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warrior
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Ron Chernow |
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On March 15, Washington addressed the officers, determined to squash a reported scheme to march on Congress. For the first time, he confronted a hostile audience of his own men. Washington sternly rebuked talk of rebellion, saying it would threaten the liberties for which they had fought. An insurrection would only "open the floodgates of civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood." He then staged the most famous coup de theatre of..
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Ron Chernow |
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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 anxiety a year earlier, John Adams had wondered what would happen if "the multitude, the vulgar, the herd, the rabble" maintained such open defiance of authority."
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Ron Chernow |
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Clearly, the U.S. government condoned something that, in modern phraseology, could be termed industrial espionage. Building upon this precedent, Hamilton put the full authority of the Treasury behind the piracy of British trade secrets.
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Ron Chernow |
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Only a free press could check abuses of executive power, Hamilton asserted.
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Ron Chernow |
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When Franklin suggested on June 28th that each session start with a prayer for heavenly help, Hamilton countered that this might foster a public impression that embarrassments and dissensions within the convention had suggested this measure. According to legend, Hamilton also rebutted Franklin with the jest that the convention didn't need "foreign aid."
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Ron Chernow |
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Ambition was reckless if inspired by purely selfish motives but laudable if guided by great principles. In
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Ron Chernow |
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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"."
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Ron Chernow |
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Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all power to the few, they will oppress the many.
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Ron Chernow |
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Tis only to consult our own hearts to be convinced that nations like individuals revolt at the idea of being guided by external compulsion.
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Ron Chernow |
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When avarice takes the lead in a state, it is commonly the forerunner of its fall.
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Ron Chernow |
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There are some people whom the Lord Almighty cannot save," he later said wearily of the Oil Creek refiners. "They don't want to be saved. They want to go on and serve the devil and keep on in their wicked ways."4"
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Ron Chernow |
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He sometimes represented poor people in criminal cases on a pro bono basis or was paid with just a barrel of ham.
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Ron Chernow |
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Only in such passages do we see that Hamilton, for all his phenomenal success in the Continental Army, still felt unlucky and unlovely, still cursed by his past.
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Ron Chernow |
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The panic was blamed on many factors--tight money, Roosevelt's Gridiron Club speech attacking the "malefactors of great wealth," and excessive speculation in copper, mining, and railroad stocks. The immediate weakness arose from the recklessness of the trust companies. In the early 1900s, national and most state-chartered banks couldn't take trust accounts (wills, estates, and so on) but directed customers to trusts. Traditionally, these ha..
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Ron Chernow |
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Alexander McDougall, John Lamb, Marinus Willett, and other chieftains of the Sons of Liberty.
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Ron Chernow |
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By the time of "A Full Vindication," Hamilton had clearly assumed the coloring of his environment."
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Ron Chernow |
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Jefferson inwardly reviled Hamilton as a traitor to republican government. "What a fatal stroke at the cause of liberty; et tu Brute," he wrote in his diary."
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Ron Chernow |
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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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Ron Chernow |
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With me it has always been a maxim rather to let my designs appear from my works than by my expressions.
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Ron Chernow |
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Do not many of us who fail to achieve big things ... fail because we lack concentration--the art of concentrating the mind on the thing to be done at the proper time and to the exclusion of everything else?"9 Rockefeller"
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Ron Chernow |
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THE FIRST TOWN IN AMERICA
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Ron Chernow |
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At another point, they met an old man in the roadway whom John so sedulously drained of local lore that the latter finally pleaded with weary resignation, "For God's sake if you will go with me over to that barn yonder, I will start and tell you everything I ever knew."72 This was the same monotonously inquisitive young man who was known as "the Sponge" in the Oil Regions."
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Ron Chernow |
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even to the renowned Washington.
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Ron Chernow |
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I have stopped the damned rascal's lying tongue at any rate," he"
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Ron Chernow |
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between 1789 and 1791, France basked in some sort of liberal pleasure garden before the erection of the guillotine is a complete fantasy.
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Ron Chernow |
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Machiavelli's The Prince and Plutarch's Lives,
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Ron Chernow |
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The proposed Senate was especially loathsome to Clintonians, who feared it would be an aristocratic conclave. They introduced an amendment allowing state legislatures to recall their senators. This idea touched a live wire in Hamilton, who saw the Senate as a check on fickle popular will and in need of political insulation. The proposal prompted him to make a speech on the dangers of maintaining a continuous revolutionary mentality in Ameri..
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Ron Chernow |
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Hamilton was an exuberant genius who performed at a fiendish pace and must have produced the maximum number of words that a human being can scratch out in forty-nine years.
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Ron Chernow |
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freedom
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Ron Chernow |
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What a world of scarred emotion and secret grief Alexander Hamilton bore with him on the boat to Boston. He took his unhappy boyhood, tucked it away in a mental closet, and never opened the door again. Beside the horrid memories, this young dynamo simply was not cut out for the drowsy, slow-paced life of slave owners on a tropical island, and he never evinced the least nostalgia for his West Indian boyhood or voiced any desire to return.
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Ron Chernow |
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In this hierarchical world, skittish planters lived in constant dread of slave revolts and fortified their garrison state to avert them. Even when he left for America, Hamilton carried a heavy dread of anarchy and disorder that always struggled with his no less active love of liberty. Perhaps the true legacy of his boyhood was an equivocal one: he came to detest the tyranny embodied by the planters and their authoritarian rule, while also f..
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Ron Chernow |
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To endure such suffering required stoicism reminiscent of the ancient Romans, so Washington had his favorite play, Addison's Cato, the story of a self-sacrificing Roman statesman, staged at Valley Forge to buck up his weary men.
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Ron Chernow |
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Perseverance in almost any plan is better than fickleness and fluctuation,
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Ron Chernow |
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an Anglican college in New York, which, he warned, would become "a contracted receptacle of bigotry" --
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Ron Chernow |
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Grant's catatonic state didn't last. Soon he was devoting four or five hours daily to his memoirs,
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Ron Chernow |
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whose
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Ron Chernow |
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From the outset, the young Hamilton had phenomenal stamina for sustained work: ambitious, orphaned boys do not enjoy the option of idleness.
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Ron Chernow |
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Whatever Hoar's injury, he departed in gentlemanly fashion, sending Grant a gracious farewell note. In private, however, he broadcast his anger and "wished the government might be destroyed."
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Ron Chernow |
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Convinced that struggle was the crucible of character, Rockefeller faced a delicate task in raising his children. He wanted to accumulate wealth while inculcating in them the values of his threadbare boyhood. The first step in saving them from extravagance was keeping them ignorant of their father's affluence. Until they were adults, Rockefeller's children never visited his office or refineries, and even then they were accompanied by compan..
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Ron Chernow |
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Few figures in American History have aroused such visceral love or loathing as Alexander Hamilton.
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Ron Chernow |
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I shall conclude [by] saying I wish there was a war. Alex. Hamilton.
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Ron Chernow |
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Hamilton did not know it, but he just wrote himself out of poverty.
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Ron Chernow |
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What a world of scarred emotion and secret grief Alexander Hamilton bore with him on the boat to Boston. He took his unhappy boyhood, tucked it away in a mental closet, and never opened the door again.
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Ron Chernow |