Taciturnity.
Starters, it would be more efficient, since there would be one overarching scheme for settling debt instead of many small, competing schemes.
Lose. The chief quartermaster on the West Coast, Robert Allen, an old friend of Grant’s, learned he was holed up in a cheap miner’s hotel called What Cheer House. He found Grant in a spartan garret ro...
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...
You certainly never felt the terrorism excited by Genêt in 1793, Adams chided Jefferson years later, when ten thousand people in the streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washingt...
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...
Where Jefferson dismissed these wholesale killings as regrettable but necessary sacrifices to freedom, Hamilton was traumatized by them. The burgeoning atheism of the French Revolution reawakened in h...
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
Washington dwelt upon the transcendent importance of education underscores the stigma that he felt about having missed college. As president, he lectured a young relative about to enter college that e...
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
To see plants rise from the earth and flourish by the superior skill and bounty of the laborer fills a contemplative mind with ideas which are more easy to be conceived than expressed.21
Time ran out on Hamilton’s military ambitions. By February 1800, Congress halted enlistments for the new army that he was assembling and that had monopolized his valuable time. That same month, Americ...
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...
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
The first great skeptic of American exceptionalism, he refused to believe that the country was exempt from the sober lessons of history.
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
Right before Adams left office, Congress had enacted the Judiciary Act, which created new courts and twenty-three new federal judgeships so as to spare Supreme Court justices the onerous task of ridin...
Perseverance in almost any plan is better than fickleness and fluctuation. (Alexander Hamilton, July 1792)
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...