His optimistic view of America’s potential coexisted with an essentially pessimistic view of human nature.
Emissary to England to continue talks about the matters discussed. On October 7, Washington discussed such an appointment with Hamilton and Jay and accepted Hamilton’s suggestion that Gouverneur Morri...
D
During the summer and early fall. In the House, James Madison helped to compress dozens of changes to the Constitution recommended by the state conventions into twelve amendments; the first ten, when...
Bibulous,
Best government posture toward religion was one of passive tolerance, not active promotion of an established church.
Avowed preference for an elite based on merit was misconstrued by enemies into a secret adoration of aristocracy.
Avoid. A rump group of rebel soldiers formed a colony west of Vera Cruz called Carlota, which soon burgeoned into a community of five thousand people. Among southern generals flocking to sanctuary in...
An Anglican college in New York, which, he warned, would become a contracted receptacle of bigotry
You know the opinion I entertain of mankind and how much it is my desire to preserve myself free from particular attachments and to keep my happiness independent of the caprice of others. You s[hould]...
Without Washington’s guidance or public responsibility, he had again revealed a blazing, ungovernable temper that was unworthy of him and rendered him less effective. He also revealed anew that the ma...
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...
While the folks at home embraced him as an improbable hero, Washington was denigrated in England as a reckless young warrior and in France as an outright assassin. He would have been crestfallen to kn...
While other Americans dreamed of a brand-new society that would expunge all traces of effete European civilization, Hamilton humbly studied those societies for clues to the formation of a new governme...
While marking time in Princeton in July, Hamilton drafted a resolution that again called for a convention to revise the Articles of Confederation. This prescient document encapsulated many features of...
While drinking almost never interfered with his official duties, it haunted his career and trailed him everywhere, an infuriating, ever-present ghost he could not shake. It influenced how people perce...
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...
When the sixty-nine electors met on February 4, 1789, they voted unanimously for Washington, who became the first president, and cast only thirty-four ballots for Adams, who came in second and thus be...
When a congressional committee reported in February on the Mississippi bloodshed, it concluded that the nation had arrived at a crossroads and must either restrain by force these violent demonstration...
When Hamilton, debilitated from illness, rejoined his comrades at Valley Forge in January 1778, he must have shuddered at the mud and log huts and the slovenly state of the men who shivered around the...