Every once in a while I run across a sentence that stops me dead. It is so eloquent, so well-crafted, so meaningful, so emotional that I have to read it over and over. Here is a whole paragraph of them, especially the last two.
No wonder Mount Holyoke College historian Joseph Ellis in his review of Brookhiser?s first biography, Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington stated it belongs ?on the same shelf with Plutarch.?
Enjoy:
Twenty years after the Jefferson Memorial was finished, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his ?I Have a Dream? speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial. He not surprisingly held up Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation as models for future black progress. But he also held up Lincoln?s predecessors, ?the architects of our republic,? who, when they ?wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence? sign[ed] a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.? Many of the architects of the republic, he knew, owned black men; some of them slept with black women they owned. But King laid claim to their words, not as a clever debater stealing rhetorical bases, but as a family member presenting a keepsake. He did not put the founders? words to his purposes, he found their purposes anticipating his words.
Richard Brookhiser
What Would the Founders Do?
