This was Alexander Hamilton’s recurring nightmare: an electoral deal struck between Virginia and New York Republicans.
This is the true secret . . . that wherever a regiment is well officered, the men have behaved well—when otherwise, ill—the [misconduct] or cowardly behavior always originating with the officers, who...
These same banks, ironically, would shortly be hauled before the Pujo Committee as the abominable Money Trust. What the public wouldn’t know was that the Money Trust had been forged, in part, by Washi...
These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and th...
The tone of politics had rapidly grown very harsh. Some poison was released into the American political atmosphere that was not put back into the bottle for a generation. As after any revolution, puri...
The terror tactics worked: on Election Day in November, only two Republicans dared to vote in all of Yazoo County, only one in Tallahatchie County. In Louisiana, whites were set to
The task of government was not to stop selfish striving—a hopeless task—but to harness it for the public good.
The remedy is for people to stop watching the ticker, listening to the radio, drinking bootleg gin, and dancing to jazz . . . and return to the old economics and prosperity based upon saving and worki...
The president was running out of room to maneuver as the country backed away from further federal interference in the South. The outcry over Louisiana began to ring down the final curtain on Reconstru...
The period of John Adams’s presidency declined into a time of political savagery with few parallels in American history, a season of paranoia in which the two parties surrendered all trust in each oth...
The people had registered their dismay with a long litany of unpopular Federalist actions: the Jay Treaty, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the truculent policy toward France, the vast army being formed u...
The painting also pinpointed an important quirk of Washington’s face: the lazy right eye that slid off into the corner while the left eye stared straight ahead. To prepare for the equestrian
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 most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves and to suffice for our own happiness.7
The man born without honor placed a premium on maintaining his.
The issue of press freedom was all the more important because the spirit of faction, that mortal poison to our land, had spread through America. He worried that a certain unnamed party might impose de...
The intimacy of this group of nationalists allowed the talks to range far beyond commercial disputes to a richer, more trenchant critique of the crumbling Articles of Confederation.
The impression was gaining ground with me that it was a good thing to let the money be my slave and not make myself a slave to money.
The extraordinary outpouring of bipartisan concern blotted out the scandals of Grant’s presidency and restored him to his rightful niche in the American pantheon. Hundreds of sympathetic messages pile...
The White Liners didn’t bother with any such pretense of civility or restraint. On October 7, John Milton Brown, the sheriff of Coahoma County, reported a perfect state of terror had seized his jurisd...