He warned that progressive accumulation of debt is perhaps the NATURAL DISEASE of all Governments. And it is not easy to conceive anything more likely than this to lead to great and convulsive revolut...
Fillip
Democracy,
Without the federal ratio, Hamilton glumly concluded, no union could possibly have been formed.87 Indeed, the whole superstructure erected in Philadelphia rested on that unstable, undemocratic foundat...
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...
With a soil and climate scarcely equaled in the world, he protested, Mexico has more poor and starving subjects who are willing and able to work than any country in the world. The rich keep down the p...
With John Adams certain to run strongly in New England and Thomas Jefferson equally so in the south, the election would hinge on pivotal votes in the mid-Atlantic states, particularly New York, which...
Wherever our flag floats, it is the flag of slavery,
Washington was then unanimously elected president of the convention.
Wars oftener proceed from angry and perverse passions than from cool calculations of interest.
Unlike Franklin or Jefferson, he never learned to subdue his opponents with a light touch or a sly, artful, understated turn of phrase.
Unable to curtail his free-handed spending and with his crops faring poorly, he started out 1786 with a paltry eighty-six pounds in cash.
There is no road to despotism more sure or more to be dreaded than that which begins at anarchy.
The rancor ushered in a golden age of literary assassination in American politics. No etiquette had yet evolved to define the legitimate boundaries of dissent. Poison-pen artists on both sides wrote v...
Philadelphia was a cosmopolitan city, praised by a highborn British visitor as one of the wonders of the world, the first town in America, and one that bids fair to rival almost any in Europe. 27 Larg...
On March 4, 1793, George Washington was sworn in for his second term as president
Of all the founders, Hamilton probably had the gravest doubts about the wisdom of the masses and wanted elected leaders who would guide them. This was the great paradox of his career: his optimistic v...
Nothing alarmed the white South more than black power at the polls, which was why most terror was directed there.
No American was to expend more prophetic verbiage in denouncing the French Revolution than Alexander Hamilton. The suspension of the monarchy and the September Massacres, Hamilton later told Lafayette...
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.