After Seabury rebutted A Full Vindication, Hamilton struck back with The Farmer Refuted, an eighty page tour de force...
23 Destiny had now conferred upon Washington a pivotal place in
112 In another message he wrote, I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three.
When pastor John Heyl Vincent dropped by to transmit his hope that Ulysses might be preserved from all harm and restored to his family, Julia fairly burst out with a new fantasy: Dear me! I hope he wi...
To make good on payments, Hamilton knew he would have to raise a substantial loan abroad and boost domestic taxes beyond the import duties now at his disposal. He proposed taxes on wines and spirits d...
To his astonishment, the officers agreed with Lee’s views and in a manner, scoffed Hamilton, that would have done honor to the most honorable society of midwives.27 Washington preferred to operate by...
Thomas Nast published an election cartoon entitled Victory! that showed Grant mounted on a white horse, waving a flag bedecked with the words Union and Equal Rights, as he thrust his sword into the th...
The underlying point of the letter was to notify Grant that, if Sherman’s brother John should be a candidate for president, it would be unnatural for me to oppose or qualify his purpose.9 When he rece...
The fifty-five delegates representing twelve states—the renegade Rhode Island boycotted the convention—scarcely constituted a cross section of America. They were white, educated males and mostly afflu...
Once Jefferson became president, Hamilton, forty-six, began to fade from public view, an abrupt fall for a man whose rise had been so spectacular, so incandescent.
Not expecting to see you again before the Spring campaign opens, I wish to express, in this way, my entire satisfaction with what you have done up to this time, so far as I understand it. The particul...
More than anyone else, the omnipresent Hamilton galvanized, inspired, and scandalized the newborn nation, serving as a flash point for pent-up conflicts of class, geography, race, religion, and ideolo...
Months after leaving office, he wrote to the Bank of the United States and admitted that he did not know his account balance because he had lost his bank book—this from the man who had created the ban...
Many people knew that Hamilton, Madison, and Jay were the authors, but the trio proclaimed their authorship to only a chosen few and then mostly after the first bound volume was published in March 178...
Like her youngest son, Julia administered stern lectures on republican virtue. Before supper, two noblewomen stopped by to school her in palace etiquette. Mrs. Grant, one said, I hope you will not fee...
Let us pause briefly to tally the grim catalog of disasters that had befallen these two boys between 1765 and 1769: their father had vanished, their mother had died, their cousin and supposed protecto...
Jefferson arrived in New York in the thick of the debate raging over assumption—Hamilton’s plan to have the federal government assume the twenty-five million dollars of state debt.
January 25, 1785, nineteen people gathered at the home of innkeeper John Simmons to form a society that would safeguard blacks who had already secured their freedom and try to win freedom for those st...
Its couplets included these lines: Before no mortal ever knew / A love like mine so tender, true…No joy unmixed my bosom warms / But when my angel’s in my arms.
It also reflected a profound political logic. Hamilton knew that bondholders would feel a stake in preserving any government that owed them money. If the federal government, not the states, was owed t...