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...
May 1780, he had fresh cause to meditate on the failings of Congress when news came of a calamitous defeat: the British had taken Charleston, capturing an American garrison of 5,400 soldiers, includin...
John D. Rockefeller was the Protestant work ethic in its purest form, leading a life so consistent with Weber’s classic essay that it reads like his spiritual biography.
James, sixteen, and Alexander, fourteen, were now left alone, largely friendless and penniless. At every step in their rootless, topsy-turvy existence, they had been surrounded by failed, broken, embi...
It was already an age of scientific wonders that promised to reshape economies and boost productivity. From the first steam engine that James Watt built in Great Britain in the 1760s to the hot-air ba...
In time, the government redefined the rules of the capitalist game to tame trusts and preserve competition, but as John D. Rockefeller set about building his fortune, the absence of clear-cut rules pr...
In the end, nobody would do more than Alexander Hamilton to infuse life into this parchment and make it the working mandate of the American government.
In other words, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence was recommending to the chief architect of the U.S. Constitution that any Virginia bank functionary who cooperated with Hamilton...
In mid-May, he dictated a message for a reunion of the Grand Army of the Republic that had a touching, patriarchal tone: Tell the boys that they probably will never look into my face again, nor hear m...
In his essays on the need for executive-branch vigor, Hamilton continually invoked the king of England as an example of what should be avoided, especially the monarch’s lack of accountability. Every p...
In addition to his better-known title of Father of His Country, Washington is also revered in certain circles as the Father of the American Mule.
In a moment of acute anxiety a year earlier, John Adams had wondered what would happen if the multitude, the vulgar, the herd, the rabble maintained such open defiance of authority. 13
In Venice, Grant let slip a remark that would provide fodder for many satirists: he told a young woman what a fine city it would be if only the canals were drained. Henry Adams adduced this as damning...
In March 1780, Congress tried to restore monetary order by issuing one new dollar in exchange for forty old ones, a move that wiped out the savings of many Americans.
If those who ‘gain all they can’ and ‘save all they can,’ will likewise ‘give all they can,’ then the more they will grow in grace.
If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.
If Jefferson provided the essential poetry of American political discourse, Hamilton established the prose of American statecraft.
How had Hamilton justified this disgraceful action to himself? He believed that Jefferson’s support for the Constitution had always been lukewarm and that, once in office, he would dismantle the feder...
His victory over the Cleveland refiners would be the first but also the most controversial campaign of his career.
He would smile at times, but I never heard him laugh aloud, said Louisa Boggs. He was a sad man . . . he seemed almost in despair.124 Grant seemed to be staring into an abyss. I don’t think he saw a l...