It was, Eliza Hamilton Holly noted pointedly, the imperative duty that Eliza had bequeathed to all her children: Justice shall be done to the memory of my Hamilton.
It was probably at this point that a pregnant Eliza first smiled and shook hands with her husband’s future executioner.
It often happens that our zeal is at variance with our understanding.
It may be that Hamilton’s preference for a diversified economy of manufacturing and agriculture originated in his youthful reflections on the avoidable poverty he had witnessed in the Caribbean.
In theory, Jefferson could have fathered all of Sally Hemings’s children. Fawn M. Brodie has written, Jefferson was not only not ‘distant’ from Sally Hemings but in the same house nine months before t...
In the standard telling of his life, Hamilton boards a ship in October 1772 and sails off to North America forever.
In the late spring of 1777, Hamilton began the most intimate friendship of his life, with an elegant, blue-eyed young officer named John Laurens, who formally joined Washington’s family in October.
In one glowing passage, Hamilton invoked the colonists’ natural rights: The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbe...
In number 71, Hamilton presented his theory of presidents as leaders who should act for the popular good, even if the people were sometimes deluded about their interests.
In a significant decision, he decided that customs revenues could be paid not just in gold and silver but with notes from the Bank of New York and the Bank of North America, an innovation that began t...
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 December 1790, with other options foreclosed, Hamilton revived a proposal he had floated in his Report on Public Credit: an excise tax on whiskey and other domestic spirits. He knew the measure wou...
I think that we Americans, at least in the Southern col[onie]s, cannot contend with a good grace for liberty until we shall have enfranchised our slaves, Laurens told a friend right before the signing...
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 had learned a lesson about propaganda in politics and mused wearily that no character, however upright, is a match for constantly reiterated attacks, however false. If a charge was made often enoug...
He had a great general’s ability to focus on his goals and brush aside obstacles as petty distractions. You can abuse me, you can strike me, Rockefeller said, so long as you let me have my own way.
He cleverly assumed that he was addressing loyal people and made common cause with them: I have come among you, not as an enemy, but as your friend and fellow-citizen, not to injure or annoy you, but...
Hamilton’s list of the advantages of manufacturing has a quintessentially American ring: Additional employment to classes of the community not ordinarily engaged in the business. The promoting of emig...
Hamilton’s life was so tumultuous that only an audacious novelist could have dreamed it up. He embodied an enduring archetype: the obscure immigrant who comes to America, re-creates himself, and succe...