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d98a53a
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Elbridge Gerry had bawdily likened standing armies to a tumescent penis: "An excellent assurance of domestic tranquillity, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure."
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Ron Chernow |
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c12cc63
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By the summer of 1791, after his victories in his skirmishes with Jefferson and Madison over public credit, assumption, and a central bank, Hamilton had attained the summit of his power. Such stellar success might have bred an intoxicating sense of invincibility. But his vigorous reign had also made him the enfant terrible of the early republic, and a substantial minority of the country was mobilized against him. This should have made him e..
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Ron Chernow |
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02413e6
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He saw too clearly that greater freedom could lead to greater disorder and, by a dangerous dialectic, back to a loss of freedom. Hamilton's lifelong task was to try to straddle and resolve this contradiction and to balance liberty and order. The
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Ron Chernow |
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0285994
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Every president "ought to be personally responsible for his behaviour in office."
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Ron Chernow |
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cb7fdab
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As Madison conceded, the specter of slavery haunted the convention, and he argued that "the states were divided into different interests not by their difference of size, but principally from their having or not having slaves. . . . [The conflict] did not lie between the large and small states. It lay between the northern and southern." 85 For many southerners, the slavery issue allowed no room for concessions, and they supported the Virgini..
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Ron Chernow |
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98f168f
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Slaveholding states wondered how their human property would be counted for congressional-apportionment purposes. Northern states finally agreed that five slaves would be counted as equivalent to three free whites, the infamous "federal ratio" that survived for another eighty years. The formula richly rewarded the southern states, artificially inflating their House seats and electoral votes and helping to explain why four of the first five p..
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Ron Chernow |
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ba4be21
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Of the nine American presidents who owned slaves--a list that includes his fellow Virginians Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe--only Washington set free all of his slaves.
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Ron Chernow |
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c600a84
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Now, for reasons both symbolic and practical, the crowd pulled George III down from his pedestal, decapitating him in the process. The four thousand pounds of gilded lead was rushed off to Litchfield, Connecticut, where it was melted down to make 42,088 musket bullets. One wit predicted that the king's soldiers "will probably have melted majesty fired at them." 56"
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Ron Chernow |
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d9ff54e
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The first "Publius" letter pointed out that greed can corrupt a state and that a public official who betrays his trust "ought to feel the utmost rigor of public resentment and be detested as a traitor of the worst and most dangerous kind."
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Ron Chernow |
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2fda132
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Both as a matter of temperament and policy, Washington was taciturn, once advising his adopted grandson, "It is best to be silent, for there is nothing more certain than that it is at all times more easy to make enemies than friends."36 Such a circumspect president formed a striking contrast with the loquacious Hamilton."
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Ron Chernow |
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90c23cc
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Princeton applicants had to know Virgil, Cicero's orations, and Latin grammar and also had to be 'so well acquainted with Greek as to render any part of the four Evangelists in that language into Latin or English.
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Ron Chernow |
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f242fcc
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Credit is an entire thing. Every part of it has the nicest sympathy with every other part. Wound one limb and the whole tree shrinks and decays."37"
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Ron Chernow |
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240f1db
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The British were unhinged by the colonists' unorthodox fighting style and shocking failure to abide by gentlemanly rules of engagement. One scandalized British soldier complained that the American riflemen 'conceal themselves behind trees etc. till an opportunity presents itself of taking a shot at our advance sentries, which done, they immediately retreat. What an unfair method of carrying on a war!
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war
funny
humor
revolutionary-war
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Ron Chernow |
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d0290e2
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In the felicitous words of one early Burr biographer, "The Clintons had power, the Livingstons had numbers, and the Schuylers had Hamilton."61"
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Ron Chernow |
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c51b1ac
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At the Constitutional Convention, Elbridge Gerry had bawdily likened standing armies to a tumescent penis: "An excellent assurance of domestic tranquillity, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure." --
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Ron Chernow |
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133331c
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He saw that inflation had originated with wartime shortages, which had led, in turn, to the waning value of money. Over time, the inflation had acquired a self-reinforcing momentum. Economic fundamentals alone could not account for this inflation, Hamilton noted, detecting a critical psychological factor at work. People were "governed more by passion and prejudice than by an enlightened sense of their interests," he wrote. "The quantity of ..
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Ron Chernow |
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8500657
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The Constitution did more than just tolerate slavery: it actively rewarded it. Timothy Pickering was to inveigh against "Negro presidents and Negro congresses"--that is, presidents and congresses who owed their power to the three-fifths rule. 55 This bias inflated southern power against the north and disfigured the democracy so proudly proclaimed by the Jeffersonians. Slaveholding presidents from the south occupied the presidency for approx..
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Ron Chernow |
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20fff8c
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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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c2e7717
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In other words, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence was recommending to the chief architect of the U.S. Constitution that any Virginia bank functionary who cooperated with Hamilton's bank should be found guilty of treason and executed.
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Ron Chernow |
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b164cef
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We have left behind the rosy agrarian rhetoric and slaveholding reality of Jeffersonian democracy and reside in the bustling world of trade, industry, stock markets, and banks that Hamilton envisioned. (Hamilton's staunch abolitionism formed an integral feature of this economic vision.)
