Quotes from Ron Chernow

When Franklin suggested on June 28th that each session start with a prayer for heavenly help, Hamilton countered that this might foster a public impression that embarrassments and dissensions within the convention had suggested this measure. According to legend, Hamilton also rebutted Franklin with the jest that the convention didn't need foreign aid.

Though he considered establishing a weekend house or summer hideaway, he had no exact plan.

Rogers's strategy paid off as far as the Buffalo imbroglio was concerned.)

Rockefeller kept renewing his earnest plea that Margaret be educated in New York City, and it became a sore point with him that Charles refused to oblige him.

By securing the Rockefeller Foundation charter in 1913, Rockefeller insulated a large portion of his wealth from inheritance taxes.

Hamilton, using the pen name "Civis" in a newspaper piece of February 23, 1791, penned the following telling sarcasm to Madison and Jefferson: "As to the negroes, you must be tender upon that subject. . . . Who talk most about liberty and equality . . . ? Is it not those who hold the bill of rights in one hand and a whip for affrighted slaves in the other?

One also suspects that the couple clashed as a result of their very similarity.

But in spite of numerous scattered cases of rival refiners getting comparable rebates, no other firm received so many rebates so consistently over so many years or on such a colossal scale as Rockefeller's.

When playing checkers or chess, he showed exceptional caution, studying each move at length, working out every possible countermove in his head. "I'll move just as soon as I get it figured out," he told opponents who tried to rush him. "You don't think I'm playing to get beaten, do you?"12 To ensure that he won, he submitted to games only where he could dictate the rules.

Meticulous in such maneuvers, Rockefeller made sure to leave no fingerprints and told Captain Vandergrift that it was "of utmost importance that nobody knows of [Standard Oil's] thought of doing something about [the suit] outside the [Clarion] County.

John loaned Frank the money to purchase the other half, keeping the mining stock as collateral.

To all questions, Rockefeller responded in this same slow, disconnected style, making his testimony worthless.

Perhaps the true legacy of his boyhood was an equivocal one: he came to detest the tyranny embodied by the planters and their authoritarian rule, while also fearing the potential uprisings of the disaffected slaves. The twin specters of despotism and anarchy were to haunt him for the rest of his life.

Also, by having autonomous conventions approve the Constitution, the new republic would derive its legitimacy not from the statehouses but directly from the citizenry, enabling federal law to supersede state legislation. With

the wealth of the Rothschilds consisted of the bankruptcy of nations.

Rockefeller always felt uneasy about venting anger or making an egotistical show of protest, and he pretended to accept this demotion with equanimity.

No etiquette yet defined civilized behavior between the parties.

Rockefeller would become their official umpire and try to govern their pool in a fair, disinterested fashion.

but he tolerated Strong out of respect for his scholarship as well as because of growing ties between their two families.

On July 6, while Captain Hamilton wandered about trying to find a purse with money that he had lost—he sometimes had a touch of the absentminded genius—the local press announced independence.

Endorsing still another form of government activism, Hamilton claimed that nothing had assisted Britain's industry more than its network of public roads and canals. He therefore touted internal improvements—what we would today call public infrastructure—to meld America's scattered regional markets into a single unified economy.

He feared that Margaret would become isolated from the rest of the family and was haunted by fears that she would be seduced by a continental fortune hunter.

This testimony was not only a fiasco for the judge but a public-relations victory for Rockefeller.

Washington frowned upon these Puritan descendants as greedy, sanctimonious hypocrites, telling Joseph Reed that "there is no nation under the sun (that I ever came across) pay greater adoration to money than they do.