Since both Eliza and Angelica were pregnant, sister Peggy crept downstairs to retrieve the endangered child. The leader of the raiding party barred her way with a musket. Wench, wench! Where is your m...
Since Hamilton had at least one sibling who had died in infancy or childhood, the poem may have summoned up memories of his own mother’s hardships: For the sweet babe, my doting heart Did all a mother...
Seven months after Grant’s death, Julia received a whopping $200,000 check from Twain and $450,000 in the end—an astonishing sum for book royalties at the time. No previous book had ever sold so many...
September 9, Washington had had enough. If the laws are to be trampled upon with impunity, he said, and a minority is to dictate to the majority, there is an end put at one stroke to republican govern...
Returning to his Manhattan town house on Christmas Eve, Grant, sixty-one, pivoted to hand the driver a holiday tip when he slipped on the icy pavement and crashed to the ground, tearing a thigh muscle...
Rather than make peace with John Adams, he was ready, if necessary, to blow up the Federalist party and let Jefferson become president. The
Patrick Henry, the leading antifederalist, warned delegates who supported the Constitution, They’ll free your niggers.
Out of the blue, a veteran named Charles Wood, manager of a brush factory in upstate New York, sent Grant a $500 check and offered him a $1,000 interest-free loan for a year, renewable if necessary. G...
Other reasons account for Hamilton’s failure to snatch the prize. Though blessed with a great executive mind and a consummate policy maker, Hamilton could never master the smooth restraint of a mature...
One scandalized British soldier complained that the American riflemen conceal themselves behind trees etc. till an opportunity presents itself of taking a shot at our advance sentries, which done, the...
Once Morris had finished his speech, the casket was transferred to a grave site in the Trinity churchyard, not far from where Hamilton had studied and lived, practiced law and served his country.
Once Hamilton was initiated into the cause of American liberty, his life acquired an even more headlong pace that never slackened.
On Easter Sunday, Nash led a mob of several hundred whites, armed with rifles and a small cannon, who opened fire on the courthouse, setting it ablaze. Even though its black defenders ran up a white f...
On August 5, he sent Stanton a one-sentence letter: Public considerations of a high character constrain me to say, that your resignation as Secretary of War will be accepted.5 Johnson knew that if Sta...
Morristown,
Madison did not want a long-term government debt, fearing that such securities would fall into foreign hands: As they have more money than the Americans and less productive ways of laying it out, they...
Like other founders and thinkers of the Enlightenment, he was disturbed by religious fanaticism and tended to associate organized religion with superstition. While a member of Washington’s military fa...
July 10, 1790, the House approved the Residence Act, designating Philadelphia as the temporary capital and a ten-mile-square site on the Potomac as the permanent site.
Julia’s brother Lewis, who remained in California, allowed them to use his house Wish-ton-wish—an Indian term meaning whip-poor-will—
Julia would gladly have stayed for one more term and had no qualms about scrapping George Washington’s precedent. Oh, Ulys! was that kind to me? she protested. Was it just to me? Well, he replied, I d...