The suspect nature of these stories can be seen in the anecdote Jefferson told of Hamilton visiting his lodging in 1792 and inquiring about three portraits on the wall. They are my trinity of the thre...
The same day, Hamilton wrote to James McHenry
The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of the divinity itse...
The rich could put their own interests above the national interests.
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 paper currency was depreciating rapidly. Hence, for the first time, Hamilton began to fiddle with ideas for creating a national bank, through a mixture of foreign loans and private subscriptions.
The panic was blamed on many factors—tight money, Roosevelt’s Gridiron Club speech attacking the malefactors of great wealth, and excessive speculation in copper, mining, and railroad stocks. The imme...
The northern states were not about to override their southern brethren on the slavery issue. All along, the American Revolution had been premised on a tacit bargain that regional conflicts would be su...
The most damning and hypocritical critiques of his allegedly aristocratic economic system emanated from the most aristocratic southern slaveholders, who deflected attention from their own nefarious de...
The government would have to track them down, ascertain their sale prices, then trace all intermediate investors who had held the debt before it was bought by the current owners—an administrative nigh...
The gist of Hamilton’s argument was that the truth of the claims made by an author should be admissible evidence for the defense in a libel case. The standard heretofore had been that plaintiffs in li...
The financial turmoil on Wall Street and the William Duer debacle pointed up a glaring defect in Hamilton’s political theory: the rich could put their own interests above the national interest.
The feud between Sherman and Stanton exposed a deep fissure that would shortly divide the country over Reconstruction. With the war ending, Sherman’s old fondness for the South became more apparent. H...
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 decades that she devoted to conserving her husband’s legacy made Eliza only more militantly loyal to his memory, and there was one injury she could never forget: the exposure of the Maria Reynolds...
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 changes in the human condition are uncertain and frequent. Many, on whom fortune has bestowed her favours, may trace their family to a more unprosperous station; and many who are now in obscurity,...
The United States still had not escaped economic dependence on England, which consumed nearly half of American exports and accounted for three-quarters of American imports.
The Second Continental Congress lacked many of the prerequisites of an authentic government—an army, a currency, taxing power—yet it evolved in pell-mell fashion into the first government of the Unite...
The Federalists were allied with powerful banking and merchant interests in New England and on the Atlantic seaboard and were disproportionately Congregationalists and Episcopalians.