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
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
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
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.
The strident tone of The Stand reflects the polarization that had gripped America over the French crisis. Feelings ran so high that Jefferson told one correspondent, Men who have been intimate all the...
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
If Madison in the 1780s was a philosopher king, Madison in the 1790s was a formidable practicing politician, and so skillful at cutting deals that he was dubbed the big knife.
Whitney brought in his friends Edwin Webster, Chandler Hovey, and Albert H. Gordon to take over the company’s name and goodwill.
John Adams was sworn in as the second president on March 4, 1797,
In the end he required political pull to do so. After years of wandering, Grant had popped up in the right congressional district in the right state. Lincoln had the power to appoint brigadier general...
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...
Washington has suffered from comparisons with other founders, several of whom were renowned autodidacts, but by any ordinary standard, he was an exceedingly smart man with a quick ability to grasp
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...
His account books reflect a concern with fashion, as shown by periodic visits to a French tailor, and his sartorial elegance is confirmed in portraits. In one painting, he wears a double-breasted coat...
By 1784, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut had outlawed slavery or passed laws for its gradual extinction
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...
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.
For Hamilton, the Jay Treaty victory represented the culmination of his work with Washington. By settling all outstanding issues left over from the Revolution, the treaty removed the last impediments...
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...
Frederick Douglass paired Grant with Lincoln as the two people who had done most to secure African American advances:
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