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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c18faee | Adams made baldly partisan selections for a judiciary already packed with Federalists. His appointment of the so-called midnight judges rubbed old Republican wounds. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 59312a6 | These horror stories about Hamilton have been regurgitated for two centuries and are now engraved on the memories of historians and readers alike. Unfortunately, these vignettes often cruelly misrepresent Hamilton and have done no small damage to his reputation. Jefferson understood very well the power of laying down a paper trail. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 3e910dd | Jefferson recorded the story of Hamilton and Adams singing the praises of the British constitution; of Hamilton supposedly raising a toast to George III at a St. Andrew's Society dinner in New York; and of Hamilton declaring at a dinner party that "there was no stability, no security in any kind of government but a monarchy." | Ron Chernow | ||
| aa6f6c9 | A master legislative tactician, Madison was now recognized as the first opposition leader in House history and had most of the south lined up solidly behind him. | Ron Chernow | ||
| e422167 | By 1792, both political parties saw their opponents as mortal threats to the heritage of the Revolution. But the special mixture of idealism and vituperation also stemmed from the experiences of the founders themselves. These selfless warriors of the Revolution and sages of the Constitutional Convention had been forced to descend from their Olympian heights and adjust to a rougher world of everyday politics, where they cultivated their own .. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 99fe90d | cannot doubt, from the evidence that I possess[,] that the National Gazette was instituted by him [Jefferson] for political purposes and that one leading object of it has been to render me and all the measures connected with my department as odious as possible. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 789ab49 | Mercy and compassion are all the grace left to us. | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| d7ec0aa | man who felt no need to placate Thomas Jefferson or James Madison had to grovel before the raffish James Reynolds, whom he later described bitterly as "an obscure, unimportant, and profligate man." | Ron Chernow | ||
| 67ae02f | You certainly never felt the terrorism excited by Genet in 1793," Adams chided Jefferson years later, "when ten thousand people in the streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his house and effect a revolution in the government or compel it to declare war in favor of the French Revolution and against England." | Ron Chernow | ||
| 114ce18 | He had prevailed in almost every major program he had sponsored--whether the bank, assumption, funding the public debt, the tax system, the Customs Service, or the Coast Guard--despite years of complaints and bitter smears. | Ron Chernow | ||
| bba5ef5 | In the first essay, Hamilton dealt with the objection that only Congress could issue a neutrality proclamation, since it alone had the power to declare war. Hamilton pointed out that if "the legislature have a right to make war, on the one hand, it is, on the other, the duty of the executive to preserve peace till war is declared."50 Once again, Hamilton broadened the authority of the executive branch in diplomacy, especially during emergen.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 8575b1a | A central tenet of the American Revolution had been that a corrupt British ministry had suborned Parliament through patronage and pensions and used the resulting excessive influence to tax the colonists and deprive them of their ancient English liberties | Ron Chernow | ||
| 19450ad | After years of frustrating delays, the Churches at last moved to New York in May 1797. John Barker Church soon established himself as a personage of staggering wealth and New York's foremost insurance underwriter. "His equipage and style of living are several degrees beyond those of any other man amongst us," Robert Troup marveled.14 Angelica began to throw extravagant parties at which guests dined on plates of polished silver. She usually .. | Ron Chernow | ||
| b43e860 | As many Republicans had predicted, the French had retaliated against the Jay Treaty by allowing their privateers to prey on American ships carrying contraband cargo bound for British ports. With Napoleon emerging as the new French military strongman, Hamilton had little doubt that his troops would spread despotism across Europe. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 5cce3af | Soon after being sworn in as president, John Adams learned that the Directory, the five-member council now ruling France, had expelled the new American minister, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and promulgated belligerent new orders against America's merchant marine. By spring, the French had seized more than three hundred American vessels. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 0e77542 | Mr. Adams is vain, suspicious, and stubborn, of an excessive self-regard, taking counsel with nobody."9 Jefferson predicted to Letombe that Adams would last only one term and urged the French to invade England." | Ron Chernow | ||
| bc808be | On May 16, 1797, President Adams delivered a bellicose message to Congress, denouncing the French for ejecting Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and stalking American ships and chiding them for having "inflicted a wound in the American breast." | Ron Chernow | ||
| 20a8408 | Adams made a conciliatory overture and announced plans to dispatch a diplomatic mission to Paris. The three-man delegation was to include two southern Federalists, John Marshall and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and a northern Republican, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, who had been a partisan of the French Revolution. "The French are no more capable of a republican government," Adams advised Gerry, "than a snowball can exist a whole week i.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 702cf6d | By the time the three Americans showed up in Paris, Napoleon had crushed the Austrian army in Italy. Then, in early September, the Directory staged a veritable coup d'etat, arresting and deporting scores of deputies and shutting down more than forty newspapers in a wholesale purge of moderate elements. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 3a2605b | When the XYZ papers were published, they proved a bonanza for the Federalists, and John Adams attained the zenith of his popularity as president. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 060457d | A spirit of warm and high resentment against the rulers of France has suddenly burst forth in every part of the United States."26 Congress rushed through a program for fortifying eastern seaports and augmenting the army and navy." | Ron Chernow | ||
| a81f4cf | Before McHenry returned to Philadelphia, Washington slipped him a sheet naming the three men he wished to see as his major generals, listed in order: Alexander Hamilton, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and Henry Knox. Writing to Adams, Washington made the appointment of his general officers | Ron Chernow | ||
