Washington possessed the outstanding judgment, sterling character, and clear sense of purpose needed to guide his sometimes wayward protégé; he saw that the volatile Hamilton needed a steadying hand.
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....
There are some people whom the Lord Almighty cannot save, he later said wearily of the Oil Creek refiners. They don’t want to be saved. They want to go on and serve the devil and keep on in their wick...
The truth is I am an unlucky honest man that speaks my sentiments to all and with emphasis.
The power of the new mass media made Grant’s illness a national spectacle, with his doctors offering twice-daily updates on his condition.
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 Publius letter pointed out that greed can corrupt a state and that a public official who betrays his trust ought to feel the utmost rigor of public resentment and be detested as a traitor of...
The Constitution did more than just tolerate slavery: it actively rewarded it. Timothy Pickering was to inveigh against Negro presidents and Negro congresses—that is, presidents and congresses who owe...
The 1800 triumph of Republicanism also meant the ascendancy of the slaveholding south. Three Virginia slaveholders—Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—were to control the White House for the next twenty-fo...
Success comes from keeping the ears open and the mouth closed and A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds.
Steuben
Soon after being sworn in as president, John Adams learned that the Directory, the five-member council now ruling France, had expelled the new American minister, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and promu...
So it may be said, with undoubted truth, that the whiskey drinkers made Mr. Jefferson the President of the United States.48
Robert Troup said that Hamilton rejected fees if they were larger than he thought warranted and generally favored arbitration or amicable settlements in lieu of lawsuits.
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...
On October 15, Adams yielded grudgingly to the appointment of Hamilton as inspector general. Knox refused to serve under him, but Charles Cotesworth Pinckney agreed and praised Hamilton. I knew that h...
On July 5, the Second Continental Congress made one final feeble effort to ward off further hostilities when it endorsed the Olive Branch Petition, urging a negotiated solution to the conflict with En...
On January 28, 1791,
Of the nine American presidents who owned slaves—a list that includes his fellow Virginians Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—only Washington set free all of his slaves.
Not only had Burr’s plan failed to provide pure water but it had thwarted other sound plans afoot, including those for a municipal water company.