Nothing alarmed the white South more than black power at the polls, which was why most terror was directed there.
In the first essay, Hamilton dealt with the objection that only Congress could issue a neutrality proclamation, since it alone had the power to declare war. Hamilton pointed out that if the legislatur...
In fact, no immigrant in American history has ever made a larger contribution than Alexander Hamilton
In early June, Grant traveled to St. Louis, where he had gained possession of White Haven and an additional 280 acres from the Dent family. It was another strange, dreamlike transformation of his life...
If Madison in the 1780s was a philosopher king, Madison in the 1790s was a formidable practicing politician, and so skillful at cutting deals that he was dubbed the big knife.
He has no desire to rise by the fall of others; no glorying over another’s abasement;
Hamilton, using the pen name Civis in a newspaper piece of February 23, 1791, penned the following telling sarcasm to Madison and Jefferson: As to the negroes, you must be tender upon that subject. . ...
Hamilton warned that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of...
Hamilton sketched out this phantom force in microscopic detail, producing comprehensive charts for regiments, battalions, and companies. In a typical passage, Hamilton was to write, A company is subdi...
Frederick Douglass paired Grant with Lincoln as the two people who had done most to secure African American advances:
Even amid a state of open warfare, these law-abiding men felt obligated to issue a formal document, giving a dispassionate list of their reasons for secession.
Daring in design, cautious in execution—it was a formula he made his own throughout his career.
Addison’s Cato,
Hamilton wanted to lead the electorate and provide expert opinion instead of consulting popular opinion. He took tough, uncompromising stands and gloried in abstruse ideas in a political culture that...
There is a kind of fear, approaching a panic, that's spreading through the Baby Boom Generation, which has suddenly discovered that it will have to provide for its own retirement.
Partly because his life ended before the age of 50, Hamilton was defined by the other founding fathers, and he managed, with amazing consistency, to alienate most of them.
The further one digs into the Phocion essays, the more apparent it becomes that Hamilton was engaging in devious manipulation of the southern vote. He was trying to turn southern slaveholders against...
Respectable and prosperous or contemptible and miserable as a nation.
Promote—the federal assumption of state debt and the selection of New York as the capital—assumption was incomparably more important to him. It was the most effective and irrevocable way to yoke the s...
Politics. A prominent antifederalist had already warned him that rather than to adopt the Constitution, I would risk a government of Jew, Turk or infidel.83