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...
Cadwallader Colden, the assistant attorney general,
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...
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 end of 1865, so-called Black Codes began to forge a new caste system in the South, a segregated world where freed slaves worked as indentured servants, subject to arrest if they left jobs befor...
By now, monarchy and aristocracy were standard code words for Hamilton and the Federalists.
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...
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...
At twenty-eight, he married a young widow, Martha Wayles Skelton, who inherited 135 slaves after her father’s death. This loving ten-year marriage was marred by childhood mortality—only two of their s...
At another point, they met an old man in the roadway whom John so sedulously drained of local lore that the latter finally pleaded with weary resignation, For God’s sake if you will go with me over to...
At a time of tremendous ideological cleavages,
As to why God had singled out John D. Rockefeller for such spectacular bounty, Rockefeller always adverted to his own adherence to the doctrine of stewardship—the notion of the wealthy man as a mere i...
Around this time, a young man named Samuel Slater slipped through the tight protective net thrown by British authorities around their textile business. As a former apprentice to Sir Richard Arkwright,...
Another boy might have been crestfallen, but Rockefeller was the sort of stubborn person who only grew more determined with rejection.
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,...
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...
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...
Alexander McDougall, Nathanael Greene, Lord Stirling, and Washington
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...
After being exculpated by the House investigating committee in late May 1794, Hamilton had informed George Washington that he would not resign after all, citing the prospect of war. In the end, he did...