Packard and Giles entreated Rockefeller for a donation to secure the school on a permanent footing: Give it a name; let it if you please be called Rockefeller College, or if you prefer let it take you...
Adumbrate a
Early July 1792, it was clear that George Washington would not have the option of silence or inaction in stemming the feud between Hamilton and Jefferson. He had probably waited too long to assert con...
By spotlighting the issue of intent, Hamilton identified the criteria for libel that still hold sway in America today: that the writing in question must be false, defamatory, and malicious.
Since Hamilton’s abiding literary sin was prolixity, the time and length constraints imposed by The Federalist may have given a salutary concision to his writing. For
The rancor ushered in a golden age of literary assassination in American politics. No etiquette had yet evolved to define the legitimate boundaries of dissent. Poison-pen artists on both sides wrote v...
The Continental Army was a national institution and helped to make Hamilton the optimal person to articulate a vision of American nationalism, his vision sharpened by the immigrant’s special love for...
On June 20, at Johnson’s behest, Attorney General James Speed ordered the U.S. attorney in Norfolk to abandon Lee’s prosecution. On the same day, Grant informed Lee that no further actions would be ta...
Hamilton then picked up a slim volume on the table and turned it over in his hands. Ah, this is the constitution, he said. Now, mark my words. So long as we are a young and virtuous people, this instr...
Washington replied, I always knew Colonel Hamilton to be a man of superior talents, but never supposed that he had any knowledge of finance. He knows everything, sir, Morris replied. To a mind like hi...
One story, perhaps apocryphal, claims that when Hamilton was asked why the framers omitted the word God from the Constitution, he replied, We forgot.
On the morning of March 4, in an extraordinary sequence of events, the House approved the bill right before the noon deadline. Senators had already adjourned to the Capitol for the inauguration. They...
On the night of April 18, 1775, eight hundred British troops marched out of Boston to capture Samuel Adams and John Hancock and seize a stockpile of patriot munitions in Concord.
If a white man kills a black, he cannot be tried for his life for the murder. . . . If a negro strikes a white man, he is punished with the loss of his hand and, if he should draw blood, with death.
Washington’s hair was reddish brown, and contrary to a common belief, he never wore a wig. The illusion that he did so derived from the powder that he sprinkled on his hair with a puffball in later li...
The Ku Klux Klan Act. He had planned a California trip that spring, but canceled it in the belief that he couldn’t sidestep this historic moment. The strong new measure laid down criminal penalties fo...
Since Ulysses S. Grant’s spelling could border on the eccentric, I have taken the liberty of correcting that and his punctuation and capitalization throughout the book for the sake of smoother reading...
Washington told Pickering that it would be political suicide to recruit anyone into his administration who was not prepared to support his programs wholeheartedly.18 He had learned his lesson with Jef...
Panegyric
He has no desire to rise by the fall of others; no glorying over another’s abasement;
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