If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.
If Jefferson provided the essential poetry of American political discourse, Hamilton established the prose of American statecraft.
If Jefferson enunciated the more ample view of political democracy, Hamilton possessed the finer sense of economic opportunity. He was the messenger from a future that we now inhabit. We have left beh...
IN APRIL 1860, Ulysses S. Grant, cloaked in his old blue army cape, arrived in Galena aboard the Mississippi steamer Itasca. Clasping in each hand chairs that had served the family as deck seats, Gran...
I will venture to pronounce it one of the most ludicrous performances which has been exhibited to public view during all the present controversy-Alexander Hamilton
I do think we are and shall be great consumers.
His whole soul was enlisted in the cause and in contending for the rights of the jury and a free press, he considered that he was establishing the surest refuge against oppression.
He saw too clearly that greater freedom could lead to greater disorder and, by a dangerous dialectic, back to a loss of freedom. Hamilton’s lifelong task was to try to straddle and resolve this contra...
He recoiled at the cowardice and selfishness he saw rampant in the New York legislature. The inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people, he told Morris. In such a governm...
Hamilton seldom published under his own name and drew on a bewildering array of pseudonyms. Such pen names were sometimes transparent masks through which the public readily identified prominent politi...
Hamilton lacked the temperament of a true-blue revolutionary. He saw too clearly that greater freedom could lead to greater disorder and, by a dangerous dialectic, back to a loss of freedom. Hamilton’...
Grant’s postwar fame didn’t spare him the bane of his father-in-law’s glaring presence. After he and Julia settled into their Georgetown home, Colonel Dent had no qualms about moving in with them, for...
Grant’s catatonic state didn’t last. Soon he was devoting four or five hours daily to his memoirs,
Grant notified the president that he had vacated the office and no longer functioned as war secretary. Faced with this fait accompli, Johnson was furious, believing Grant should have resigned his post...
Grant later boasted, with some justice, that Hamilton Fish was the best secretary of state in fifty years. While historians have tended to mock Grant’s cabinet as a bunch of mediocrities—and Borie cer...
Grant had overwhelmingly won the electoral vote, and had garnered the largest popular majority of the century, nearly 56 percent of the vote, the biggest percentage between Andrew Jackson and Theodore...
Grant explained to Porter his aversion to profanities, saying swearing helps to rouse a man’s anger; and when a man flies into a passion his adversary who keeps cool always gets the better of him.50
George Clinton, his future political nemesis.
From the outset, the young Hamilton had phenomenal stamina for sustained work: ambitious, orphaned boys do not enjoy the option of idleness.
From the First Philippic of Demosthenes, he plucked a passage that summed up his conception of a leader as someone who would not pander to popular whims. As a general marches at the head of his troops...