After reading through George Washington’s papers, Marshall pronounced Hamilton the greatest man (or one of the greatest men) that had ever appeared in the United States.31 Marshall considered Hamilton...
After signing, the delegates adjourned to the City Tavern, which John Adams described as the most genteel tavern in America, for a farewell dinner.103 Behind the conviviality lurked unspoken fears, an...
After years of frustrating delays, the Churches at last moved to New York in May 1797. John Barker Church soon established himself as a personage of staggering wealth and New York’s foremost insurance...
Again and again in his career, Hamilton committed the same political error: he never knew when to stop, and the resulting excesses led him into irremediable indiscretions.
Alexander Hamilton triumphed as a doer and thinker, not as a leader of the average voter. He was simply too unashamedly brainy to appeal to the masses.
Alexander McDougall, John Lamb, Marinus Willett, and other chieftains of the Sons of Liberty.
All on this side [of] the Mississippi must be ours, including both Floridas, he had already argued to McHenry in early 1798.
All the patriots had to do was plant doubts among Britain’s creditors about the war’s outcome. By stopping the progress of their conquests and reducing them to an unmeaning and disgraceful defensive,...
Almost two thousand New Yorkers died, and a fresh potter’s field was consecrated in what is now Greenwich Village.
Also, by having autonomous conventions approve the Constitution, the new republic would derive its legitimacy not from the statehouses but directly from the citizenry, enabling federal law to supersed...
Am I then more of an American than those who drew their first breath on American ground? Or what is it that thus torments me at a circumstance so calmly viewed by almost everybody else? Am I a fool, a...
Ambition was reckless if inspired by purely selfish motives but laudable if guided by great principles. In
America, he argued, did not need to triumph decisively over the heavily taxed British: a war of attrition that eroded British credit would nicely do the trick. All the patriots had to do was plant dou...
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...
Americans today know little about the terrorism that engulfed the South during Grant’s presidency. It has been suppressed by a strange national amnesia. The Klan’s ruthless reign is a dark, buried cha...
An episode at Congress Hall in January 1798 symbolized the acrimonious mood. Representative Matthew Lyon of Vermont, a die-hard Republican, began to mock the aristocratic sympathies of Roger Griswold,...
Another boy might have been crestfallen, but Rockefeller was the sort of stubborn person who only grew more determined with rejection.
Around this time, Mark Twain belonged to a small, irregular Confederate company and later claimed for comic effect that he had been pursued by Grant’s troops. As he said facetiously, I did not know th...
As a West Point graduate, Grant had enjoyed an insider’s knowledge of military personnel during the war, but as a Washington outsider, he needed the valuable advice of seasoned professionals about app...
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...
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