The evening of Hamilton’s death, New York’s leading merchants exhorted one another to shutter their shops for a state funeral hastily arranged for Saturday, July 14. The corpse is already putrid, Gouv...
The court approved Hamilton’s argument that this excise tax was legal and that Congress had power over every species of taxable property, except exports.5 The decision in Hylton v. United States not o...
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...
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 American Revolution and its aftermath coincided with two great transformations in the late eighteenth century. In the political sphere, there had been a repudiation of royal rule, fired by a new r...
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
So it may be said, with undoubted truth, that the whiskey drinkers made Mr. Jefferson the President of the United States.48
She liked to quote the maxim, To be a good wife and mother is the highest and hardest privilege of woman.27
Probably the first book that Hamilton absorbed was Malachy Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, a learned almanac of politics, economics, and geography that was crammed with arti...
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 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.
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 May 12, a thousand New Yorkers cheered from the docks as Jay sailed to England, hoping to avert war.
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 July 26, the House narrowly passed the assumption bill.
Morristown,
It now seemed futile to try to halt a British advance upon the capital.
In early July 1777, Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York fell to the British, prompting King George III to clap his hands and exclaim, I have beat them! Beat all the Americans.58 It was a potential ca...
In a mood of mounting anger, Grant was not content to chastise Jewish traders: he wanted to banish all Jews. On December 17, he issued the most egregious decision of his career. General Orders No. 11...