By the end of 1865, so-called Black Codes began to forge a new caste system in the South, a segregated world where freed slaves worked as indentured servants, subject to arrest if they left jobs befor...
Before McHenry returned to Philadelphia, Washington slipped him a sheet naming the three men he wished to see as his major generals, listed in order: Alexander Hamilton, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, a...
Because the Constitution made no mention of a cabinet, Washington had to invent it. At first, this executive council consisted of just three men: Hamilton as secretary of the treasury, Jefferson as se...
BY 1798 the Federalist party had grown haughty by being too long in power. When a party grows strong and feels its power, it becomes intoxicated, grows presumptuous and extravagant, and breaks to piec...
At this, Hamilton dropped any pose of civility and chastised Monroe, saying your representation is totally false.
At the start of 1799, both of the banks in New York City happened to be the brainchildren of Alexander Hamilton: the Bank of New York and the local branch of the Bank of the United States.
At a time when moguls vied to impress people with their possessions, Rockefeller preferred comfort to refinement. His house was bare of hunting trophies, shelves of richly bound but unread books, or o...
At 8:08 a.m. on July 23, 1885, Grant died so gently that nobody was quite certain at first that his spirit had stolen away. His death reflected words he had once written to a bereaved widow during the...
As to the love of liberty and country, you have given no stronger proofs of being actuated by it than I have done. Cease then to arrogate to yourself and to your party all the patriotism and virtue of...
As many Republicans had predicted, the French had retaliated against the Jay Treaty by allowing their privateers to prey on American ships carrying contraband cargo bound for British ports. With Napol...
As in the American south, an exaggerated sense of romantic honor may have been an unconscious way for slaveholders to flaunt their moral superiority, purge pent-up guilt, and cloak the brutish nature...
As early as 1775, Philadelphia Quakers had launched the world’s first antislavery society, followed by others in the north and south.
As always, Hamilton cited constitutional grounds for his program, invoking the clause that gave Congress authority to provide for the common defence and general welfare.59 Owing in part to Hamilton’s...
As a member of the style committee, Hamilton showed that, for all his misgivings about the Constitution, he could be cooperative and play a serviceable part. The convention showed good judgment in cho...
As a lender of last resort, the House of Morgan favored like-minded institutions of similar character and background. Kidder, Peabody was just such a firm. It didn’t hustle business or steal clients a...
As Madison conceded, the specter of slavery haunted the convention, and he argued that the states were divided into different interests not by their difference of size, but principally from their havi...
April 12, 1790, the House voted down Hamilton’s assumption plan, thirty-one to twenty-nine, and two weeks later voted to discontinue all debate on the issue. By early June, it looked as if the assumpt...
Another traveling companion remembered the Rockefellers sitting at a private dining room in a Roman hotel as the paterfamilias dissected the weekly bill, trying to ascertain whether they had really co...
Another boy might have been crestfallen, but Rockefeller was the sort of stubborn person who only grew more determined with rejection.
Americans often wonder how this moment could have spawned such extraordinary men as Hamilton and Madison. Part of the answer is that the Revolution produced an insatiable need for thinkers who could g...