By the time he left the Treasury in 1795, slavery had begun to recede in New England and the mid-Atlantic states. Rhode Island, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut had...
Poltroon,
In number 65, Hamilton visualized, with exceptional
Douceur
Between 1789 and 1791, France basked in some sort of liberal pleasure garden before the erection of the guillotine is a complete fantasy.
This, I confess, hurts my feelings, and if it obtains credit will require a contradiction,
Then, on Friday, September 11, 1789, thirty-four-year-old Alexander Hamilton was officially nominated for the job. The appointment was confirmed by the Senate the same day.
The proposed Senate was especially loathsome to Clintonians, who feared it would be an aristocratic conclave. They introduced an amendment allowing state legislatures to recall their senators. This id...
Rawlins was soon sidetracked from the war effort, however, by word from his wife, Emily, staying with her family in Goshen, New York, that she suffered from consumption; Rawlins would shortly leave to...
On December 12, 1799, Washington sent Hamilton a letter applauding his outline for an American military academy: The establishment of an institution of this kind . . . has ever been considered by me a...
Johnson had unleashed the political equivalent of an act of war against Congress. Retaliating against the president’s violation of the Tenure of Office Act, the House introduced a resolution to impeac...
In early July 1777, Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York fell to the British, prompting King George III to clap his hands and exclaim, I have beat them! Beat all the Americans.
If he had wanted to impose a monarchy upon America, Hamilton said, he would follow the classic path of a populist demagogue: I would mount the hobbyhorse of popularity, I would cry out usurpation, dan...
Hamilton was that rare revolutionary: a master administrator and as competent a public servant as American politics would ever produce. One historian has written, Hamilton was an administrative genius...
Hamilton was an exuberant genius who performed at a fiendish pace and must have produced the maximum number of words that a human being can scratch out in forty-nine years.
Hamilton wanted the votes of individual members recorded. Instead, the convention chose to proceed on a one-state, one-vote basis, which meant that Hamilton’s vote would likely be nullified by his two...
Hamilton wanted logical proofs of religion, not revelation, and amply annotated his copy of A View of the Evidences of Christianity, by William Paley. I have examined carefully the evidence of the Chr...
Despite incessant disappointment, he doggedly pursued a position. Each morning, he left his boardinghouse at eight o’clock, clothed in a dark suit with a high collar and black tie, to make his rounds...
As in past years, the self-absorbed Jesse Root Grant and equally self-absorbed Colonel Dent continued to find each other insufferable and Grant took refuge in his old strategy of passive detachment. W...
Hamilton’s lifelong habit of talking sotto voce while pacing lent him an air of either inspiration or madness.) A