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.
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 democracy, of politicians simply catering to the popular will, and favored educated leaders who would enlighten the people and exercise their own judgment. Whatever.
The issue of press freedom was all the more important because the spirit of faction, “that mortal poison to our land,” had spread through America. He worried that a certain unnamed party might impose despotism: “To watch the progress of such endeavours is the office of a free press. To give us early alarm and put us on our guard against the encroachments of power. This then is a right of the utmost importance, one for which, instead of yielding it up, we ought rather to spill our blood.
In discussing this Romanian bloodletting with Simon Wolf, Grant declared that “respect for human rights” was the “first duty” of any head of state and that blacks and Jews should be elevated to a rank of “equality with the most enlightened.” Grant showed surprising passion on the subject, saying “the story of the sufferings of the Hebrews of Roumania profoundly touches every sensibility of our nature.
D. Rockefeller drew strength by simplifying reality and strongly believed that excessive reflection upon unpleasant but unalterable events only weakened one’s resolve in the face of enemies.
While other Americans dreamed of a brand-new society that would expunge all traces of effete European civilization, Hamilton humbly studied those societies for clues to the formation of a new government. Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton never saw the creation of America as a magical leap across a chasm to an entirely new landscape, and he always thought the New World had much to learn from the Old. Probably.
Few First Ladies – and the name wasn’t yet commonly used – have so reveled in the White House or developed such a proprietary feeling about it. “Eight happy years I spent there – so happy!” Julia would reminisce. “It still seems as much like home to me as the old farm in Missouri, White Haven.
Reared with Methodist modesty, he could never admit nakedly to the true depth of his ambition. In this way, he was strictly Hannah Grant’s son, not Jesse’s. Ethical and honorable, he wanted to receive jobs based squarely on his merits, a faith he held so unalterably he called it “one of my superstitions.
How this seemingly dull, phlegmatic man, in a stupendous act of nation building, presided over the victorious Continental Army and forged the office of the presidency is a mystery to most Americans. Something essential about Washington has been lost to posterity, making him seem a worthy but plodding man who somehow stumbled into greatness.
Paranoid thinking seems to be a legacy of all revolutions, with purists searching for signs of heresy, and the American experience was no exception.
If the party elected Burr, it would be exposed “to the disgrace of a defeat in an attempt to elevate to the first place in the government one of the worst men in the community.”14 Hamilton had never spoken about Adams and Jefferson in these terms. “The appointment of Burr as president would disgrace our country abroad,” he informed Sedgwick. “No agreement with him could be relied upon.”15.
Man proposes and God disposes.
Simon Wolf wrote during Woodrow Wilson’s tenure, “President Grant did more on behalf of American citizens of Jewish faith at home and abroad than all the Presidents of the United States prior thereto or since.
To Jefferson we owe the self-congratulatory language of Fourth of July oratory, the evangelical conviction that America serves as a beacon to all humanity. Jefferson told John Dickinson, “Our revolution and its consequences will ameliorate the condition of man over a great portion of the globe.” 54 At least on paper, Jefferson possessed a more all-embracing view of democracy than Hamilton, who was always frightened by a sense of the fickle and fallible nature of the masses. Having.
The Federalist has been extolled as both a literary and political masterpiece. Theodore Roosevelt commented “that it is on the whole the greatest book” dealing with practical politics.
The strident tone of “The Stand” reflects the polarization that had gripped America over the French crisis. Feelings ran so high that Jefferson told one correspondent, “Men who have been intimate all their lives cross the street to avoid meeting and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch hats.
Grant worded his message to remove any suspicion that he spoke for a particular religious denomination. Also buried in his statement was a courageous, farsighted plea for free, universal education for black children. The laconic Grant’s crusade for public education was a unique event in his presidency, the result of a riveting speech that had forced an issue on the national consciousness through powerful oratory.
In public exigencies, there is hardly anything more prejudicial than excessive caution, timidity and dilatoriness, as there is nothing more beneficial than vigour, enterprise and expedition.
Hamilton, back by August 13, dove into a debate that passionately engaged him: immigration. He opposed any attempt to restrict membership in Congress to native-born Americans or to stipulate a residency period before immigrants could qualify for it.
Grant adopted unusual precautions, returning to the Willard Hotel twice daily for meals and staying indoors at night. When he set eyes on images of John Wilkes Booth, he immediately recognized the sinister horseman who had shadowed his path to the train station and knew that he himself had stood on the death list of intended victims.