The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves and to suffice for our own happiness.
The law is whatever is successfully argued and plausibly maintained,
The intimacy of this group of nationalists allowed the talks to range far beyond commercial disputes to a richer, more trenchant critique of the crumbling Articles of Confederation.
The federal government had captured forever the bulk of American taxing power.
The extraordinary outpouring of bipartisan concern blotted out the scandals of Grant’s presidency and restored him to his rightful niche in the American pantheon. Hundreds of sympathetic messages pile...
The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee, he once said, and I pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.
The American Revolution was to succeed because it was undertaken by skeptical men who knew that the same passions that toppled tyrannies could be applied to destructive ends.
The 1800 elections revealed, for the first time, the powerful centrist pull of American politics—the electorate’s tendency to rein in anything perceived as extreme.
Thanks to Washington and Hamilton, the American economy flourished; thanks to Adams, the Quasi-War with France had receded to a memory. Inheriting domestic prosperity and international peace, Jefferso...
So it may be said, with undoubted truth, that the whiskey drinkers made Mr. Jefferson the President of the United States.
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...
Rockefeller was sensitive about adults who behaved in a high-handed fashion toward him. Having assumed so much responsibility at home, he now thought of himself as a mature person.
Republican ire about the Federalist dominance of the judiciary became especially strident after Adams nominated John Marshall as chief justice of the Supreme Court in late January 1801.
Regarding the uprising as a direct threat to constitutional order, Washington asked Supreme Court Justice James Wilson to declare a state of anarchy around Pittsburgh.
Prejudice and private interest will be antagonists too powerful for public spirit and public good. 69
Patrick Henry, the leading antifederalist, warned delegates who supported the Constitution, They’ll free your niggers.
Once Hamilton was initiated into the cause of American liberty, his life acquired an even more headlong pace that never slackened.
On September 17, 1787, after almost four months of hard-fought battles, the convention ended when thirty-nine delegates from twelve states signed the Constitution
Oh how blessed the young men are who have to struggle for a foundation and a beginning in life. I shall never cease to be grateful for the three and a half years of apprenticeship and the difficulties...
McDougall was a certified revolutionary hero, while the Scottish-born cashier, the punctilious and corpulent William Seton, was a Loyalist who had spent the war in the city. In a striking show of bipa...