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Ron Chernow |
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0898f09
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So it may be said, with undoubted truth, that the whiskey drinkers made Mr. Jefferson the President of the United States."48"
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Ron Chernow |
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24d28fb
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Hamilton had championed a humane, enlightened policy toward the Indians. When real-estate speculators had wanted to banish them from western New York, he warned Governor Clinton that the Indians' friendship "alone can keep our frontiers in peace. . . . The attempt at the total expulsion of so desultory a people is as chimerical as it would be pernicious."23"
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Ron Chernow |
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7abf4a2
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Madison did not want a long-term government debt, fearing that such securities would fall into foreign hands: "As they have more money than the Americans and less productive ways of laying it out, they can and will pretty generally buy out the Americans."
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Ron Chernow |
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81df6d0
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One scandalized British soldier complained that the American riflemen "conceal themselves behind trees etc. till an opportunity presents itself of taking a shot at our advance sentries, which done, they immediately retreat. What an unfair method of carrying on a war!" 16"
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Ron Chernow |
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7829e23
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James, sixteen, and Alexander, fourteen, were now left alone, largely friendless and penniless. At every step in their rootless, topsy-turvy existence, they had been surrounded by failed, broken, embittered people. Their short lives had been shadowed by a stupefying sequence of bankruptcies, marital separations, deaths, scandals, and disinheritance. Such repeated shocks must have stripped Alexander Hamilton of any sense that life was fair, ..
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Ron Chernow |
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9b48ccb
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If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.
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Ron Chernow |
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1631eab
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Hamilton argued that the security of liberty and property were inseparable and that governments should honor their debts because contracts formed the basis of public and private morality: "States, like individuals, who observe their engagements are respected and trusted, while the reverse is the fate of those who pursue an opposite conduct."23 The proper handling of government debt would permit America to borrow at affordable interest rates..
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Ron Chernow |
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ed499bd
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How exactly the debt should be funded was to be the most inflammatory political issue. During the Revolution, many affluent citizens had invested in bonds, and many war veterans had been paid with IOUs that then plummeted in price under the confederation. In many cases, these upright patriots, either needing cash or convinced they would never be repaid, had sold their securities to speculators for as little as fifteen cents on the dollar. U..
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Ron Chernow |
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bb08aea
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In a country riven by quarrels, Hamilton produced a vision of harmonious parts. Agriculture and commerce were mutually beneficial. North and south, the western frontier and the eastern seaboard, enjoyed complementary economies. The only thing needed to capitalize on these strengths was national unity.
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Ron Chernow |
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215740f
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love of fame, the ruling passion of the noblest minds, which would prompt a man to plan and undertake extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit." 54 Ambition was reckless if inspired by purely selfish motives but laudable if guided by great principles."
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Ron Chernow |
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844cb36
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Clinton represented what would become a staple of American political folklore: the local populist boss, not overly punctilious or savory yet embraced warmly by the masses as one of their own.
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Ron Chernow |
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1c45f9c
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In the report's final section, Hamilton reiterated that a well-funded debt would be a "national blessing" that would protect American prosperity. He feared this statement would be misconstrued as a call for a perpetual public debt--and that is exactly what happened. For the rest of his life, he was to express dismay at what he saw as a deliberate distortion of his views. His opponents, he claimed, neglected a critical passage of his report ..
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Ron Chernow |
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814bb2b
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The 1800 elections revealed, for the first time, the powerful centrist pull of American politics--the electorate's tendency to rein in anything perceived as extreme.
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Ron Chernow |
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9cf039e
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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"
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Ron Chernow |
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18ebbe6
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Hamilton warned that "a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government."
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Ron Chernow |
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7c13a5a
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On July 4, in his sixth "Continentalist" essay, Hamilton, with a nod to Morris, applauded the appointment of federal customs and tax collectors to "create in the interior of each state a mass of influence in favour of the federal government."12 This essay makes clear that, in the Revolution's waning days, Hamilton had to combat the utopian notion that America could dispense with taxes altogether: "It is of importance to unmask this delusion..
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Ron Chernow |
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dc01113
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The more I see, the more I find reason for those who love this country to weep over its blindness," Hamilton wrote.14 He recoiled at the cowardice and selfishness he saw rampant in the New York legislature. "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 Increasingly Hamilton despaired of pure democra..
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Ron Chernow |
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557d4f7
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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. 13"
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Ron Chernow |
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27d2b29
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In May, when a Senate committee took up the explosive issue of titles, Adams suggested that Washington be addressed as "His Highness, the President of the United States of America and Protector of their Liberties."34 Adams provided fodder for contemporary wags and was promptly dubbed "His Rotundity" or the "Duke of Braintree."
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Ron Chernow |
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f759c00
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They profess to aim only at a reform of the constitution and of certain abuses in the public administration, but an abolition of debts public and private and a new division of property are strongly suspected in contemplation.
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Ron Chernow |
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d722d7f
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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 vitriolic essays that were overly partisan, often paid scant heed to accuracy, and sought visceral impact.
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Ron Chernow |
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39a6325
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Such is my opinion of your abilities as a critic," Hamilton addressed him directly, "that I very much prefer your disapprobation to your applause."
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Ron Chernow |
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776885a
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Months after leaving office, he wrote to the Bank of the United States and admitted that he did not know his account balance because he had lost his bank book--this from the man who had created the bank. He
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Ron Chernow |
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2726efe
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best government posture toward religion was one of passive tolerance, not active promotion of an established church.
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Ron Chernow |