At noon on December 14, 1780, Alexander Hamilton, twenty-five, wed Elizabeth Schuyler, twenty-three, in the southeast parlor of the Schuyler mansion.
At home, Rockefeller created a make-believe market economy, calling Cettie the general manager and requiring the children to keep careful account books.16They earned pocket money by performing chores...
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...
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...
And in the Senate, Oliver Ellsworth took the lead in drafting a judiciary act that provided for a six-member Supreme Court, buttressed by federal district and circuit courts.
Ambition was reckless if inspired by purely selfish motives but laudable if guided by great principles. In
All on this side [of] the Mississippi must be ours, including both Floridas, he had already argued to McHenry in early 1798.
Alexander Hamilton triumphed as a doer and thinker, not as a leader of the average voter. He was simply too unashamedly brainy to appeal to the masses.
After Seabury rebutted A Full Vindication, Hamilton struck back with The Farmer Refuted, an eighty page tour de force...
That the retaliation would also be highly personal. That Hamilton could be so sensitive to criticisms of himself and so insensitive to the effect his words had on others was a central mystery of his p...
Task of government was not to stop selfish striving—a hopeless task—but to harness it for the public good.
Capture the Republican nomination instead of Grant. With Johnson acquitted, everyone knew, Grant would get the party nod. Significantly, the seven Republicans who voted for acquittal all campaigned fo...
Bolstered southern power by scrapping the rule that had once counted an African American as only three-fifths of a person for electoral purposes. Despite suppressing the vote of blacks, white southern...
When Franklin suggested on June 28th that each session start with a prayer for heavenly help, Hamilton countered that this might foster a public impression that embarrassments and dissensions within t...
Washington appointed Hamilton, George Wythe, and Charles Pinckney to a small committee that drew up rules and procedures for the convention.
This encouraged Grant to revive a proposal he had floated a year earlier to connect American canals and rivers into a national network, lowering transport costs and stoking business. He also wanted to...
The prolific Hamilton was now writing pseudonymous commentaries on his own pseudonymous essays.
The outside world may have wondered about Grant’s sympathies, but his private statements leave no room for conjecture about his inexorable drift toward Radical Republicanism. Welles later speculated t...
The lawmakers were drawn to the courtroom by more than curiosity: they had under consideration a bill that would allow truth as a defense in libel trials.
The influence of the doctrine of states’ rights, especially in the version promulgated by Jefferson, reverberated right up to the Civil War and beyond. At the close of that war, James Garfield of Ohio...