With snow-white hair and a massive forehead, Bismarck, in military uniform, welcomed Grant with both hands extended. Turning on the charm, he expressed surprise that Grant was only seven years his jun...
Then, on Friday, September 11, 1789, thirty-four-year-old Alexander Hamilton was officially nominated for the job. The appointment was confirmed by the Senate the same day.
The proposed Senate was especially loathsome to Clintonians, who feared it would be an aristocratic conclave. They introduced an amendment allowing state legislatures to recall their senators. This id...
Rawlins was soon sidetracked from the war effort, however, by word from his wife, Emily, staying with her family in Goshen, New York, that she suffered from consumption; Rawlins would shortly leave to...
Public infamy must restrain what the laws cannot.
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. (Thomas Jefferson)
Mills lashed out at Barbot as an impertinent puppy—the sort of fighting words that prompted duels.35
Johnson had unleashed the political equivalent of an act of war against Congress. Retaliating against the president’s violation of the Tenure of Office Act, the House introduced a resolution to impeac...
In early July 1777, Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York fell to the British, prompting King George III to clap his hands and exclaim, I have beat them! Beat all the Americans.
If he had wanted to impose a monarchy upon America, Hamilton said, he would follow the classic path of a populist demagogue: I would mount the hobbyhorse of popularity, I would cry out usurpation, dan...
Hamilton, back by August 13, dove into a debate that passionately engaged him: immigration. He opposed any attempt to restrict membership in Congress to native-born Americans or to stipulate a residen...
Hamilton was that rare revolutionary: a master administrator and as competent a public servant as American politics would ever produce. One historian has written, Hamilton was an administrative genius...
Hamilton wanted logical proofs of religion, not revelation, and amply annotated his copy of A View of the Evidences of Christianity, by William Paley. I have examined carefully the evidence of the Chr...
George Clinton, his future political nemesis.
General John Cadwalader, who fired a ball through Conway’s mouth that came out the back of his head.
As in past years, the self-absorbed Jesse Root Grant and equally self-absorbed Colonel Dent continued to find each other insufferable and Grant took refuge in his old strategy of passive detachment. W...
Hamilton’s lifelong habit of talking sotto voce while pacing lent him an air of either inspiration or madness.) A
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Poltroon,
On January 28, 1791,