Quotes from Ron Chernow

For some days past there has been little less than a famine in the camp," Washington said in mid-February. Before winter's end, some 2,500 men, almost a quarter of the army, perished from disease, famine, or the cold.

grooming sons to inherit their respective businesses.

that the retaliation would also be highly personal. That Hamilton could be so sensitive to criticisms of himself and so insensitive to the effect his words had on others was a central mystery of his psyche.

To live with his own conscience, he told his father, he had to resign from the trust and devote his life to philanthropy.

Pierpont's anti-Semitism was well known.

He was respectful toward his superiors but never awed by them and was always aware of their shortcomings.

For Jefferson, banks were devices to fleece the poor, oppress farmers, and induce a taste for luxury that would subvert republican simplicity. Strangely enough for a large slaveholder, he thought that agriculture was egalitarian while manufacturing would produce a class-conscious society.

He also advocated Archbold's ouster, but Senior thought it impossible to fire Archbold in the midst of the antitrust suit.

Reproaching his slave carpenters, he said, "There is not to be found so idle a set of rascals." Of a slave named Betty who worked as a spinner in the mansion, he complained that "a more lazy, deceitful and impudent hussy is not to be found in the United States.

He had long bewailed his inability to delegate authority—"It is my nature and I cannot help it

His dislike of Jews may have been sharpened by dealings with the Rothschilds.

Between February 17 and March 28, 1872—between the first rumors of the SIC and the time it was scuttled—Rockefeller swallowed up twenty-two of his twenty-six Cleveland competitors. During

On April 16, 1789, George Washington departed from Mount Vernon on an eight-day journey to New York that blossomed into a national celebration.

Then suddenly, in early 1889, Rockefeller grew aloof toward William Rainey Harper, who had committed the classic error of promoting his cause too assertively.

Something about this deep domesticity and respectability pleased Washington, who was never cut out for a gallivanting, footloose life. Martha gave him a secure, happy base for the myriad activities of a busy career. She was his dear companion, trusted adviser, and confidante long after lust faded, and they delighted in each other's company.

This feud, rife with intrigue and lacerating polemics, was to take on an almost pathological intensity.

Despite the scope of his vision, Pierpont was extremely attentive to details and took pride in the knowledge that he could perform any job in the bank:

which he attributed to his discomfort with Jews.

Beyond the size of his stake, Rockefeller also possessed an unlikely charisma

That spring, Gates had survived a serious illness, awakening his curiosity about American medicine.

the RIMR was now "probably the best equipped institution for the study of the causes and cure of disease to be found anywhere in the world

That his father honored his wish to leave Standard Oil only deepened the bond between them.

Hamilton dreaded parties as "the most fatal disease" of popular governments and hoped America could dispense with such groups.

If forced to choose, Hamilton preferred a man with wrong principles to one devoid of any. "There is no circumstance which has occurred in the course of our political affairs that has given me so much pain as the idea that Mr. Burr might be elevated to the Presidency by the means of the Federalists