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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b821402 | The painting also pinpointed an important quirk of Washington's face: the lazy right eye that slid off into the corner while the left eye stared straight ahead. To prepare for the equestrian | Ron Chernow | ||
| 39af386 | I would rather see you dead at my feet than dishonored. | Philippa Gregory | ||
| ba7f3ed | By 1784, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut had outlawed slavery or passed laws for its gradual extinction | Ron Chernow | ||
| c9bfa43 | When Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, slaves constituted 40 percent of the population of his home state, Virginia. | Ron Chernow | ||
| fe05324 | The intimacy of this group of nationalists allowed the talks to range far beyond commercial disputes to a richer, more trenchant critique of the crumbling Articles of Confederation. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 747d291 | that countries follow their interests, not their sympathies--was engraved in Hamilton's memory, and he often reminded Jeffersonians later on that the French had fought for their own selfish purposes. | Ron Chernow | ||
| defaf25 | The northern states were not about to override their southern brethren on the slavery issue. All along, the American Revolution had been premised on a tacit bargain that regional conflicts would be subordinated to the need for unity among the states. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 83fb6b6 | At noon on December 14, 1780, Alexander Hamilton, twenty-five, wed Elizabeth Schuyler, twenty-three, in the southeast parlor of the Schuyler mansion. | Ron Chernow | ||
| b2f3a69 | While marking time in Princeton in July, Hamilton drafted a resolution that again called for a convention to revise the Articles of Confederation. This prescient document encapsulated many features of the 1787 Constitution: a federal government with powers separated among legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and a Congress with the power to levy taxes and raise an army. | Ron Chernow | ||
| c8751c2 | The constant session of Congress cannot be necessary in times of peace," said Thomas Jefferson, who wanted to replace it with a committee.64 Slowly but inexorably, the future battle lines were being drawn between those who wanted an energetic central government and those who wanted rights to revert to the states." | Ron Chernow | ||
| f3db076 | sinister glow. "The jury will mark every muscle of" | Ron Chernow | ||
| b3cf570 | 1783, General Henry Knox proposed creation of the Society of the | Ron Chernow | ||
| 4a77a93 | America. During the war, the New York legislature had passed a series of laws that stripped Tories of their properties and privileges. The 1779 Confiscation Act provided for the seizure of Tory estates, and the 1782 Citation Act made it difficult for British creditors to collect money from republican debtors. In March 1783, the legislature enacted the statute that most engrossed Hamilton: the Trespass Act, which allowed patriots who had lef.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 91dd636 | May 12, 1784, the state legislature passed a law depriving most Loyalists of the vote for the next two years. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 6568986 | Mocking Hancock as an inexperienced political lightweight, Republicans printed up a pamphlet entitled "Hancock's Political Achievements," a work that contained nothing but blank pages.79" | Ron Chernow | ||
| adf4fc0 | Many things beyond the absence of Laurens troubled Hamilton that summer, especially the shortsighted failure of the states to grant mandatory taxing power to Congress in the Articles of Confederation, which had been approved as the new nation's governing charter on November 15, 1777, and submitted to the states for ratification. | Ron Chernow | ||
| fdd9114 | memories of Valley Forge and Morristown would powerfully affect the future political agendas of both Washington and Hamilton, who had to grapple with the defects of a weak central government | Ron Chernow | ||
| c894f55 | in number 65, Hamilton visualized, with exceptional | Ron Chernow | ||
| 07e3d01 | Tens of thousands of onlookers gaped in amazement as the shattered British troops marched out of Yorktown and, to the tune of an old English ballad, "The World Turned Upside Down," | Ron Chernow | ||
| e57d8f5 | 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 of the Potomac River. | Ron Chernow | ||
| f468a7c | Washington was then unanimously elected president of the convention. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 5bec571 | Washington appointed Hamilton, George Wythe, and Charles Pinckney to a small committee that drew up rules and procedures for the convention. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 61c357f | Hamilton wanted the votes of individual members recorded. Instead, the convention chose to proceed on a one-state, one-vote basis, which meant that Hamilton's vote would likely be nullified by his two fellow delegates. | Ron Chernow | ||
| c868f37 | Who were these solons rhapsodized by Benjamin Franklin as "the most august and respectable assembly he was ever in in his life"?44 The fifty-five delegates representing twelve states--the renegade Rhode Island boycotted the convention--scarcely constituted a cross section of America. They were white, educated males and mostly affluent property owners. A majority were lawyers and hence sensitive to precedent. Princeton graduates (nine) trump.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 9f8588d | During one ghastly period in 1779, the continental dollar shed half its value in three weeks. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 8ad7f19 | In March 1780, Congress tried to restore monetary order by issuing one new dollar in exchange for forty old ones, a move that wiped out the savings of many Americans. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 336edf8 | beginning | Ron Chernow | ||
