Early disappointments with people left Washington with a residual cynicism that was to jibe well with Hamilton’s views.
Delenda est Carthago: Carthage must be destroyed and obliterated.
Credit is an entire thing. Every part of it has the nicest sympathy with every other part. Wound one limb and the whole tree shrinks and decays.37
Confederate forces were being whittled down and could not be replaced by the South’s smaller population.
By the time of A Full Vindication, Hamilton had clearly assumed the coloring of his environment.
By the end of Grant’s second term, white Democrats, through the redeemer movement, had reclaimed control of every southern state, winning in peacetime much of the power lost in combat. They promulgate...
By 1872, under Grant’s leadership, the Ku Klux Klan had been smashed in the South. (Its later twentieth-century incarnation had no connection to the earlier group other than a common style and ideolog...
Both as a matter of temperament and policy, 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 ea...
Both Grant and Sherman were damaged souls who would redeem tarnished reputations in the brutal crucible of war.
Aware of the widespread prejudice against banks, Hamilton knew he needed to set out their advantages. Echoing Adam Smith, he showed how gold and silver, if locked up in a merchant’s chest, were steril...
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...
At home, Rockefeller created a make-believe market economy, calling Cettie the general manager and requiring the children to keep careful account books.16They earned pocket money by performing chores...
As too much power leads to despotism, too little leads to anarchy, and both eventually to the ruin of the people.
As a team, they were unbeatable and far more than the sum of their parts.
All on this side [of] the Mississippi must be ours, including both Floridas, he had already argued to McHenry in early 1798.
Ah, this is the constitution, he said. Now, mark my words. So long as we are a young and virtuous people, this instrument will bind us together in mutual interests, mutual welfare, and mutual happines...
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 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.
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.
1690, the first capital, Jamestown, was swallowed whole by the sea during an