Once Morris had finished his speech, the casket was transferred to a grave site in the Trinity churchyard, not far from where Hamilton had studied and lived, practiced law and served his country.
On September 20, the New York Stock Exchange halted trading for ten days. Grant received emergency pleas for purchases of Treasury bonds to add liquidity to national banks, while Thomas Murphy, the fo...
On Easter Sunday, Nash led a mob of several hundred whites, armed with rifles and a small cannon, who opened fire on the courthouse, setting it ablaze. Even though its black defenders ran up a white f...
On August 5, he sent Stanton a one-sentence letter: Public considerations of a high character constrain me to say, that your resignation as Secretary of War will be accepted.5 Johnson knew that if Sta...
On April 16, 1789, George Washington departed from Mount Vernon on an eight-day journey to New York that blossomed into a national celebration.
Many of the real scenes in early California life exceed in strangeness and interest any of the mere products of the brain of the novelist, he declared
Madison did not want a long-term government debt, fearing that such securities would fall into foreign hands: As they have more money than the Americans and less productive ways of laying it out, they...
Like other founders and thinkers of the Enlightenment, he was disturbed by religious fanaticism and tended to associate organized religion with superstition. While a member of Washington’s military fa...
Like Ben Franklin, Hamilton was mostly self-taught and probably snatched every spare moment to read. The
Julia would gladly have stayed for one more term and had no qualms about scrapping George Washington’s precedent. Oh, Ulys! was that kind to me? she protested. Was it just to me? Well, he replied, I d...
Jefferson inwardly reviled Hamilton as a traitor to republican government. What a fatal stroke at the cause of liberty; et tu Brute, he wrote in his diary.
It was probably at this point that a pregnant Eliza first smiled and shook hands with her husband’s future executioner.
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 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 politics, I am indifferent what side she may be of; I think I have arguments that will easily convert her to mine.
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 January 1803, a grand jury in Columbia County, New York, indicted Harry Croswell for seditious libel against President Jefferson.
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...