As often is the case with addictions, the fanciful notion of a gradual discontinuance only provided a comforting pretext for more sustained indulgence.
An essential difference between the American and French revolutions was that the American version allowed a search for many truths, while French zealots tried to impose a single sacred truth that allo...
Has anyone given you the law of these offices? No? It is this: nobody does anything if he can get anybody else to do it.… As soon as you can, get some one whom you can rely on, train him in the work,...
Reproaching his slave carpenters, he said, There is not to be found so idle a set of rascals.28 Of a slave named Betty who worked as a spinner in the mansion, he complained that a more lazy, deceitful...
I have developed a very strong partiality for the dead: they don't talk back, they don't sue, and they don't have angry relatives.
Revenge, greed, resentment, envy, and patriotism made for an inflammatory mix.
Having been battered by the world in his earlier years, he had come to rely on family and friends and never forgot that lesson. When he offered an appointment to a former St. Louis friend, the man fel...
He had prevailed in almost every major program he had sponsored—whether the bank, assumption, funding the public debt, the tax system, the Customs Service, or the Coast Guard—despite years of complain...
My family is American, Ulysses later declared proudly, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral.
Jay was attacked with peculiar venom. Near his New York home, the walls of a building were defaced with the gigantic words, 'Damn John Jay. Damn everyone that won’t damn John Jay. Damn everyone that w...
Tens of thousands of onlookers gaped in amazement as the shattered British troops marched out of Yorktown and, to the tune of an old English ballad, The World Turned Upside Down,
Washington once advised his adopted grandson that where there is no occasion for expressing an opinion, it is best to be silent. For there is nothing more certain than that it is at all times more eas...
He wondered why he cared so desperately about the fate of his adopted country and others seemingly so little.To see the character of the government and the country so sported with, exposed to so indel...
On February 2, 1780, hard on the heels of Cornelia and Polly, Elizabeth Schuyler arrived in Morristown, accompanied by a military escort, to stay with relatives.
[Kitty] was the type of woman Hamilton found irresistible: pretty, coquettish, somewhat spoiled, and always ready for flirtatious banter.
The feckless President Buchanan, who opposed secession, thought the federal government powerless to stop it, and in his last annual message blamed the incessant and violent agitation of the slavery qu...
A capitalist society requires certain preconditions. Among other things, it must establish a rule of law through enforceable contracts; respect private property; create a trustworthy bureaucracy to ar...
Owned hundreds of human beings but profited from the Constitution’s least democratic features: the legality of slavery and the ability of southern states to count three-fifths of their captive populat...
Where revolutions, by their nature, resisted excess government power, the opposite situation could be equally hazardous. As too much power leads to despotism, too little leads to anarchy, and both eve...
Adumbrate a plan that did not reflect popular opinion.
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