Washington quibbled with Hamilton on one or two points but otherwise stood in perfect agreement. His letter to Hamilton again corroborates what the Jeffersonians found difficult to credit: that Washin...
In the general course of things, the popular views and even prejudices will direct the action of the rulers.
Yellow-fever epidemic of 1798 that had claimed the lives of Benjamin Franklin Bache and John Fenno had also given fresh urgency to the work of the Widows Society, as many women lost their family bread...
The American Revolution was to succeed because it was undertaken by skeptical men who knew that the same passions that toppled tyrannies could be applied to destructive ends. In a moment of acute anxi...
The road leading to the Constitutional Convention was a long, circuitous one. It began at Mount Vernon in 1785 when commissioners from Maryland and Virginia resolved a heated dispute over navigation o...
From modest origins, the Treasury offices proliferated until they occupied the entire block. The 1791 city directory gives an anatomy of this burgeoning department, with 8 employees in Hamilton’s offi...
The constant session of Congress cannot be necessary in times of peace, said Thomas Jefferson, who wanted to replace it with a committee.64 Slowly but inexorably, the future battle lines were being dr...
I trust . . . that the good sense of our countrymen will guard the public weal against this and every other innovation and that, altho[ugh] we may be a little wrong now and then, we shall return to th...
With only three executive departments, each secretary wielded considerable power. Moreover, departmental boundaries were not well defined, allowing each secretary to roam across a wide spectrum of iss...
Summing up Grant’s career, Frederick Douglass wrote: In him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior.153 Church
Hamilton was more persuasive than he realized, and a delegation of business leaders soon approached him to subscribe to a money-bank that would thwart Livingston’s land bank. I was a little embarrasse...
When you indulge in wine let [it] be sparingly—never go beyond three glasses—but by no means every day.
In fact, no immigrant in American history has ever made a larger contribution than Alexander Hamilton
As president, he lectured a young relative about to enter college that every hour misspent is lost forever and that future years cannot compensate for lost days at this period of your life.15
The inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people, he told Morris. In such a government there can be nothing but temporary expedient, fickleness, and folly.15
It was all very pleasant and balmy, supremely beautiful and languid, if you were white, were rich, and turned a blind eye to the black population expiring in the canebrakes.
Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton never saw the creation of America as a magical leap across a chasm to an entirely new landscape, and he always thought the New World had much to learn from the Old. Probably
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...
Many of these slaveholding populists were celebrated by posterity as tribunes of the common people. Meanwhile, the self-made Hamilton, a fervent abolitionist and a staunch believer in meritocracy, was...
The residence law that passed Congress in July 1790, establishing Philadelphia as the interim capital, dictated that all government offices relocate there by early December.
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