In a blatant affront to the almighty Livingstons, Hamilton threw his weight behind his thirty-four-year-old friend Rufus King, a handsome, Harvard-educated lawyer from New England who had recently mov...
If Hamilton had shot first, he had wasted his fire, exactly as foretold. And if Burr had fired first, as Pendleton alleged, then Hamilton seems to have squeezed the trigger in a reflexive spasm of ago...
How exactly the debt should be funded was to be the most inflammatory political issue. During the Revolution, many affluent citizens had invested in bonds, and many war veterans had been paid with IOU...
His military triumphs had been neither frequent nor epic in scale. He had lost more battles than he had won, had botched several through strategic blunders, and had won at Yorktown only with the indis...
His faculties stayed intact until about fifteen minutes before the end. Then, at 2:00 P.M. on Thursday, July 12, 1804, thirty-one hours after the duel, forty-nine-year-old Alexander Hamilton died gent...
His eloquence . . . seemed to require opposition to give it its full force.
He saw that while he had much to lose by refraining from the duel, he had precious little to gain by facing it: I shall hazard much and can possibly gain nothing by the issue of the interview. 72 Why...
He embodied an enduring archetype: the obscure immigrant who comes to America, re-creates himself, and succeeds despite a lack of proper birth and breeding.
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 crowded years as treasury secretary scarcely exhaust the epic story of his short life, which was stuffed with high drama. From his illegitimate birth on Nevis to his bloody downfall in Weeh...
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 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...
Hamilton probably spent little more than two years at King’s and never formally graduated due to the outbreak of the Revolution. By April 6, 1776, King’s College, tarred by its earlier association wit...
Hamilton had championed a humane, enlightened policy toward the Indians. When real-estate speculators had wanted to banish them from western New York, he warned Governor Clinton that the Indians’ frie...
Hamilton extra
Hamilton cast himself as a warm advocate for limited monarchy and an unfeigned well-wisher to the present royal family.
Had Napoleon been thoroughly unselfish, Grant suggested, he would have been the greatest man in history, such was his military genius. When a young woman on board asked Grant to name the two figures h...
Gordian knot
For Washington, parties weren’t so much expressions of popular politics as their negation, denying the true will of the people as expressed through their chosen representatives.
Finally, he [John F. Mercer] ridiculed Hamilton as an upstart, a mushroom excrescence, who did not deserve the prominence he had gained.