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Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich was born in Foster, Rhode Island, in 1841, the son of a mill hand, and began as a clerk for a wholesale grocery firm, eventually becoming a partner. He served three months as a Union private in the defenses of Washington in 1862, then married Abigail Chapman, who brought wealth and social standing. After losing a child and suffering ill health in 1872, he took a five month...

Thomas Slade Gorton III was born in Chicago in 1928 and grew up in Evanston, heir to the seafood family behind Gorton's of Gloucester, but chose law and public life instead. After Dartmouth and Columbia Law, he served in the Army and the Air Force and stayed in the Air Force Reserve until 1980, retiring as a colonel. He entered the Washington State House of Representatives in 1958 and became attor...

Charles Curtis was born in 1860 in the Kansas territory, of Kaw, Osage, and Potawatomi descent on his mother's side and a descendant of Chief White Plume of the Kaw and Chief Pahuska of the Osage. He spoke French and Kansa before English, lost his mother at three, and was raised by grandparents who split his childhood between the Kaw Reservation and white Topeka. In 1868, at eight, he rode 60 mile...

Albert B. Fall was born in Kentucky in 1861 and was working in a cotton factory by age 11, an experience that left him with lifelong respiratory problems. He moved west through Oklahoma and Texas to the New Mexico Territory, taught himself law, and became a landowner in the Tularosa Basin, where he allied with rancher Oliver M. Lee. When attorney Albert Jennings Fountain and his eight-year-old son...

Harry S. Truman was born in Lamar, Missouri, in 1884 and grew up in Independence, where he practiced piano at five in the morning and worked as a Shabbos goy for Jewish neighbors. He was a bank clerk, a farmer, and a railroad timekeeper living in work camps, and his ventures in zinc and lead mining, oil, real estate, and a Kansas City haberdashery all failed. Bess Wallace turned down his 1911 prop...

William Edgar Borah was born in 1865 in rural Illinois, the seventh of ten children. His father sent him to a Presbyterian academy in Enfield to train for the ministry, but he was expelled for riding an Illinois Central train to spend a night in a neighboring town, and he briefly ran off with a traveling Shakespearean troupe. He left the University of Kansas after contracting tuberculosis, read la...

John Quincy Adams was born in Massachusetts in 1767 to John and Abigail Adams and raised to embody the ideals of the new republic. As a boy he translated Virgil and Plutarch, studied at Leiden University, and at 14 served as secretary to an American diplomat in St. Petersburg, Russia. He graduated second in his class at Harvard, struggled with depression throughout his life, and defied his parents...

George Graham Vest was born in Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1830, graduated from Centre College in 1848, and earned his law credentials from Transylvania University in 1853. Bound for California, he stopped in Pettis County, Missouri, and won an acquittal for a young Black man charged with murder, but a mob seized his client and burned him at the stake and threatened Vest. He stayed, settled in Georget...

Judah P. Benjamin was born in 1811 on St. Croix in the Danish West Indies to Sephardic Jewish parents and raised mainly in the Carolinas. He entered Yale at 14 and left at 16 amid unproven rumors, arriving in New Orleans in 1828 with no money. He traded English lessons for French lessons, learned Louisiana's civil law, and married his pupil, Natalie St. Martin, from a wealthy Creole family; she sp...

In January 1970 Army intelligence officer Christopher Pyle revealed that the military was spying on civilians, and in December 1974 Seymour Hersh reported in The New York Times on Operation CHAOS, a CIA program collecting information on Americans' political activity. The Senate voted 82 to 4 to create a select committee chaired by Frank Church of Idaho. It examined the CIA's internal compilation k...

In May 1856, with Bleeding Kansas in full swing after the Kansas-Nebraska Act replaced fixed lines with popular sovereignty, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner delivered a two day speech he had largely memorized, running over a hundred pages. He targeted the act's authors, Stephen Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Butler of South Carolina, mocking the speech impediment Butler had after a stroke and...

William H. Seward was born in 1801 in rural New York to a slave-owning farmer and was so bookish that he ran away from home to go to school. At 17, after a quarrel with his father over money, he left Union College to teach in Georgia, where he saw slavery at full scale. A broken carriage wheel in Rochester in 1824 introduced him to newspaper publisher Thurlow Weed, who became his political manager...

