Quotes from Ron Chernow

What he said, what he thought, and what he felt, came from his mother, but what he did came from his father, with the addition of a great caution generated by early unpleasantness.

He was apparently forced out.

Once Washington had set his sights on independence, his vision was unblinking, and his consistency proved one of his most compelling qualities.

He identified many critics as competing refiners who had foolishly taken cash instead of Standard Oil stock for their plants.

Even later, as a private citizen, he said that his own "scrupulousness" had prevented him from "being concerned in what is termed speculation."9 This made his blindness to Duer's shameless machinations the more bewildering. Hamilton was an extremely perceptive judge of character, and William Duer was one of the few cases in which his acute vision seems to have been blinkered.

To avert overbuilding and internecine price wars, Morgan decided to spearhead a new steel consolidation.

that the reason why Morgan & Co. are so insistent on increasing the dividend from 4 to 6% is to enable them to sell out their stocks at a very high figure on the basis of the increased dividend.

Hamilton believed that the United States should preemptively seize Spanish Florida and Louisiana, lest they fall into hostile French hands. To accomplish this, he directed General James Wilkinson to assemble an armada of seventy-five riverboats.

if a white man kills a black, he cannot be tried for his life for the murder. . . . If a negro strikes a white man, he is punished with the loss of his hand and, if he should draw blood, with death.

Washington went on to say that this mighty blaze "ought to be under the guidance of reason, for although we cannot avoid first impressions, we may assuredly place them under guard.

Had there been management consultants in those days, they couldn't have devised a better or wiser compromise.

Rockefeller even hesitated to punish serious offenses and instead of prosecuting the occasional embezzler simply dismissed him.

What more can punish a man than to sit and groan as he contemplates what might have been!

Unfettered markets tended frequently toward monopoly or, at least, toward unhealthy levels of concentration, and government sometimes needed to intervene to ensure the full benefits of competition

Rockefeller sounded more like Karl Marx than our classical image of the capitalist. Like the Marxists, he believed that the competitive free-for-all eventually gave way to monopoly and that large industrial-planning units were the most sensible way to manage an economy. But while Rockefeller had faith in such private monopolies, the Marxists saw them as merely halfway houses on the road to socialism.

Hamilton never carried out his plans for Louisiana or Florida, much less for Spanish America. As the original rationale for his army—defense against a French invasion—was increasingly undercut by peace negotiations, such plans seemed increasingly pointless, preposterous, and irrelevant. Still, the episode went down as one of the most flagrant instances of poor judgment in Hamilton's career.

Hamilton believed that revolutions ended in tyranny because they glorified revolution as a permanent state of mind. A spirit of compromise and a concern with order were needed to balance the quest for liberty.

they had genuine affection for Jack.

We would prefer having him to come here, but don't see how he could do it without exposing the whole thing.

Businessmen such as Rockefeller preferred to think of themselves as victims of political extortion, not as initiators of bribes.

Despite being the target of so much public obloquy, Rockefeller seemed fearless.

Far from being a pro-British lackey, much less a high-level spy, Hamilton stubbornly defended U.S. interests at every turn. He was bargaining with Beckwith, not groveling. He insisted that the United States should be able to trade with the British West Indies.

Standard Oil had taught the American public an important but paradoxical lesson: Free markets, if left completely to their own devices, can wind up terribly unfree. Competitive capitalism did not exist in a state of nature but had to be defined or restrained by law.

Pierpont wanted to follow him, but he held back, awaiting word of Junius's plans.