Around this time, a young man named Samuel Slater slipped through the tight protective net thrown by British authorities around their textile business. As a former apprentice to Sir Richard Arkwright,...
As Madison conceded, the specter of slavery haunted the convention, and he argued that the states were divided into different interests not by their difference of size, but principally from their havi...
As a member of the style committee, Hamilton showed that, for all his misgivings about the Constitution, he could be cooperative and play a serviceable part. The convention showed good judgment in cho...
As a team, they were unbeatable and far more than the sum of their parts.
As after any revolution, purists were vigilant for signs of ideological backsliding and departures from the one true faith. The 1780s and 1790s were to be especially rich in feverish witch hunts for t...
As always, Hamilton cited constitutional grounds for his program, invoking the clause that gave Congress authority to provide for the common defence and general welfare.59 Owing in part to Hamilton’s...
As in the American south, an exaggerated sense of romantic honor may have been an unconscious way for slaveholders to flaunt their moral superiority, purge pent-up guilt, and cloak the brutish nature...
As many Republicans had predicted, the French had retaliated against the Jay Treaty by allowing their privateers to prey on American ships carrying contraband cargo bound for British ports. With Napol...
As the sole clergyman, Knox resided in a settlement known as the Bottom, sunk in the elevated crater of an extinct volcano; it could be reached only by climbing up a stony path. Knox
As to the love of liberty and country, you have given no stronger proofs of being actuated by it than I have done. Cease then to arrogate to yourself and to your party all the patriotism and virtue of...
As too much power leads to despotism, too little leads to anarchy, and both eventually to the ruin of the people.
At 8:08 a.m. on July 23, 1885, Grant died so gently that nobody was quite certain at first that his spirit had stolen away. His death reflected words he had once written to a bereaved widow during the...
At a time when moguls vied to impress people with their possessions, Rockefeller preferred comfort to refinement. His house was bare of hunting trophies, shelves of richly bound but unread books, or o...
At forty-six, Grant was still trim and fit, the youngest man elected president until then. Having weathered the crucible of war, he was a more worldly figure than in earlier years, his face showing cu...
At noon on December 14, 1780, Alexander Hamilton, twenty-five, wed Elizabeth Schuyler, twenty-three, in the southeast parlor of the Schuyler mansion.
At the time, Charles Sumner still chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and made preposterous demands upon the English. Not only did he want all of Canada but a total British withdrawal from...
At this, Hamilton dropped any pose of civility and chastised Monroe, saying your representation is totally false.
At twenty-eight, he married a young widow, Martha Wayles Skelton, who inherited 135 slaves after her father’s death. This loving ten-year marriage was marred by childhood mortality—only two of their s...
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...
BY 1798 the Federalist party had grown haughty by being too long in power. When a party grows strong and feels its power, it becomes intoxicated, grows presumptuous and extravagant, and breaks to piec...
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