Quotes from Ron Chernow

Frederick Douglass paired Grant with Lincoln as the two people who had done most to secure African American advances: "May we not justly say . . . that the liberty which Mr. Lincoln declared with his pen General Grant made effectual with his sword—by his skill in leading the Union armies to final victory?"21 For the admiring Douglass, Grant was "the vigilant, firm, impartial, and wise protector of my race.

Gates himself invested in several of the companies he managed for Rockefeller, and in 1902 he cashed in a tidy $500,000 profit.

Mr. Rockefeller may have made himself the richest man in the world, but he has paid.

I have always wished, simply as a matter of satisfaction to myself, that my salary might represent the real value of my services in the office, while as it is and has been in the past it represents rather your generosity.

Junior waited more than a year to depart from the company.

Many things beyond the absence of Laurens troubled Hamilton that summer, especially the shortsighted failure of the states to grant mandatory taxing power to Congress in the Articles of Confederation, which had been approved as the new nation's governing charter on November 15, 1777, and submitted to the states for ratification.

Unlike his father's composed look, his already seemed restless.

and personally audited the books each New Year's Day.

National City became known as the oil bank, much as J. P. Morgan and Company would be called the steel bank.

For the record, he professed great respect for Isaac Hewitt, twenty-five years his senior, but he was much more caustic in private, referring to him as a "disgruntled" man, forever entangled in litigation.

but Rockefeller started at the top, believing that if he could crack his strongest competitor first, it would have a tremendous psychological impact.

To purify himself of all business ties, Junior also retired at the same time from U.S. Steel.

The paper currency was depreciating rapidly. Hence, for the first time, Hamilton began to fiddle with ideas for creating a national bank, through a mixture of foreign loans and private subscriptions.

In time, it would become hard to disentangle the House of Morgan from various aspects of Anglo-American policy.

Rockefeller could brush off Tarbell's critique of his business methods as biased, but he was deeply pained by the character study.

At the January 11, 1910, board meeting, he quietly retired as a director of Standard Oil:

the tax constituted the second largest source of federal revenues and was indispensable to Hamilton. If deprived of that crucial tax, he would have to raise tariffs, which would encourage more smuggling and tax evasion and spur commercial retaliation abroad. The government also needed money to finance military expeditions against the Indians—expeditions that were especially popular in the affected frontier communities, such as those of western Pennsylvania.

Every company that failed and was reorganized by a bank ended up the bank's captive client.

By the bye," he wrote to Washington, "in the melancholy situation to which the poor King of England has been reduced, there were, I am told, in relation to you, some whimsical circumstances." In a deranged fit, wrote Morris, the king had "conceived himself to be no less a personage than George Washington at the head of the American Army.

Rockefeller knew that he was overpaying but couldn't resist a deal that would certify his position as the world's largest oil refiner at age thirty-one.

Rockefeller always sees a little further than the rest of us—and then he sees around the corner.

Then it grew steadily clearer that Junior would be the receptacle for the bulk of the fortune.

It was not until February 11, 1801, that votes cast by presidential electors in the various states were actually opened in the Senate chamber, confirming what was already common knowledge: that Jefferson and Burr had tied with seventy-three votes apiece.

James Clark later told Ida Tarbell that he sold out only from fear of the SIC contract.