Quotes from Ron Chernow

Patrick Henry, the leading antifederalist, warned delegates who supported the Constitution, "They'll free your niggers.

Just before Hamilton returned to headquarters, Washington received a letter from Captain Lee announcing Hamilton's death in the Schuylkill. There were tears of jubilation, as well as considerable laughter, when the sodden corpse himself sauntered through the door.

Harriman was a very different type from Pierpont.

In other words, the Sherman Antitrust Act wouldn't be used against U.S. Steel.

Their strategy was to make clients feel accepted into a private club, as if a Morgan account were a membership card to the aristocracy.

Has anyone given you the law of these offices? No? It is this: nobody does anything if he can get anybody else to do it.… As soon as you can, get some one whom you can rely on, train him in the work, sit down, cock up your heels, and think out some way for the Standard Oil to make some money.

April 12, 1790, the House voted down Hamilton's assumption plan, thirty-one to twenty-nine, and two weeks later voted to discontinue all debate on the issue. By early June, it looked as if the assumption plan was heading for oblivion. So Hamilton began to search for a compromise that would salvage the linchpin of his economic program.

when John Rockefeller dies," Archbold said, "the world is going to be surprised to learn what a very great man he has been in every way.

In the fall elections, Lincoln paid a fearful price for that impending proclamation. Berating Republicans as "Nigger Worshippers," Democrats conjured up fantastic "scenes of lust and rapine" in the South and "a swarthy inundation of negro laborers and paupers" in the North as the likely consequences of emancipation.

Sharp drops in the money supply then led to severe recessions. The country needed an elastic currency and a permanent lender of last resort.

As it turned out, Junior resigned from the bank board the following year, finding some of its practices questionable.

Archbold] was a man of imagination, of courage, of great persuasiveness, with a genius for reading men and dealing with them.

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

Far sooner than Rockefeller, the railroads had foreseen the political reaction and inevitable defeat.

Days later, Melancton Smith finally broke the deadlock when he endorsed the Constitution if Congress would promise to consider some amendments. Paying indirect tribute to Hamilton, Smith credited "the reasonings of gentlemen" on the other side for his changed vote.

In the words of Howell Cobb of Georgia, who helped to create the Confederacy, "The day you make soldiers of [slaves] is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong—but they won't make good soldiers.

The people had registered their dismay with a long litany of unpopular Federalist actions: the Jay Treaty, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the truculent policy toward France, the vast army being formed under Hamilton and the taxes levied to support it. The 1800 elections revealed, for the first time, the powerful centrist pull of American politics—the electorate's tendency to rein in anything perceived as extreme.

giving him more generous sympathy than he received in return

Like the London merchant bankers, the early Jewish bankers on Wall Street had started out as dry-goods merchants: the Lehmans began as Alabama cotton brokers; Goldman, as the owner of a Pennsylvania clothing store, Kuhn and Loeb, as Cincinnati clothiers; and Lazard, in a New Orleans dry-goods business.

Pierpont was amenable to central banks so long as they were private and had boards composed of bankers.

If Rutgers v. Waddington made Hamilton a controversial figure in city politics in 1784, the founding of the Bank of New York cast him in a more conciliatory role. The creation of New York's first bank was a formative moment in the city's rise as a world financial center. Banking was still a new phenomenon in America.

In this era before railroad regulation and antitrust legislation, the SIC contract didn't violate any obvious laws, only a universal sense of fair play.

promote—the federal assumption of state debt and the selection of New York as the capital—assumption was incomparably more important to him. It was the most effective and irrevocable way to yoke the states together into a permanent union. So when he saw that Madison possessed the votes to block assumption, Hamilton considered bargaining away New York as the capital in exchange for southern support for assumption.

There has never been a moment since Lee surrendered that I would not have gone more than halfway to meet the Southern people in a spirit of conciliation. But they have never responded to it.