The day after the Manhattan Company inaugurated business on Wall Street, two of its directors, Aaron Burr and John Barker Church, celebrated the event in idiosyncratic fashion: with a duel.
The Republican marching club was known as the Galena Wide Awakes—Orvil Grant was a member—and as they tramped along, clad in dark oilcloth capes and caps, their martial air portended war. Grant rebuff...
The Philadelphia mutiny had major repercussions in American history, for it gave rise to the notion that the national capital should be housed in a special federal district where it would never stand...
The Federalist has been extolled as both a literary and political masterpiece. Theodore Roosevelt commented that it is on the whole the greatest book dealing with practical politics.
The American Revolution had succeeded because it was a free, regular and deliberate act of the nation and had been conducted with a spirit of justice and humanity.22 It was, in fact, a revolution writ...
The Alien Act of June 25 gave the president the power to deport, without a hearing or even a reasonable explanation, any foreign-born residents deemed dangerous to the peace. The Alien Enemies Act of...
Some states, he noted, had paid their debts by ignoble means. New York, for instance, had reneged on interest payments to drive down the market value of its debt, making it cheaper for the state to bu...
So grave were the interstate tensions over trade that Nathaniel Gorham, named president of Congress in 1786, feared that clashes between New York and its neighbors might degenerate into civil war. Sim...
Since both Eliza and Angelica were pregnant, sister Peggy crept downstairs to retrieve the endangered child. The leader of the raiding party barred her way with a musket. Wench, wench! Where is your m...
Since Hamilton had at least one sibling who had died in infancy or childhood, the poem may have summoned up memories of his own mother’s hardships: For the sweet babe, my doting heart Did all a mother...
Seven months after Grant’s death, Julia received a whopping $200,000 check from Twain and $450,000 in the end—an astonishing sum for book royalties at the time. No previous book had ever sold so many...
Right before his inauguration, he received a Quaker delegation and asked them to nominate Indian agents from their members. If you can make Quakers out of the Indians, it will take the fight out of th...
Returning to his Manhattan town house on Christmas Eve, Grant, sixty-one, pivoted to hand the driver a holiday tip when he slipped on the icy pavement and crashed to the ground, tearing a thigh muscle...
Rather than make peace with John Adams, he was ready, if necessary, to blow up the Federalist party and let Jefferson become president. The
Princeton applicants had to know Virgil, Cicero's orations, and Latin grammar and also had to be 'so well acquainted with Greek as to render any part of the four Evangelists in that language into Lati...
People tended either to embrace Hamilton or to abhor him;
Out of the blue, a veteran named Charles Wood, manager of a brush factory in upstate New York, sent Grant a $500 check and offered him a $1,000 interest-free loan for a year, renewable if necessary. G...
Other reasons account for Hamilton’s failure to snatch the prize. Though blessed with a great executive mind and a consummate policy maker, Hamilton could never master the smooth restraint of a mature...
One scandalized British soldier complained that the American riflemen conceal themselves behind trees etc. till an opportunity presents itself of taking a shot at our advance sentries, which done, the...
One lady remembered seeing them together that summer turn and laugh and play with a monkey that was climbing in a neighbor’s yard.