At the time, Charles Sumner still chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and made preposterous demands upon the English. Not only did he want all of Canada but a total British withdrawal from...
At the Constitutional Convention, Elbridge Gerry had bawdily likened standing armies to a tumescent penis: An excellent assurance of domestic tranquillity, but a dangerous temptation to foreign advent...
At one point, Bill suggested that if John didn’t find work he might have to return to the country; the thought of such dependence upon his father made a cold chill run down his spine, Rockefeller late...
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...
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 early as 1775, Philadelphia Quakers had launched the world’s first antislavery society, followed by others in the north and south.
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...
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...
Around this time he performed a ceremony that he had contemplated for some time. He asked Fred to compose a letter requesting a future president of the United States to appoint his grandson Ulysses (F...
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...
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...
America. During the war, the New York legislature had passed a series of laws that stripped Tories of their properties and privileges. The 1779 Confiscation Act provided for the seizure of Tory estate...
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...
Ambition was reckless if inspired by purely selfish motives but laudable if guided by great principles. In
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...
Almost two thousand New Yorkers died, and a fresh potter’s field was consecrated in what is now Greenwich Village.
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 Hamilton may have been musing upon his mother's marriage to Lavien when he later observed, 'Tis a very good thing when their stars unite two people who are fit for each other, who have souls...
After the death of John Laurens, Hamilton shut off some compartment of his emotions and never reopened it.
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...