Broken Glass

One of the most colorful, controversial, and misunderstood public figures of the 19th century The most hated man in New England, critics dubbed him on the eve of the Civil War. Caleb Cushing, brash and controversial, was perhaps the last of 19th-century America's renaissance figures. Poet and politician, essayist and diplomat, general and lawyer, this multidimensional scion of a Newburyport, Massachusetts, mercantile family moved in and out of positions of power and influence, for more than fifty years. First as a spokesman for the Whig and then the Democratic Parties, Cushing served in Congress, as the minister to China, as a general in the Mexican War, U.S. attorney general, and legal adviser and diplomatic operative for Presidents Lincoln, Johnson, and Grant. With an unharnessed mind and probing intellect, Cushing inspired and infuriated contemporaries with his strident views on such topics as race relations and gender roles, national expansion and the legitimacy of secession.