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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, taught judo, ran a bar later known as the Gaslight, earned a civil engineering degree, and helped build Minuteman missile silos for the Air Force. At 32 he went to law school. He lost a race for attorney general in 1968, won a U.S. House seat in 1970, and in 1972 became the first Arab American elected to the U.S. Senate.

In 1973 he and George McGovern negotiated inside the Wounded Knee occupation. As the first chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs he wrote the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 and the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, which gave tribal courts primary authority over custody cases for Native children. His 1974 amendment banning overseas police assistance led to the closing of USAID's Office of Public Safety in 1975. He left after a single term, and his seat went to Larry Pressler. In 1980 he founded the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

• His bar employees included future Governor Bill Janklow and future activist Russell Means, who later helped lead the Wounded Knee occupation.
• After Dr. Connie Redbird Pinkerman-Uri exposed sterilizations of Native women at federal facilities, he ordered a GAO investigation.
• He won Abourezk v. Reagan in 1987 before Ruth Bader Ginsburg, challenging visa denials to foreign speakers.
• He also represented the Islamic Republic of Iran in contract lawsuits from the Shah's era.
• A 2007 interview on Hezbollah-funded Al-Manar, in which he promoted conspiracy claims about 9/11 and Congress, drew wide condemnation, and he died on his 92nd birthday in 2023.

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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 Zachary Taylor, then resigned in 1835 to marry Taylor's daughter, Sarah Knox Taylor, who died of malaria three months later at 21. He spent years studying in his brother's library at Briarfield, enslaved more than 100 people, married Varina Howell, and won a House seat in 1845.

In the Mexican War he armed his Mississippi Rifles with percussion rifles, held the line at Buena Vista despite a wound to the heel, and turned down a federal general's commission on states' rights grounds. As Franklin Pierce's secretary of war he backed a transcontinental railroad and oversaw the Gadsden Purchase. Chosen Confederate president at Montgomery in 1861, he imposed a draft, direct taxes and suspension of habeas corpus, clashing with governors Joseph Brown and Zebulon Vance. Captured in Georgia in May 1865, he was held at Fort Monroe, but the treason case was dropped in 1869.

• He named an enslaved man, James Pemberton, overseer of his plantation, a highly unusual arrangement.
• His January 1861 Senate farewell after Mississippi seceded was, he said, the saddest day of his life.
• Northern cartoonists mocked the raglan cloak and his wife's shawl he wore at his capture.
• His $100,000 bail was partly paid by Horace Greeley and Cornelius Vanderbilt, after prosecutors feared a Richmond jury would acquit.
• At Beauvoir he wrote The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, recasting the war around states' rights, and some 200,000 people attended his 1889 funeral in New Orleans.

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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 send its militia, while the Gold Rush after the discovery at Sutter's Mill pushed California to write a constitution banning slavery and demand immediate statehood. Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun took the stage for their final great fight. Calhoun, sick with tuberculosis, sat wrapped in blankets as a colleague read his warning of secession, and Webster risked his standing in New England with his Seventh of March speech for the Union.

Clay bundled eight proposals into one omnibus bill, but it collapsed in July 1850 as opponents on both sides united against it, and President Zachary Taylor opposed it too. After Taylor died, Millard Fillmore backed a deal and faced down Texas, and Stephen A. Douglas split the package into five separate bills, each passed by a shifting coalition. California entered as a free state, Texas gave up its claims in exchange for $10 million of debt relief, the slave trade was banned in Washington, D.C., and Utah and New Mexico were organized under popular sovereignty. The Fugitive Slave Act radicalized the North.

• Ralph Waldo Emerson had warned that conquering Mexico would be like swallowing arsenic.
• Taylor, a Louisiana slaveholder, argued slavery could not pay in the arid Southwest.
• Officials who refused to help capture escapees faced a $1,000 fine, and aiding one could bring six months in prison.
• Accused fugitives got no jury and could not testify, and commissioners earned $10 for sending a person South but $5 for freeing them.
• Historian David M. Potter called the result an armistice, and the decade it bought let Northern industry and railroads grow before 1861.

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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 1982. He taught at Thomas M. Cooley Law School, chaired the Michigan Republican Party from 1983 to 1990, and served as deputy chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle before winning a U.S. Senate seat in 1994. As of 2026 he remains the last Republican to represent Michigan in the Senate.

In the Senate he wrote early internet law, including the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act and the Government Paperwork Elimination Act, and in 1996 he led the effort that blocked proposed cuts to legal immigration. In 2000 he lost to Debbie Stabenow after voting in 1999 to convict Bill Clinton and facing attack ads from the Federation for American Immigration Reform. In 1999 he had co-sponsored a bill to abolish the Department of Energy, yet in 2001 George W. Bush named him the 10th Secretary of Energy, a post he held until 2005. He later moved into the nuclear industry.

