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...
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...
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—...
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 optimistic view of America’s potential coexisted with an essentially pessimistic view of human nature.
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...
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...
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...
Echo John Dickinson, who had written that the essential rights to happiness are bestowed by God, not man. They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals.64 Hamilton added beauty and rhythm to the...
What makes Flagler’s ethics consequential for Rockefeller’s career was that he was the mastermind of many negotiations with the railroads—the single most controversial aspect of Standard Oil history.
What a world of scarred emotion and secret grief Alexander Hamilton bore with him on the boat to Boston. He took his unhappy boyhood, tucked it away in a mental closet, and never opened the door again...
Washington was taciturn, once advising his adopted grandson, It is best to be silent, for there is nothing more certain than that it is at all times more easy to make enemies than friends.
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.
Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power. . . . [T]he former rather than the latter is apparently most to be apprehended by the United States.
Washington had several surrogate sons during the Revolution, most notably the marquis de Lafayette, and he often referred to Hamilton as my boy.
Henceforth he would project himself into opponents’ minds and comprehend their fears and anxieties instead of blowing them up into all-powerful bugaboos, giving him courage when others quailed.
Avowed preference for an elite based on merit was misconstrued by enemies into a secret adoration of aristocracy.
Their strategy was to make clients feel accepted into a private club, as if a Morgan account were a membership card to the aristocracy.
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...
Over a period of nearly six months, he published twenty-eight glittering essays, strengthening his claim as arguably the foremost political pamphleteer in American history. As with The Federalist Pape...
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