He applauded a belated decision to evacuate Garfield from the White House in early September and bring him by train to Long Branch. During the months of August and September the White House is one of...
Hamilton’s critics seriously underrated his superhuman stamina. He enjoyed beating his enemies at their own game, and the resolutions roused his fighting spirit. By February 19, in a staggering displa...
Hamilton opposed the vogue for state banks that proliferated in the 1790s, less from narrow political motives than from a fear that competition among banks would dilute credit standards and invite imp...
Finally, he [John F. Mercer] ridiculed Hamilton as an upstart, a mushroom excrescence, who did not deserve the prominence he had gained.
Even as a raw country boy, he allowed himself no oath stronger than Thunder and Lightning
Elbridge Gerry had bawdily likened standing armies to a tumescent penis: An excellent assurance of domestic tranquillity, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.
December 14, 1790, one day after he jolted Congress with his call for an excise tax on liquor, Alexander Hamilton submitted another trailblazing report, this one a clarion call to charter America’s fi...
Clearly, this ambivalent twenty-year-old favored the Revolution but also worried about the long-term effect of habitual disorder, especially among the uneducated masses. Hamilton lacked the temperamen...
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.
To be an essential ingredient in its structure that it shall be under a private not a public direction, under the guidance of individual interest, not of public policy.18
The works of Locke, Montesquieu, Hobbes, and Hume, as well as those of such reigning legal sages as Sir William Blackstone, Hugo Grotius, and Samuel von Pufendorf. He was especially taken with the jur...
The government must degenerate either into an absolute and despotic monarchy or a tyrannical aristocracy.
The Senate’s composition introduced a lasting political bias in American life in favor of smaller states. Left
Such conduct in a man high in office argues greater attachment to his own power than to the public good and furnishes strong reason to suspect a dangerous predetermination to oppose whatever may tend...
Strong executives and endorsed single ministers for war, foreign affairs, finance, and the navy:
Sinister glow. The jury will mark every muscle of
Proper handling of government debt would permit America to borrow at affordable interest rates and would also act as a tonic to the economy. Used as loan collateral, government bonds could function as...
Polite with dignity, affable without formality, distant without haughtiness, grave without austerity,
Parvenu
Orders.