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d5bd960
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On August 5, he sent Stanton a one-sentence letter: "Public considerations of a high character constrain me to say, that your resignation as Secretary of War will be accepted."5 Johnson knew that if Stanton resigned, instead of being sacked, the troublesome legislation would be a dead issue. That same day, in a tart response, Stanton lectured Johnson that "public considerations of a high character . . . constrain me not to resign the office..
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Ron Chernow |
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0994cad
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Grant notified the president that he had vacated the office and no longer functioned as war secretary. Faced with this fait accompli, Johnson was furious, believing Grant should have resigned his post and allowed him to name a successor.
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Ron Chernow |
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bf27bfc
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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 impeach Andrew Johnson for high crimes and misdemeanors. Three days later, the resolution passed by an overwhelming 126 to 47
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Ron Chernow |
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558dba3
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bolstered southern power by scrapping the rule that had once counted an African American as only three-fifths of a person for electoral purposes. Despite suppressing the vote of blacks, white southerners could now count them fully for election purposes, giving the "solid South" forty extra votes in the Electoral College and disproportionate influence in American politics. "They keep those votes, but disfranchise the negroes. That is one of ..
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Ron Chernow |
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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 the right path with more avidity." 15 It was an accurate forecast of American history, both its tragic lapses and its miraculous redemptions."
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Ron Chernow |
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fb7e619
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Consequential to the election outcome were the many private contacts in the capital between southern Democrats and Hayes's northern Republican supporters. At Wormley's Hotel on February 26, five Hayes people pledged that federal troops would be withdrawn from the South; new "redeemer" governments would be tolerated and "home rule" restored; the four southern Democrats promised, in return, fair treatment of the black community. The influence..
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Ron Chernow |
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capture the Republican nomination instead of Grant. With Johnson acquitted, everyone knew, Grant would get the party nod. Significantly, the seven Republicans who voted for acquittal all campaigned for Grant after he secured the nomination. They also extracted a critical pledge from Johnson that he would cease interfering with congressional action on Reconstruction.
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Ron Chernow |
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370d52f
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eight thousand Republicans crammed into Crosby's Opera House for a veritable coronation of Ulysses S. Grant. To play on wartime memories, General John "Black Jack" Logan was designated to place his name in nomination. His speech was followed by a well-staged extravaganza: hats and handkerchiefs fluttered, rounds of applause rippled across the house, and a pigeon, dyed red, white, and blue, flapped through the cavernous space. As a huge ovat..
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Ron Chernow |
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90888cc
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On Easter Sunday, Nash led a mob of several hundred whites, armed with rifles and a small cannon, who opened fire on the courthouse, setting it ablaze. Even though its black defenders ran up a white flag of surrender, begging for mercy, the mob butchered dozens of them. Black families were afraid to claim the many corpses that thickly littered the ground. When Longstreet sent Colonel T. W. DeKlyne to Colfax, the latter found heaps of dead b..
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Ron Chernow |
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925018b
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BY 1798 the Federalist party had grown haughty by being too long in power. "When a party grows strong and feels its power, it becomes intoxicated, grows presumptuous and extravagant, and breaks to pieces," Johns Adams later wrote, having presided over just such a situation as president."
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Ron Chernow |
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0f1406f
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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"
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Ron Chernow |
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b55a5c5
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In June 1789 some congressmen wanted Washington to have to gain senatorial approval to fire as well as hire executive officers--the Constitution was silent on the subject; the House duly approved that crippling encroachment on executive authority. When the Senate vote ended in a tie, Vice President Adams cast the deciding vote to defeat the measure, thereby permitting the president to exert true leadership over his cabinet and, for better o..
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Ron Chernow |
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2eef3ad
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One thing that hasn't aroused dispute is the exemplary nature of Washington's religious tolerance. He shuddered at the notion of exploiting religion for partisan purposes or showing favoritism for certain denominations. As president, when writing to Jewish, Baptist, Presbyterian, and other congregations--he officially saluted twenty-two major religious groups--he issued eloquent statements on religious tolerance. He was so devoid of spiritu..
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Ron Chernow |
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dd21d2a
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In addition to his better-known title of Father of His Country, Washington is also revered in certain circles as the Father of the American Mule.
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Ron Chernow |
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14b088b
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Franklin wanted a unicameral legislature and an executive council in lieu of a president. He also opposed a presidential veto on legislation, thinking it would lead to executive corruption "till it ends in monarchy."
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Ron Chernow |
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162a3aa
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If Hamilton had shot first, he had wasted his fire, exactly as foretold. And if Burr had fired first, as Pendleton alleged, then Hamilton seems to have squeezed the trigger in a reflexive spasm of agony and shot involuntarily into the trees. In neither scenario did Hamilton aim his gun at Aaron Burr.
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Ron Chernow |
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e0f91c2
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Let us pause briefly to tally the grim catalog of disasters that had befallen these two boys between 1765 and 1769: their father had vanished, their mother had died, their cousin and supposed protector had committed bloody suicide, and their aunt, uncle, and grandmother had all died. James, sixteen, and Alexander, fourteen, were now left alone, largely friendless and penniless. At every step in their rootless, topsy-turvy existence, they ha..
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Ron Chernow |
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932cc76
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Both Grant and Sherman were damaged souls who would redeem tarnished reputations in the brutal crucible of war.
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Ron Chernow |
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a520d7b
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The Federalists were allied with powerful banking and merchant interests in New England and on the Atlantic seaboard and were disproportionately Congregationalists and Episcopalians.
