In public exigencies, there is hardly anything more prejudicial than excessive caution, timidity and dilatoriness, as there is nothing more beneficial than vigour, enterprise and expedition.
In discussing this Romanian bloodletting with Simon Wolf, Grant declared that respect for human rights was the first duty of any head of state and that blacks and Jews should be elevated to a rank of...
In defending his plan, Hamilton did not speak just in arid technical terms. He talked of justice, equity, patriotism, and national honor. His funding system was premised upon a simple concept: that th...
In a question of veracity between U.S. Grant and Andrew Johnson, between a soldier whose honor is as untarnished as the sun, and a President who has betrayed every friend, and broken every promise, th...
In a little more than two years, they had suffered their father’s disappearance and their mother’s death, reducing them to orphans and throwing them upon the mercy of friends, family, and community.
In March 1780, Congress tried to restore monetary order by issuing one new dollar in exchange for forty old ones,
In February 1878, Grant braved rain, wind, and snow to become the first American president to visit Jerusalem. He met with a delegation of American Jews who distributed relief to their suffering breth...
In February 1866, he testified before Congress to oppose suffrage for former slaves: My own opinion is that, at this time, they cannot vote intelligently, and that giving them the right of suffrage wo...
If Washington expected relief from Hamilton badgering him for an appointment, he soon learned otherwise. Hamilton was fully prepared to become a pest.
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...
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 have stopped the damned rascal’s lying tongue at any rate, he
How this seemingly dull, phlegmatic man, in a stupendous act of nation building, presided over the victorious Continental Army and forged the office of the presidency is a mystery to most Americans. S...
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 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 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’...
Hamilton alone seemed resigned as the end neared. At one point, speaking of politics, he said, If they break this union, they will break my heart.69 He could have left no more fitting political epitap...
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 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...