps the authors will be interested to know that the Gunter’s chain had one hundred links, even though it was only sixty-six feet long. It was one of those developments of the unfortunate English system of measurements which foisted such units as the yard, the rod, the furlong, and the acre upon this country. Four rods of 16½ feet made a “chain” of 66 feet.…

The bibliographical paragraph at the end of Francis Biddle’s “The Ordeal of William Penn,” in our April issue, gives the publication date of Catherine Owens Peare’s biography of Penn as 1907. The book was in fact published by the J. B. Lippincott Company in 19^, and we regret the error.