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Ron Chernow |
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6b88919
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At the same time, the mounting fear of Hamilton among Jefferson, Madison, and their supporters cohered into an organized opposition that began to call itself Republican. Alluding to the ancient Roman republic, this was also a clever label, insinuating that Federalists were not real republicans and hence must be monarchists. Often Baptists and Methodists, Republicans drew their strength from rich southern planters and small farmers.
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Ron Chernow |
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47d93d7
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It was between rival economic systems, each of which was aimed at generating its own men of property."13 In fact, the Federalist ranks had plenty of self-made lawyers like Hamilton, while the Republicans were led by two men of immense inherited wealth: Jefferson and Madison. Moreover, the political culture of the slaveholding south was marked by much more troubling disparities of wealth and status than was that of the north, and the vast ma..
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Ron Chernow |
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906fe39
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The United States still had not escaped economic dependence on England, which consumed nearly half of American exports and accounted for three-quarters of American imports.
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Ron Chernow |
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13a2757
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Mr. Monroe, if you have come to tell me that you repent, that you are sorry, very sorry, for the misrepresentations and the slanders and the stories you circulated against my dear husband, if you have come to say this, I understand it. But otherwise, no lapse of time, no nearness to the grave, makes any difference.
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Ron Chernow |
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6921c73
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Around this time, a young man named Samuel Slater slipped through the tight protective net thrown by British authorities around their textile business. As a former apprentice to Sir Richard Arkwright, Slater had sworn that he would never reveal his boss's trade secrets. Flouting this pledge, he sailed to New York and made contact with Moses Brown, a Rhode Island Quaker. Under Slater's supervision, Brown financed a spinning mill in Rhode Isl..
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Ron Chernow |
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ab4559b
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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 Larger than either New York or Boston, it supported ten newspapers and thirty bookshops. Largely through the civic imagination of Benjamin Franklin, it boasted an astounding panoply of cultural and civic institutions, including two theaters, ..
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Ron Chernow |
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4a8ef50
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The two sides projected competing nightmares of what would happen if the other side prevailed.
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Ron Chernow |
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39b84a6
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Julia's brother Lewis, who remained in California, allowed them to use his house "Wish-ton-wish"--an Indian term meaning whip-poor-will--"
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Ron Chernow |
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2b13bce
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As early as 1775, Philadelphia Quakers had launched the world's first antislavery society, followed by others in the north and south.
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Ron Chernow |
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b53a096
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Frederick Douglass, who had entertained hopes for the Haitian post, graciously conceded defeat. "Your appointment," he told Bassett, "is a grand achievement for yourself and for our whole people."
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Ron Chernow |
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9f3b2fa
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Finally, he [John F. Mercer] ridiculed Hamilton as an upstart, "a mushroom excrescence," who did not deserve the prominence he had gained."
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Ron Chernow |
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989d171
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Almost two thousand New Yorkers died, and a fresh potter's field was consecrated in what is now Greenwich Village.
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Ron Chernow |
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cf832ca
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He embodied an enduring archetype: the obscure immigrant who comes to America, re-creates himself, and succeeds despite a lack of proper birth and breeding.
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Ron Chernow |
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f2c5a16
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currency, so he wouldn't be seen as questioning American credit, but by the summer of 1779 he could no longer afford these massive losses and discontinued the practice. The previous winter Washington had been sufficiently confident of his troops to risk a six-week stay in Philadelphia, but he now felt compelled to stick close to his restive men, "to stem a torrent which seems ready to overwhelm us."
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Ron Chernow |
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e36cffd
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A man of irreproachable integrity, Hamilton severed all outside sources of income while in office, something that neither Washington nor Jefferson nor Madison dared to do.
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Ron Chernow |
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justice, and Samuel, a plantation owner, also owned nearby houses.
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Ron Chernow |
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0c98bb9
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liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power. . . . [T]he former rather than the latter is apparently most to be apprehended by the United States.
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Ron Chernow |
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12c43d1
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The terror tactics worked: on Election Day in November, only two Republicans dared to vote in all of Yazoo County, only one in Tallahatchie County. In Louisiana, whites were set to
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Ron Chernow |
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2ffc18f
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Many of the real scenes in early California life exceed in strangeness and interest any of the mere products of the brain of the novelist," he declared"
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Ron Chernow |
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790d36a
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Hamilton said, "A nation without a national government is, in my view, an awful spectacle. The establishment of a constitution in [a] time of profound peace by the voluntary consent of a whole people is a prodigy, to the completion of which I look forward with trembling anxiety."
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Ron Chernow |
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2688d03
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In the end, nobody would do more than Alexander Hamilton to infuse life into this parchment and make it the working mandate of the American government.
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Ron Chernow |
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b501e6b
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Sheridan had a pugnacity that refused to quit, and Sherman described him as "a persevering terrier dog, honest, modest, plucky and smart enough."78 Quite unlike Grant,"
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Ron Chernow |
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c7b4abd
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January 25, 1785, nineteen people gathered at the home of innkeeper John Simmons to form a society that would safeguard blacks who had already secured their freedom and try to win freedom for those still held in bondage. The group was called the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves.
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Ron Chernow |
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62412d9
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Addison's Cato,
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Ron Chernow |
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67ac0b2
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a fashionable tailor with the splendid name of Hercules Mulligan, whose
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Ron Chernow |