Mordant
The more I see, the more I find reason for those who love this country to weep over its blindness, Hamilton wrote.14 He recoiled at the cowardice and selfishness he saw rampant in the New York legisla...
The first great skeptic of American exceptionalism, he refused to believe that the country was exempt from the sober lessons of history.
Duration by Britain’s treacherous support for the Confederacy.43 Not simply wanting compensation for destroyed American vessels, he added a still more explosive demand: that Britain pay a staggering $...
Right before Adams left office, Congress had enacted the Judiciary Act, which created new courts and twenty-three new federal judgeships so as to spare Supreme Court justices the onerous task of ridin...
The issue is much more complicated than that, but there’s no doubt that Rockefeller’s achievement arose from the often tense interplay between the two opposing, deeply ingrained tendencies of his natu...
This treasured gift retained a secret meaning for Eliza, for it had been a tacit gesture of solidarity from Washington when her husband was ensnared in the first major sex scandal in American history....
Congress was chased like a covey of partridges from Philadelphia to Trenton, from Trenton to Lancaster, Adams wrote with his usual gift for evocative language.
Beginning
Daring in design, cautious in execution—it was a formula he made his own throughout his career.
Dishclout
Although he was not formally relieved until early November. Lincoln’s decision to cashier Frémont served as a cautionary tale for Grant, who noted, The generals who insisted upon writing emancipation...
Like the Reynolds pamphlet, these clandestine messages signal a further deterioration in Hamilton’s judgment once he no longer worked under Washington’s wise auspices and was left purely to his own de...
Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, a bespectacled Republican with a grizzled beard, who was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and attended Harvard College and Law School. A former member of the Free-Soil Party, an...
Appearances, not reality, ruled in politics, he
On April 30, 1781, Hamilton sent a marathon letter to Morris—it runs to thirty-one printed pages—that set forth a full-fledged system for shoring up American credit and creating a national bank.
Where Jefferson dismissed these wholesale killings as regrettable but necessary sacrifices to freedom, Hamilton was traumatized by them. The burgeoning atheism of the French Revolution reawakened in h...
Arguing for a new trial, Hamilton highlighted the principle at stake, the protection of a free press: The liberty of the press consists, in my idea, in publishing the truth from good motives and for j...
Leitmotif
Philadelphia was a cosmopolitan city, praised by a highborn British visitor as one of the wonders of the world, the first town in America, and one that bids fair to rival almost any in Europe.27 Large...
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