Adams made baldly partisan selections for a judiciary already packed with Federalists. His appointment of the so-called midnight judges rubbed old Republican wounds.
A system which looks to the extinction of a race is too abhorrent for a Nation to indulge in, Grant told Congress in his first annual message in December 1869. As with all his presidential addresses,...
A spirit of warm and high resentment against the rulers of France has suddenly burst forth in every part of the United States.26 Congress rushed through a program for fortifying eastern seaports and a...
90 In the words of Frederick Douglass, That sturdy old Roman, Benjamin Butler, made the negro a contraband, Abraham Lincoln made him a freeman, and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant made him a citizen.
80–82 Jane Street. Taken to a large, second-floor bedroom, Alexander Hamilton was never to emerge from the house.
23 Destiny had now conferred upon Washington a pivotal place in
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 fiery and destructive passions of war reign in the human breast with much more powerful sway than the mild and beneficent sentiments of peace.54
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...
Something akin to chief of staff, he rode with the general in combat, cantered off on diplomatic missions, dealt with bullheaded generals, sorted through intelligence, interrogated deserters, and nego...
Rude and petulant, his frank manner a cloak for infinite calculation. Clinton
Raiders, the United States wanted Great Britain to foot the bill for the entire war cost after Gettysburg, some $2 billion, the logic being that after Gettysburg, the Confederacy had abandoned offensi...
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...
Peroration,
Looked more like a grizzled, weather-beaten prospector than a former president. When he bet Julia that she wouldn’t dare to descend into the mine, located seventeen hundred feet below, it roused her f...
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.
It is a melancholy truth that the behaviour of many among us might serve as the severest satire upon the [human] species. It has been a compound of inconsistency, falsehood, cowardice, selfishness and...
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—...