The first great skeptic of American exceptionalism, he refused to believe that the country was exempt from the sober lessons of history.
Even as a raw country boy, he allowed himself no oath stronger than “Thunder and Lightning.
He became known for breaking in wild horses for local farmers, a sight that drew admiring spectators to the village square. He tamed even the most refractory horses through a fine sensitivity to their nature rather than by his physical prowess. “If people knew how much more they could get out of a horse by gentleness than by harshness,” Grant once observed, “they would save a great deal of trouble both to the horse and the man.
Grant explained to Porter his aversion to profanities, saying “swearing helps to rouse a man’s anger; and when a man flies into a passion his adversary who keeps cool always gets the better of him.”50.
Mills lashed out at Barbot as “an impertinent puppy” – the sort of fighting words that prompted duels.35.
Lafayette showed a courtier’s love of compliments, was a master of flattery, and liked to hug people in the French manner. Perhaps Washington doted on the young man because he dared to express emotions that he himself stifled, thawing his frosty reserve and opening an outlet for his suppressed emotions.
Washington presented a rare case of a revolutionary leader who, instead of being blinded by political fervor, recognized that fallible human beings couldn’t always live up to the high standards he set for them.
The president of a democracy, he averred, had to show himself to the people, and some danger was an inescapable hazard of office. “To be absolutely safe,” he told John Nicolay resignedly, “I should lock myself up in a box.
The young man who had worked so hard to ingratiate himself with his superiors in the British Army was suddenly breathing fire. Washington was always reluctant to sign on to any cause, because when he did so, his commitment was total.
Reconstruction was a fine but ultimately doomed experiment in American life. The tragedy of this intractable issue was that there was finally no way for blacks to enjoy their rights without a prolonged military presence, and that became politically impossible.
Once Reconstruction collapsed, it left southern blacks for eighty years at the mercy of Jim Crow segregation, lynchings, poll taxes, literacy tests, and other tactics designed to segregate them from whites and deny them the vote.
A whirlwind of energy, Madison would seem omnipresent in the early days of Washington’s administration. He drafted not only the inaugural address but also the official response by Congress and then Washington’s response to Congress, completing the circle.
He knew the western country from surveying; had the robust constitution to survive the winter woods; was mostly unflappable; had a mature appearance and sound judgment; and was a model youth, with no tincture of rowdiness in his nature. In certain ways, he was a very old young man.
Washington initially oversaw a larger staff of slaves and servants at Mount Vernon than he did as president of the United States – but the new government quickly overshadowed his estate in size.
Everything was perfectly sorted, classified, and slotted in his compartmentalized mind and books. Washington’s contemporaries recognized that this compulsive note taking, this itch to record his every action, went to the very essence of this well-regulated man.
They promulgated a view of the Civil War as a righteous cause that had nothing to do with slavery but only states’ rights – to which an incredulous James Longstreet once replied, “I never heard of any other cause of the quarrel than slavery.
The New York Times foresaw that in future generations “if a great soldier is indomitable in purpose and exhaustless in courage, endurance, and equanimity; if he is free from vanity and pettiness, if he is unpretentious, truthful, frank, constant, generous to friends, magnanimous to foes, and patriotic to the core, of him it will be said, ‘He is like Grant.’”144.
Hamilton’s life was so tumultuous that only an audacious novelist could have dreamed it up.
Taking for granted the growth of his empire, he hired talented people as found, not as needed.
I am so tired. It is so long. I want to see Hamilton.
It never seemed to dawn on her to encourage her children to have a good time.