• The National Council of La Raza gave him its Defender of the Melting Pot award for his 1996 immigration work.
• The FAIR ads placed his photo alongside Osama bin Laden and tied his immigration stance to terrorism.
• The 1999 bill he co-sponsored would have moved the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to the Defense Department.
• As chairman of Areva Inc. he worked on a program to turn weapons-grade plutonium into fuel for civilian reactors.
• He chaired Uranium Energy Corp and co-wrote the 2010 book Lights Out about America's energy problems.

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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 than 1,400 of them sailed secretly out of Honolulu on the transport ship Maui, learning only near California that they were now the 100th Infantry Battalion (Separate). Together with the Varsity Victory Volunteers, their record helped lead to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Matsunaga fought in Italy, was wounded twice, and left the Army as a captain.

He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1951, served as a prosecutor and territorial legislator, entered the U.S. House in 1963, and won Hiram Fong's open Senate seat in 1976 after beating Patsy Mink in the primary and former Governor William Quinn in the general election. In the Senate he pushed a poet laureate bill for 22 consecutive years until the post was created at the Library of Congress in 1985, helped establish the United States Institute of Peace in 1984, and drove the Japanese American redress bill. He died of prostate cancer in Toronto at 73 in 1990 and lay in state at the Hawaii State Capitol.

• In 1981 Secretary of State Alexander Haig asked him at a White House reception whether he understood English, and Matsunaga reminded Haig that he had voted to confirm him.
• The 100th Battalion adopted Remember Pearl Harbor as its motto.
• The redress package totaled $1.25 billion, with a formal apology and $20,000 for each person who had been interned.
• He voted to confirm Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, but opposed William Rehnquist for chief justice, Robert Bork, and John Tower for defense secretary in 1989.
• Since 1999 his portrait has appeared on the $10,000 Series I U.S. Savings Bond.

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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 Congressional Globe in Washington. State printing contracts funded his canals, railroads and the Bank of Middletown. In 1838 he served as a commissioner settling Winnebago claims in Wisconsin Territory, and never proven fraud allegations earned him the nickname the Great Winnebago Chief.

In 1845 he took a Senate seat from his own Democratic Party's nominee with a coalition of dissident Democrats, Whigs and Know Nothings. As a Republican in 1857 he won again after three Democratic legislators defected, and they were thrown out of their Harrisburg hotels that night. At the 1860 convention he traded Pennsylvania's delegates for a cabinet post, publicized Lincoln's offer while ignoring a second letter rescinding it, and became secretary of war. His brother James was killed at Bull Run. When his annual report urged arming freed slaves and he leaked it to the press, Lincoln removed him and sent him to Russia. He returned to the Senate in 1867, supported seating Hiram Revels, and in 1877 had the legislature elect his son Don Cameron to his seat.

• The War Department had just 90 employees when the Civil War began.
• He kept records of military contracts on scraps of paper stuffed in his coat pockets.
• He championed Tom Chester, an escaped slave he helped educate who became a diplomat.
• He abandoned the Russian post after a few months and rebuilt his Pennsylvania machine.
• He died in 1889 at 90, and his machine dominated Pennsylvania politics into the 1920s.

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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' Judge Advocate General's department in Europe, then as a Salt Lake City judge and Salt Lake County attorney. In 1958 he won a Senate seat with less than 40 percent after former governor J. Bracken Lee ran as an independent against incumbent Arthur Watkins, who had chaired the committee that censured Joseph McCarthy.

Moss became an expert on Western water, wrote The Water Crisis in 1967 and secured new national parks for Utah. As chairman of the Commerce Committee's consumer subcommittee he sponsored the Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, the Poison Prevention Packaging Act behind childproof caps and the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975, and he was an original sponsor of Medicaid. In 1976, at 64, he posed as a poor patient at an East Harlem clinic that ran him through needless tests. That year Orrin Hatch beat him by nine points, asking what you call a senator who has served 18 years and answering that you call him home. Hatch then held the seat for 42 years. Moss, the last Democrat to represent Utah in the Senate, died in 2003 at 91.

• His father is considered the father of high school athletics in Utah.
• His tobacco law required health warnings and ended cigarette advertising on radio and television.
• In 1974 he and Frank Church sponsored the first bill for federal hospice funding, groundwork for the 1982 Medicare hospice benefit.
• He chaired the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences from 1973 to 1977.
• In 1976 he backed a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade.

