Quotes from Ron Chernow

greed can corrupt a state and that a public official who betrays his trust "ought to feel the utmost rigor of public resentment and be detested as a traitor of the worst and most dangerous kind.

Seven months after Grant's death, Julia received a whopping $200,000 check from Twain and $450,000 in the end—an astonishing sum for book royalties at the time. No previous book had ever sold so many copies in such a short period of time, and it rivaled that other literary sensation of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Clearly Grant had emerged victorious in his last uphill battle.

He immediately had Rawlins summon stretcher bearers, but was dismayed when they removed the Union officer and overlooked the Confederate private. "Take this Confederate, too," he said. "Take them both together; the war is over between them." Grant seemed sickened by the carnage. "Let's get away from this dreadful place," he told an officer. "I suppose this work is part of the devil that is left in us all.

So long as we are a young and virtuous people, this instrument will bind us together in mutual interests, mutual welfare, and mutual happiness. But when we become old and corrupt, it will bind us no longer.

Rawlins was soon sidetracked from the war effort, however, by word from his wife, Emily, staying with her family in Goshen, New York, that she suffered from consumption; Rawlins would shortly leave to join her.

My family is American, Ulysses later declared proudly, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral.

a full-blooded Seneca Iroquois sachem, Ely S. Parker, who grew up on an Indian reservation in upstate New York and was a chief of the Six Nations. Trained as a civil engineer, he was a man of giant girth with jet-black hair, penetrating eyes, and exceptional strength who styled himself a "savage Jack Falstaff of 200 [pound] weight.

As a member of the style committee, Hamilton showed that, for all his misgivings about the Constitution, he could be cooperative and play a serviceable part. The convention showed good judgment in choosing him, given his literary gifts and rapid pen. It is hard to believe that the Committee of Style and Arrangement took only four days to burnish syllables that were to be painstakingly explicated by future generations.

While other founding fathers were reared in tidy New England villages or cosseted on baronial Virginia estates, Hamilton grew up in a tropical hellhole of dissipated whites and fractious slaves, all framed by a backdrop of luxuriant natural beauty.

The Republican marching club was known as the Galena Wide Awakes—Orvil Grant was a member—and as they tramped along, clad in dark oilcloth capes and caps, their martial air portended war. Grant rebuffed an effort, spearheaded by John Rawlins

Elbridge Gerry had bawdily likened standing armies to a tumescent penis: "An excellent assurance of domestic tranquillity, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.

I am so tired. It is so long. I want to see Hamilton.

When the couple rode by the shore one day, John became so enraged at Fidelia that he drove their carriage straight into Chesapeake Bay. When Fidelia asked where he was going, John replied with a sneer, "To hell, Madam." To which she retorted boldly, "Drive on, sir.

By the end of four years at West Point, he had capitulated to the tyranny of the clerical error and adopted Ulysses S. Grant as his new moniker for life.

Both Grant and Sherman were damaged souls who would redeem tarnished reputations in the brutal crucible of war.

Americans today know little about the terrorism that engulfed the South during Grant's presidency. It has been suppressed by a strange national amnesia. The Klan's ruthless reign is a dark, buried chapter in American history. The Civil War is far better known than its brutal aftermath.

The extraordinary outpouring of bipartisan concern blotted out the scandals of Grant's presidency and restored him to his rightful niche in the American pantheon. Hundreds of sympathetic messages piled up at the Grant residence, including telegrams from Jefferson Davis and the sons of Robert E. Lee and Albert Sidney Johnston.

By the end of Grant's second term, white Democrats, through the "redeemer" movement, had reclaimed control of every southern state, winning in peacetime much of the power lost in combat. They promulgated a view of the Civil War as a righteous cause that had nothing to do with slavery but only states' rights—to which an incredulous James Longstreet once replied, "I never heard of any other cause of the quarrel than slavery.

I shall conclude [by] saying I wish there was a war. Alex. Hamilton.

he worried that a separate senate, elected solely by propertied voters, will "degenerate into a body purely aristocratical.

The power of the new mass media made Grant's illness a national spectacle, with his doctors offering twice-daily updates on his condition.

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

He had a great general's ability to focus on his goals and brush aside obstacles as petty distractions. "You can abuse me, you can strike me," Rockefeller said, "so long as you let me have my own way.

In the next poem, Hamilton has suddenly metamorphosed into a jaded rake, who begins with a shocking, Swiftian opening line: 'Celia's an artful little slut.