Quotes from Harlow Giles Unger

He believed the future of the nation was at stake, and he returned day after day to fight his war against the "slaveocracy." And Quincy voters sent him back to Congress again and again. Louisa fretted about his health and safety, but she had lost all influence over him and could do nothing to restrain him. He was unstoppable—a meteor spiraling out of control in the political firmament.

America is on the point of bursting into flames

Everyone that is not a noble," he lamented, "is a slave.

Lafayette was a splendid man...with a marvelous, self-depreciating sense of humor. He was, for example, balding noticeably when he reached an Indian outpost...and he calmed his wife's anxieties by noting that "I cannot lose what I do not have.

Respect," he declared, "forms the basis of every negotiation with these powers. The respect which one power has for another, is in the exact proportion of the means which they respectively have of injuring each other with the least detriment to themselves.

Monroe's presidency made poor men rich, turned political allies into friends, and united a divided people as no president had done since Washington.

Daniel Shays, a farmer struggling to keep his property, convinced neighbors that Boston legislators were colluding with judges and lawyers to raise property taxes and foreclose when farmers found it impossible to pay.

He supported Jefferson's proposed Land Ordinance of 1784,22 ceding Virginia's western territory to Congress for division into fourteen future states in which "there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude." Congress defeated the Ordinance by one vote.

Setting aside her own disappointment, Abigail tried to lift her son's spirits: "These are the times in which a genius would wish to live," she told him. "It is not in the still calm life . . . that great characters are formed. . . . When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

Nothing," he declaimed to the assembled town, "could be more gratifying to eight millions of people than to behold the man whom they have voluntarily placed at the head of their government, ardently laboring to promote the welfare and happiness not of a few, not of a faction; not of his dependents and flatterers; but of the whole American Republic.

And to Virginia governor Edmund Randolph, who also favored a bill of rights, he explained, "The human race is too apt to rush from one extreme to another.… For now, the cry is power; give Congress power, without reflecting that every free nation that hath ever existed has lost its liberty by the same rash impatience and want of necessary caution.

By March 1766, colonist boycotts had proved so costly to British merchants that Parliament repealed the stamp tax without having collected a single penny.

Lafayette told the duke, as the latter read the document, "and I see the Constitution of the United States as the most perfect document in existence.

which are plainly adapted to that end

At the end of June 1783, Monroe's first year of government service came to an end. Although he had accomplished nothing, he had done no less than his colleagues - which is exactly what Virginia planters had elected them to do.

He was curious, courteous, open - never arrogant or condescending - and generous to a fault. Abigail Adams later noted his "agreeable affability," "unassuming manner," and "polite attentions to all orders and ranks"...

history informs us that the passage of dethroned monarchs is short from prison to the grave."18

Monroe also saved Tom Paine, whose revolutionary fervor had inspired him to become a French citizen and win a seat in the Convention. When Paine voted against executing King Louis XVI, however, Robespierre sent him to prison, where he languished in ever-deteriorating health until Monroe rescued him in November 1794, and brought him to La Folie to recuperate.

Behind them in America, rebel torches had set skies aglow in western Pennsylvania to protest a federal tax on whiskey.