| 862bc94 | Before McHenry returned to Philadelphia, Washington slipped him a sheet naming the three men he wished to see as his major generals, listed in order: Alexander Hamilton, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and Henry Knox. Writing to Adams, Washington made the appointment of his general officers a precondition for accepting the commanding post. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 441b431 | For five weeks in November and December 1798, he conferred in Philadelphia with Washington, who made his first resplendent return to the capital in twenty months, appearing in uniform on horseback. Charles C. Pinckney and Secretary of War McHenry joined the planning sessions. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 0d0253d | Regarding the uprising as a direct threat to constitutional order, Washington asked Supreme Court Justice James Wilson to declare a state of anarchy around Pittsburgh. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 651948f | Washington contrived a statesmanlike compromise between Hamilton's truculence and Randolph's civility. He issued a proclamation telling the insurgents to desist by September 1, or the government would send in a militia. At the same time, he announced that a three-man commission would confer with citizens | Ron Chernow | ||
| 2341f35 | There is no road to despotism more sure or more to be dreaded than that which begins at anarchy. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 0b37a43 | September 9, Washington had had enough. "If the laws are to be trampled upon with impunity," he said, "and a minority is to dictate to the majority, there is an end put at one stroke to republican government." | Ron Chernow | ||
| 41f32ed | Hamilton now believed that his great opportunities lay behind him. On December 1, 1794, the day he returned to Philadelphia, he told Washington that he would surrender his Treasury post in late January. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 5850828 | After Hamilton and his family left Philadelphia in mid-February 1795, they rented lodgings in New York City for several days before proceeding to the Schuyler residence in Albany for a long-overdue rest. | Ron Chernow | ||
| fed9f19 | Hamilton refused to drop his involvement in the Manumission Society even as his renown grew and his commitments vastly multiplied. He kept up his connection as a legal adviser until his death. Was this perhaps his personal way of acknowledging the past by rectifying the injustice that had surrounded his early years? | Ron Chernow | ||
| 4220ba6 | On November 26, 1799, she gave birth to her seventh child, Eliza, but she continued to shelter strays and waifs, a practice that she and Alexander had started in adopting Fanny Antill. | Ron Chernow | ||
| a6bde79 | On December 12, 1799, Washington sent Hamilton a letter applauding his outline for an American military academy: "The establishment of an institution of this kind . . . has ever been considered by me as an object of primary importance to this country."44 It was the last letter George Washington ever wrote. After riding in a snowstorm, he developed a throat infection and died two days later. Washington did not live to see the government tran.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 3627199 | 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, Americans learned that Napoleon Bonaparte had eliminated the Directory in November and pronounced himself first consul, in precisely the turn to despotism that Hamilton had long prophesied for France. The fulfillment of his prediction, however, left .. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 2a14585 | On October 15, Adams yielded grudgingly to the appointment of Hamilton as inspector general. Knox refused to serve under him, but Charles Cotesworth Pinckney agreed and praised Hamilton. "I knew that his talents in war were great," he told McHenry, "that he had a genius capable of forming an extensive military plan, and a spirit courageous and enterprizing, equal to the execution of it." | Ron Chernow | ||
| dfb50ba | Around this time, Hamilton chatted with Burr about an appointment. Aware of bad blood between him and Washington, Hamilton asked Burr whether he could serve faithfully under the general. Burr unhesitatingly replied that "he despised Washington as a man of no talents and one who could not spell a sentence of common English." | Ron Chernow | ||
| bc76390 | In retirement, Adams mused that if Burr had become a brigadier general in 1798, it might have tethered him to the Federalists and assured his own reelection in 1800. Indeed, Adams was right in one respect: Washington blundered by recruiting only Federalists to top military positions, while Adams had wished to include two Republicans--Burr and Frederick Muhlenberg--as brigadiers. Had the army taken on a more bipartisan complexion, it might w.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| e54e4ce | Hamilton sketched out this phantom force in microscopic detail, producing comprehensive charts for regiments, battalions, and companies. In a typical passage, Hamilton was to write, "A company is subdivided equally into two platoons, a platoon into two sections and a section into two squads, a squad consisting of four files of three or six files of two."89 He assigned ranks to officers, set up recruiting stations, stocked arsenals with ammu.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 33363d8 | By the time he left the Treasury in 1795, slavery had begun to recede in New England and the mid-Atlantic states. Rhode Island, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut had decided to abolish it. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 148546b | yellow-fever epidemic of 1798 that had claimed the lives of Benjamin Franklin Bache and John Fenno had also given fresh urgency to the work of the Widows Society, as many women lost their family breadwinners. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 39fc50f | Republican ire about the Federalist dominance of the judiciary became especially strident after Adams nominated John Marshall as chief justice of the Supreme Court in late January 1801. | Ron Chernow | ||
| fd298f6 | By the time he left the Treasury in 1795, slavery had begun to recede in New England and the mid-Atlantic states. Rhode Island, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut had decided to abolish it. Conspicuously missing were New York and New Jersey. So in January 1798, Hamilton resumed his association with the New York Manumission Society, his personal affiliation having lapsed during his Philadelphia years. Electe.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| baa25a8 | All on this side [of] the Mississippi must be ours, including both Floridas," he had already argued to McHenry in early 1798." | Ron Chernow | ||
| 64d4a69 | Like the Reynolds pamphlet, these clandestine messages signal a further deterioration in Hamilton's judgment once he no longer worked under Washington's wise auspices and was left purely to his own devices. | Ron Chernow |