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 unflappable Washington then continued with the session as if nothing had happened. It was a classic performance: he exercised the greatest self-control when roiled by the most unruly emotions.
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...
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...
Thinking the move suicidal, Grant believed the South would stop short of the awful leap of secession.41
This encouraged Grant to revive a proposal he had floated a year earlier to connect American canals and rivers into a national network, lowering transport costs and stoking business. He also wanted to...
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...
This was a powerful argument for Washington, who had gone to Philadelphia feeling that the war would be incomplete without a new Constitution; now, he knew, the Constitution would be incomplete withou...
Thomas Jefferson’s resignation as secretary of state on December 31, 1793. The Virginian had failed to eject Hamilton from the cabinet and had lost the contest for Washington’s favor.
Thomas Paine, who had arrived in Philadelphia two years earlier, provided Hamilton with a perfect model when he anonymously published Common Sense. The onetime corset maker and excise officer issued a...
Throughout his life, Rockefeller was wounded deeply by accusations that he was a cold, malignant personality.
Thus, Hamilton triumphed posthumously over Burr, converting the latter’s victory at Weehawken into his political coup de grâce. Burr’s reputation perished along with Hamilton, exactly as Hamilton had...
Tis only to consult our own hearts to be convinced that nations like individuals revolt at the idea of being guided by external compulsion.
To curb further abuse, Hamilton recommended a Supreme Court that would consist of twelve judges holding lifetime offices on good behavior. In this manner, each branch would maintain a salutary distanc...
To embarrass Madison, Elias Boudinot read aloud in Congress some passages about the necessary and proper clause from Federalist number 44, notably the following: No axiom is more clearly established i...
To endure such suffering required stoicism reminiscent of the ancient Romans, so Washington had his favorite play, Addison’s Cato, the story of a self-sacrificing Roman statesman, staged at Valley For...
Unfortunately, Greene’s personal finances were in no less disorderly a state than those of the country at large: he had accumulated such heavy debts guaranteeing contracts for the southern army that i...
Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton never saw the creation of America as a magical leap across a chasm to an entirely new landscape, and he always thought the New World had much to learn from the Old.
Walt Whitman, who ardently followed the Overland Campaign: When did [Grant] ever turn back? He was not that sort; he could no more turn back than time! . . . Grant was one of the inevitables; he alway...
When Hamilton heard about British depredations, he did not behave like a pawn of British interests. Rather, he drew up for Washington contingency plans to raise a twenty-thousand-man army to defend co...
Showing 801 to 820 of 995 results