| 7338772 | When Grant read this, he was outraged at the shocking suggestion that he had subverted justice. He handed the letter to Bristow with a passionate admonition scrawled across it: "Let no guilty man escape if it can be avoided--Be specially vigilant--or instruct those engaged in the prosecutions of fraud to be--against all who insinuate that they have high influence . . . to protect them." | Ron Chernow | ||
| 0113a88 | In theory, the convention had a mandate only to revise the Articles of Confederation. Any delegates who took this circumscribed mission at face value were soon rudely disabused. On May 30, Edmund Randolph presented a plan, formulated chiefly by Madison, that sought to scuttle the articles altogether and create a strong central government. This "Virginia Plan" made a clean break with the past and contained the basic design of the future U.S... | Ron Chernow | ||
| bd7a352 | While Hamilton's Senate would be chosen for life by electors, his House of Representatives, by contrast, was exceedingly democratic, chosen directly by universal male suffrage every three years. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 57e634d | To curb further abuse, Hamilton recommended a Supreme Court that would consist of twelve judges holding lifetime offices on good behavior. In this manner, each branch would maintain a salutary distance from popular passions. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 078d2a9 | On July 16, the thick gloom finally lifted at Philadelphia when delegates agreed to a grand bargain, the so-called Connecticut Compromise, proposed by Roger Sherman of Connecticut and others. The major conflicts at the convention had perhaps hinged less on the question of federal versus state power than on how federal representation was apportioned among the states. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 09f2f94 | The delegates solved this baffling riddle by deciding that all states would enjoy equal representation in the Senate (a sop to small states) while representation in the House of Representatives would be proportionate to each state's population (a sop to large states). This broke the deadlock, though the Senate's composition introduced a lasting political bias in American life in favor of smaller states. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 116a6a9 | 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.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 97f8f94 | 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 foundation." | Ron Chernow | ||
| 55ef71b | Hamilton showed that, for all his misgivings about the Constitution, he could be cooperative and play a serviceable part. The convention showed good judgment in choosing him, given his literary gifts and rapid pen. It is hard to believe that the Committee of Style and Arrangement took only four days to burnish syllables that were to be painstakingly explicated by future generations. The objective was to make the document short and flexible,.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 2012b30 | its chief draftsman, Morris shrank the original twenty-three articles to seven and wrote the great preamble with its ringing opening, "We the People of the United States." Paying tribute to Morris's craftsmanship, Madison wrote, "The finish given to the style and arrangement fairly belongs to the pen of Mr. Morris." | Ron Chernow | ||
| 4a91480 | On September 17, 1787, after almost four months of hard-fought battles, the convention ended when thirty-nine delegates from twelve states signed the Constitution | Ron Chernow | ||
| eac4775 | After signing, the delegates adjourned to the City Tavern, which John Adams described as the "most genteel tavern in America," for a farewell dinner.103 Behind the conviviality lurked unspoken fears, and Washington, for one, doubted that the new federal government would survive twenty years. The delegates decided that the Constitution would take effect when nine state conventions approved it. For tactical and philosophical reasons, state le.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 92180f8 | Hamilton alone seemed resigned as the end neared. At one point, speaking of politics, he said, "If they break this union, they will break my heart."69 He could have left no more fitting political epitaph." | Ron Chernow | ||
| cc3ec8d | His faculties stayed intact until about fifteen minutes before the end. Then, at 2:00 P.M. on Thursday, July 12, 1804, thirty-one hours after the duel, forty-nine-year-old Alexander Hamilton died gently, quietly, almost noiselessly. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 1a2f8ee | The evening of Hamilton's death, New York's leading merchants exhorted one another to shutter their shops for a state funeral hastily arranged for Saturday, July 14. "The corpse is already putrid," Gouverneur Morris wrote that Friday, "and the funeral procession must take place tomorrow morning."5 Mourners assembled on Saturday morning in front of 25 Robinson Street (today Park Place), the home of John and Angelica Church. The New York Comm.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 65a9d04 | Once Morris had finished his speech, the casket was transferred to a grave site in the Trinity churchyard, not far from where Hamilton had studied and lived, practiced law and served his country. | Ron Chernow | ||
| ce7a0c4 | The paper currency was depreciating rapidly. Hence, for the first time, Hamilton began to fiddle with ideas for creating a national bank, through a mixture of foreign loans and private subscriptions. | Ron Chernow |