Ron Chernow Quotes

At a time of tremendous ideological cleavages,

Back at 23 Wall Street, Lamont received a wire from Jack Morgan expressing disgust with Mexico. Jack thought it a point of family honor to make sure Mexico repaid his father’s 1899 loan: I did not thi...

Because the Constitution made no mention of a cabinet, Washington had to invent it. At first, this executive council consisted of just three men: Hamilton as secretary of the treasury, Jefferson as se...

Both Hamilton and Madison were rational men who assumed that people often acted irrationally because of ambition and avarice. Madison wrote, If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

Burr is said to have remarked, Had I read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.61

By no means confined to the south, slavery was well entrenched in much of the north. By 1784, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut had outlawed slavery or...

By now, monarchy and aristocracy were standard code words for Hamilton and the Federalists.

By the summer of 1791, after his victories in his skirmishes with Jefferson and Madison over public credit, assumption, and a central bank, Hamilton had attained the summit of his power. Such stellar...

By the time the three Americans showed up in Paris, Napoleon had crushed the Austrian army in Italy. Then, in early September, the Directory staged a veritable coup d’état, arresting and deporting sco...

Cadwallader Colden, the assistant attorney general,

Cettie was equally vigilant. When the children clamored for bicycles, John suggested buying one for each child. No, said Cettie, we will buy just one for all of them. But, my dear, John protested, tri...

Chase was a tall, ungainly man with a resemblance to Dr. Samuel Johnson and a face so broad and ruddy that he was dubbed Bacon Face.

Clearly, the U.S. government condoned something that, in modern phraseology, could be termed industrial espionage. Building upon this precedent, Hamilton put the full authority of the Treasury behind...

Conforming to tradition, the convention sent a delegation to Grant with official notice of his nomination. In return, he scratched out a statement that mostly dealt in standard rhetoric, concluding wi...

Cornwallis had grown so desperate that he infected blacks with smallpox and forced them to wander toward enemy lines in an attempt to sicken the opposing forces.

Despite Grant’s best efforts at Appomattox, the breach of the Civil War never healed but became deeply embedded in American political culture.

Determined not to be caught shorthanded in case of war, Hamilton supported an annual purchase of military weapons to aid the formation of arsenals.57 So vital were supplies to national security that H...

Dismissed as a philistine, a boor, a drunk, and an incompetent, Grant has been subjected to pernicious stereotypes that grossly impede our understanding of the man. As a contemporary newspaper sniffed...

Do not many of us who fail to achieve big things … fail because we lack concentration—the art of concentrating the mind on the thing to be done at the proper time and to the exclusion of everything el...

Far from hiding Black Jack, the irascible John Custis doted on him, and when the little boy was five, he submitted a petition to the governor to free the boy christened John but commonly called Jack,...