What pretty much guaranteed that Johnson would side with white supremacists was his benighted view of black people. No American president has ever held such openly racist views. This is a country for...
Of the British prime minister, Lord North, he wrote with exceptional acuity: The Premier has advanced too far to recede with safety: he is deeply interested to execute his purpose, if possible…. In co...
When Grant made Edward S. Salomon governor of the Washington Territory, it was the first time an American Jew had occupied a gubernatorial post. (When Salomon proved corrupt, Grant handled his case le...
His optimistic view of America’s potential coexisted with an essentially pessimistic view of human nature.
When Grant read this, he was outraged at the shocking suggestion that he had subverted justice. He handed the letter to Bristow with a passionate admonition scrawled across it: Let no guilty man escap...
His view that in framing a government every man ought to be supposed a knave and to have no other end in all his actions but private interests. The task of government was not to stop selfish striving—...
Oh how blessed the young men are who have to struggle for a foundation and a beginning in life. I shall never cease to be grateful for the three and a half years of apprenticeship and the difficulties...
Fearful of being overshadowed by an expanding Republican slave empire in the west, some New England Federalists began to talk of secession from the union. Such plans formed part of the context for the...
Factions can become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.
On April 30, 1796, Federalists eked out a razor-thin victory of fifty-one to forty-eight in the House to make money available for the Jay Treaty.
Addison’s Cato,
At the same time, the mounting fear of Hamilton among Jefferson, Madison, and their supporters cohered into an organized opposition that began to call itself Republican. Alluding to the ancient Roman...
A lifelong Methodist, he had always viewed religious excess with a certain irony, having once told a clutch of ministers that America boasted three parties: Democrats, Republicans, and Methodists.
Where Hamilton looked at the world through a dark filter and had a better sense of human limitations, Jefferson viewed the world through a rose-colored prism and had a better sense of human potentiali...
Willful waste makes woeful want.
With an exalted sense of his place in history, he viewed himself as a potential savior of the republic. He once told a friend, Perhaps my sensibility is the effect of an exaggerated estimate of my ser...
On January 28, 1791,
On July 11, Lincoln appeared at Fort Stevens, north of Washington, which was under fire from Early’s men. To soothe an alarmed populace, Lincoln and Stanton rode there in an open carriage. The tall, a...
On May 19, Representative Elias Boudinot of New Jersey, Hamilton’s old patron from Elizabethtown, proposed that Congress establish a department of finance. From the clamor that arose over what would b...
On May 19, Representative Elias Boudinot of New Jersey, Hamilton’s old patron from Elizabethtown, proposed that Congress establish a department of finance.
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