The Federalists were allied with powerful banking and merchant interests in New England and on the Atlantic seaboard and were disproportionately Congregationalists and Episcopalians.
These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
Unlike Franklin or Jefferson, he never learned to subdue his opponents with a light touch or a sly, artful, understated turn of phrase.
At the same time, the mounting fear of Hamilton among Jefferson, Madison, and their supporters cohered into an organized opposition that began to call itself Republican. Alluding to the ancient Roman republic, this was also a clever label, insinuating that Federalists were not real republicans and hence must be monarchists. Often Baptists and Methodists, Republicans drew their strength from rich southern planters and small farmers.
The United States still had not escaped economic dependence on England, which consumed nearly half of American exports and accounted for three-quarters of American imports.
The president was running out of room to maneuver as the country backed away from further federal interference in the South. The outcry over Louisiana began to ring down the final curtain on Reconstruction. Southern whites increasingly substituted the word “Redemption” – a restoration of white rule – for the hated term “Reconstruction.
What pretty much guaranteed that Johnson would side with white supremacists was his benighted view of black people. No American president has ever held such openly racist views. “This is a country for white men,” he declared unashamedly, “and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.
The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves and to suffice for our own happiness.
The feckless President Buchanan, who opposed secession, thought the federal government powerless to stop it, and in his last annual message blamed the “incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question throughout the North for the past quarter of a century.
In number 71, Hamilton presented his theory of presidents as leaders who should act for the popular good, even if the people were sometimes deluded about their interests.
It is the child of avarice, the brother of inequity, and father of mischief. It has been the ruin of many worthy families, the loss of many a man’s honor, and the cause of suicide. To all those who enter the list, it is equally fascinating. The successful gamester pushes his good fortune till it is overtaken by a reverse. The losing gamester, in hopes of retrieving past misfortunes, goes on from bad to worse.”37 Washington.
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.
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.
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!
In the felicitous words of one early Burr biographer, “The Clintons had power, the Livingstons had numbers, and the Schuylers had Hamilton.”61.
While the folks at home embraced him as an improbable hero, Washington was denigrated in England as a reckless young warrior and in France as an outright assassin. He would have been crestfallen to know that, for some high-ranking folks in London, his behavior only confirmed that.
In closing, Washington referred to the character of Jesus, “the Divine author of our blessed religion.”32.
So it may be said, with undoubted truth, that the whiskey drinkers made Mr. Jefferson the President of the United States.”48.
At the time, Charles Sumner still chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and made preposterous demands upon the English. Not only did he want all of Canada but a total British withdrawal from the Western Hemisphere, including its Caribbean islands and the Falkland Islands off the Argentine coast.
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.