Perseverance in almost any plan is better than fickleness and fluctuation. (Alexander Hamilton, July 1792)
On May 19, Representative Elias Boudinot of New Jersey, Hamilton’s old patron from Elizabethtown, proposed that Congress establish a department of finance.
It was between rival economic systems, each of which was aimed at generating its own men of property.13 In fact, the Federalist ranks had plenty of self-made lawyers like Hamilton, while the Republica...
In his response to Livingston, Hamilton made clear that some family members thought he was excessively preoccupied by the opposite sex. I exercise [my pen] at the [risk] of being anathematized by grav...
If a charge was made often enough, people assumed in the end that a person so often accused cannot be entirely innocent.
I can bear to hear of imputed or real errors. The man who wishes to stand well in the opinion of others must do this, because he is thereby enabled to correct his faults or remove the prejudices which...
He has no desire to rise by the fall of others; no glorying over another’s abasement;
Hamilton’s besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism.
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...
Hamilton seemed unhinged by the dispute. In the still secret Reynolds affair, he had shown a lack of private restraint. Now something compulsive and uncontrollable appeared in his public behavior. A c...
Hamilton did not know it, but he just wrote himself out of poverty.
Hamilton and his men ran so fast that they almost overtook the sappers, who were snapping off the edges of the sharpened tree branches and opening a breach through which the infantry rushed. Hamilton,...
Frederick Douglass paired Grant with Lincoln as the two people who had done most to secure African American advances:
Elbridge Gerry had bawdily likened standing armies to a tumescent penis: An excellent assurance of domestic tranquillity, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.
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.
Clinton epitomized the flaws of the old confederation, and he denounced the pernicious intrigues of a man high in office to preserve power and emolument to himself at the expense of the union, the pea...
1783, General Henry Knox proposed creation of the Society of the
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...
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Panegyric