Such is my opinion of your abilities as a critic, Hamilton addressed him directly, that I very much prefer your disapprobation to your applause.
Some states, such as Massachusetts and South Carolina, struggled with heavy debts and were glad to be relieved by the central government. Others, such as Virginia and North Carolina, had settled most...
Slaveholding states wondered how their human property would be counted for congressional-apportionment purposes. Northern states finally agreed that five slaves would be counted as equivalent to three...
Since Ulysses S. Grant’s spelling could border on the eccentric, I have taken the liberty of correcting that and his punctuation and capitalization throughout the book for the sake of smoother reading...
Since Hamilton’s abiding literary sin was prolixity, the time and length constraints imposed by The Federalist may have given a salutary concision to his writing. For
Shiloh, but it sorely disappointed the Century editors. Written in Grant’s pithy style, it was arid and compact and read like a bloodless report. Johnson hurried over to Long Branch for a pep talk wit...
Sheridan had a pugnacity that refused to quit, and Sherman described him as a persevering terrier dog, honest, modest, plucky and smart enough.78 Quite unlike Grant,
Sensing an abandonment of Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass wondered what good abolition had been for the black man if having been freed from the slaveholder’s lash, he is to be subject to the slaveh...
Self-sufficiency and a contempt of the science and experience of others are too prevailing traits of character in this country, he wailed to John Jay.
Predictably, northern military units predominated, but the presence of Confederate soldiers touched onlookers. It was quite a sight to see the Stonewall Brigade [march] up Fifth Avenue with their drum...
Perseverance in almost any plan is better than fickleness and fluctuation,
Packard and Giles entreated Rockefeller for a donation to secure the school on a permanent footing: Give it a name; let it if you please be called Rockefeller College, or if you prefer let it take you...
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...
Only in such passages do we see that Hamilton, for all his phenomenal success in the Continental Army, still felt unlucky and unlovely, still cursed by his past.
On the morning of March 4, in an extraordinary sequence of events, the House approved the bill right before the noon deadline. Senators had already adjourned to the Capitol for the inauguration. They...
On November 26, 1799, she gave birth to her seventh child, Eliza, but she continued to shelter strays and waifs, a practice that she and Alexander had started in adopting Fanny Antill.
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 16, 1797, President Adams delivered a bellicose message to Congress, denouncing the French for ejecting Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and stalking American ships and chiding them for having infli...
On June 20, at Johnson’s behest, Attorney General James Speed ordered the U.S. attorney in Norfolk to abandon Lee’s prosecution. On the same day, Grant informed Lee that no further actions would be ta...
Of the two policies that Hamilton wished to promote—the federal assumption of state debt and the selection of New York as the capital—assumption was incomparably more important to him. It was the most...