Hamilton has often been extolled as the exponent of a rational foreign policy based on cool calculations of national self-interest. But his April 14 letter expressed his unswerving conviction that nat...
Greeley campaigned from the back of a train, delivering scores of speeches and previewing the whistle-stop style that later marked presidential campaigns. His campaign stumbled from the start and neve...
Grant’s catatonic state didn’t last. Soon he was devoting four or five hours daily to his memoirs,
Grant worded his message to remove any suspicion that he spoke for a particular religious denomination. Also buried in his statement was a courageous, farsighted plea for free, universal education for...
Grant refused to accept that. In a newspaper interview, he placed blame for the disaster squarely on Custer’s shoulders: I regard Custer’s massacre as a sacrifice of troops, brought on by Custer himse...
For that reason, historian Clinton Rossiter insisted that Hamilton’s works and words have been more consequential than those of any other American in shaping the Constitution under which we live.40
For some, the credo sounded blandly vacuous and Henry Adams wisecracked that Let Us Have Peace meant only Leave Me Alone.16
For five weeks in November and December 1798, he conferred in Philadelphia with Washington, who made his first resplendent return to the capital in twenty months, appearing in uniform on horseback. Ch...
For Hamilton, Jefferson’s desire to overturn the Judiciary Act was an insidious first step toward destroying the Constitution: Who is so blind as not to see that the right of the legislature to abolis...
Far more than just a technical document, the Report on Manufactures was a prescient statement of American nationalism.
Far from being a pro-British lackey, much less a high-level spy, Hamilton stubbornly defended U.S. interests at every turn. He was bargaining with Beckwith, not groveling. He insisted that the United...
Credit is an entire thing. Every part of it has the nicest sympathy with every other part. Wound one limb and the whole tree shrinks and decays.37
Chase was a tall, ungainly man with a resemblance to Dr. Samuel Johnson and a face so broad and ruddy that he was dubbed Bacon Face.
Cadwallader Colden, the assistant attorney general,
Both as a matter of temperament and policy, Washington was taciturn, once advising his adopted grandson, It is best to be silent, for there is nothing more certain than that it is at all times more ea...
Both Jefferson and Adams detested people who earned a living shuffling financial paper, and when Adams launched a bitter tirade in later years against the iniquitous banking system, Jefferson agreed t...
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...
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...
At the same time, the mounting fear of Hamilton among Jefferson, Madison, and their supporters cohered into an organized opposition that began to call itself Republican. Alluding to the ancient Roman...
At the Constitutional Convention, Elbridge Gerry had bawdily likened standing armies to a tumescent penis: An excellent assurance of domestic tranquillity, but a dangerous temptation to foreign advent...