Thomas Pryor Gore was born in Mississippi in 1870 and lost his sight in two separate accidents, one to his left eye at eight and another to his right eye three years later, becoming fully blind by 20. He kept his childhood goal of reaching the U.S. Senate, built a near perfect memory, worked as a page in the Mississippi Senate, earned a law degree in Tennessee, and campaigned for the Farmers' Alli...

William A. Clark was born in Pennsylvania in 1839, moved to Iowa, taught school and studied some law before heading to Montana in 1862. After a short stint of mining he made his first money supplying miners, driving mule teams between Salt Lake City and the boom towns and carrying mail with his brothers. He opened a bank in Deer Lodge, foreclosed on struggling mines during busts, and became one of...

Robert Morris was born out of wedlock in Liverpool in 1734, raised by his grandmother, and at 13 joined his father in Maryland. His father died after being struck when a ceremonial bottle bounced off a ship's hull at a christening, leaving Morris an inheritance. In Philadelphia he apprenticed with merchant Charles Willing and became a partner of Thomas Willing, building Willing, Morris and Company...

William Henry Harrison, born in Virginia in 1773, was the last president born a British subject and the son of Benjamin Harrison V, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He studied medicine in Philadelphia under Benjamin Rush, but after his father died in 1791 and the family money ran short, he became an Army ensign within 24 hours of meeting Governor Henry Lee III. He served under Anthony...

Elihu Root was born in 1845 in Clinton, New York, the son of a mathematics professor, and studied law at New York University, staying an extra year for private tutoring when most students rushed to the bar. Early work for the Bank of North America on its charter reorganization led him into the Tammany Hall trials, where he helped defend James Ingersoll and later worked on the defense of Boss Tweed...

Brien McMahon was born James O'Brien McMahon in Norwalk, Connecticut, in 1903, graduated from Fordham in 1924 and Yale Law School in 1927, and changed his name the year he joined the bar. After serving as a local judge he joined the Justice Department in 1933 under Attorney General Homer Cummings and was running its criminal division by 1935, prosecuting associates of Baby Face Nelson and the lawy...

James Abourezk was born in 1931 in Wood, South Dakota, to Charles and Lena, Lebanese Greek Orthodox immigrants who ran general stores on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. He spoke only Arabic at home until elementary school. Expelled from high school at 16 over a prank on a teacher, he joined the Navy and served as an electrician's mate in Japan during the Korean War, then worked as a rancher, taugh...

Jefferson Davis was born in Kentucky in 1808, the youngest of 10 children, and raised in Mississippi. After his father died in debt, his brother Joseph, 23 years older and a rich planter, became a surrogate father and secured him a place at West Point, where Davis was court-martialed for drinking at a tavern and confined over the 1826 Eggnog Riot. He graduated 23rd of 33 and served under Colonel Z...

By late 1849 the U.S. House had voted more than 60 times without electing a Speaker, fistfights broke out, and a loaded revolver was drawn on the floor. The cause was the land taken from Mexico under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which threatened the Senate's balance between free and slave states. Texas, annexed in 1845, claimed land to the Rio Grande deep into New Mexico and threatened to...

Spencer Abraham was born in 1952 in East Lansing, Michigan, to a family of Lebanese descent, and his mother was active on the state Republican committee. After graduating from Michigan State University's Honors College in 1974 he went to Harvard Law School, where in 1978 he co-founded the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy and then helped found the Federalist Society, formally organized in 1...

Spark Matsunaga was born Masayuki Matsunaga on Kauai in 1916 to Japanese immigrant parents and picked up the nickname Sparky at age eight from a comic strip character called Sparkplug. He graduated with honors from the University of Hawaii in 1941, months before Pearl Harbor. Japanese American soldiers in the Hawaii National Guard were pulled into a provisional battalion, and in June 1942 more tha...

Simon Cameron was born in 1799 in Maytown, Pennsylvania, son of a tailor and tavern keeper who died when Simon was a boy. Boarded with a doctor in Sunbury, he read through the doctor's library and befriended Mozart librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, who then ran a grocery there. Apprenticed as a printer, he became an assistant editor of a state newspaper in his early 20s and set type for the Congression...

Frank Moss was born in 1911 in Holladay, Utah, the youngest of seven children of educator James Edward Moss. A two time state debate champion at Granite High School, he graduated magna cum laude from the University of Utah in 1933, married Phyllis Hart in 1934, and earned his law degree at George Washington University in 1937 while working at New Deal agencies. He served in the Army Air Forces' Ju...