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Sam Houston was born in Virginia in 1793, and after his father's death his mother moved the family to Maryville on the Tennessee frontier. At 16 he ran away to live with the Cherokee under Chief John Jolly, learning the language and taking the name Raven. He joined the Army in the War of 1812 and was wounded so badly at Horseshoe Bend in 1814 that doctors left him for dead, earning Andrew Jackson's lifelong patronage. He became a Nashville district attorney, a congressman and in 1827 governor of Tennessee, but resigned in 1829 after his marriage to 19 year old Eliza Allen ended within 11 weeks, and returned to the Cherokee in Arkansas Territory, where he married Diana Rogers.

In 1832 he beat Congressman William Stanbery with a cane on Pennsylvania Avenue, was reprimanded by the House and fined $500, and soon moved to Mexican Texas. As commander of the Texian army he retreated after the fall of the Alamo, then routed Santa Anna's force at San Jacinto in April 1836 and captured Santa Anna despite a shattered ankle. He served as the first and third president of the Republic of Texas and courted Britain and France until the U.S. annexed Texas in 1845. As a senator he backed the Compromise of 1850 and opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Elected governor in 1859, he refused the Confederate loyalty oath in 1861 and was removed. He died of pneumonia in July 1863 at 70.

• Stanbery had accused him of seeking a fraudulent contract to supply rations to Native Americans.
• At San Jacinto his horse was shot out from under him.
• He warned the Senate that the Kansas-Nebraska Act would bring a sea of blood and smoking ruin.
• While being removed, he warned that the North would advance with the momentum of a mighty avalanche.
• After his death Joshua, a man Houston had enslaved, offered his own savings to help Houston's widow Margaret.

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Russell B. Long was born Huey Pierce Long III in 1918, son of Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long, and is the only person preceded in the Senate by both his father and his mother, Rose McConnell Long. After serving as student body president at LSU, he commanded a Navy landing craft in the invasions of North Africa, Sicily, Italy and southern France, earning four battle stars. Elected in 1948 one day before turning 30, he took office on December 31, gaining seniority over an incoming class of 1949 that included Lyndon B. Johnson and Hubert Humphrey. He chaired the Senate Finance Committee from 1966 to 1981, with jurisdiction over all federal revenue and about 40 percent of federal spending, and the Wall Street Journal called him the fourth branch of government.

Long preferred attaching amendments to must-pass tax bills over sponsoring headline legislation. He was the chief architect of the Earned Income Tax Credit and of Employee Stock Ownership Plans. With Representative Hale Boggs he placed the AFL and NFL merger's antitrust exemption in a tax bill in exchange for an expansion team, and the New Orleans Saints were born on November 1, 1966. He signed the 1956 Southern Manifesto and voted against the Voting Rights Act of 1965, yet backed statehood for Hawaii and Alaska, twice voted to outlaw the poll tax, hired Black staff in 1960, stayed out of the filibuster and later voted to extend the act. He retired in 1987 with 75 percent approval and died in 2003.

• A 1972 provision letting a Thibodaux Marine keep a $547 overpayment also created the Middle District of Louisiana federal court.
• Colleagues called his provisions for the elderly and poor grandma amendments.
• He summed up tax politics as: don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree.
• A 1966 plane conversation with New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison about the Warren Commission helped spur Garrison's JFK investigation.
• Martin Luther King Jr. called his 1965 election as Majority Whip a blessing in disguise.

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Roscoe Conkling was born in Albany, New York, in 1829, son of a federal judge and congressman. Six foot three, he boxed, rode and took long daily walks, yet recoiled from being touched. As a Utica lawyer he won a forgery case by proving the defendant could not read or write, then served as mayor of Utica and went to the House as an anti-slavery Republican. During the Civil War he investigated the Union defeat at Ball's Bluff and fought the printing of unbacked paper money. On the Joint Committee on Reconstruction he helped draft the 14th Amendment, championing the section that cut House representation for states denying the vote and the use of persons rather than citizens.

A bitter 1866 House exchange with James G. Blaine, who mocked his vanity and strut, began a feud that split the Republican Party for two decades. As a senator Conkling led the Stalwart faction through control of jobs at the New York Custom House. After failing to win Ulysses S. Grant a third nomination in 1880, he saw his protégé Chester A. Arthur put on the ticket, then resigned in 1881 when President James A. Garfield handed Custom House posts to Blaine allies, expecting a reelection that never came. After Garfield's assassination, President Arthur embraced civil service reform. Conkling declined a confirmed Supreme Court seat, was chased from a Rhode Island estate by a jealous husband, and died after walking home through the Great Blizzard of 1888.

• He was said to be able to transcribe entire speeches from memory after hearing them once.
• Custom House employees owed the party an assessment, sometimes two to six percent of their salaries.
• Garfield's assassin claimed he acted for the Stalwarts so that Arthur would become president.
• Ulysses S. Grant had earlier offered him the chief justiceship, which he also turned down.
• Later, arguing for railroad clients, he claimed the 14th Amendment's drafters chose the word persons to protect corporations.