Quotes About Politics

The people had registered their dismay with a long litany of unpopular Federalist actions: the Jay Treaty, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the truculent policy toward France, the vast army being formed under Hamilton and the taxes levied to support it. The 1800 elections revealed, for the first time, the powerful centrist pull of American politics—the electorate's tendency to rein in anything perceived as extreme.

If Rutgers v. Waddington made Hamilton a controversial figure in city politics in 1784, the founding of the Bank of New York cast him in a more conciliatory role. The creation of New York's first bank was a formative moment in the city's rise as a world financial center. Banking was still a new phenomenon in America.

The certificate of deposit was more difficult to trace than a check and was the instrument of choice for political bribery.

On July 26, the House narrowly passed the assumption bill.

Among the well-intentioned men who were woefully backward in finance, if forward-looking in politics, were Hamilton's three most savage critics of the 1790s: Jefferson, Madison, and Adams. These founders adhered to a static, archaic worldview that scorned banks, credit, and stock markets. From this perspective, Hamilton was the progressive figure of the era, his critics the conservatives.

When the sixty-nine electors met on February 4, 1789, they voted unanimously for Washington, who became the first president, and cast only thirty-four ballots for Adams, who came in second and thus became vice president.

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

These selfless warriors of the Revolution and sages of the Constitutional Convention had been forced to descend from their Olympian heights and adjust to a rougher world of everyday politics, where they cultivated their own interests and tried to capitalize on their former glory. In consequence, the founding fathers all appear to us in two guises: as both sublime and ordinary, selfless and selfish, heroic and humdrum

Far more telling was how he became a divisive issue among Republicans and helped to split the party in 1912 over several issues. One

John Adams said that if Washington "was not the greatest president, he was the best actor of the presidency we have ever had.

The Negro will disappear from the field of national politics...Henceforth the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him. (The Nation, progressive periodical of our day, published demeaning, racist opinions of Black Americans during Reconstruction (ie pg. 854 softcover)

Hamilton wanted the votes of individual members recorded. Instead, the convention chose to proceed on a one-state, one-vote basis, which meant that Hamilton's vote would likely be nullified by his two fellow delegates.

This early experience made Grant tend to view war as a hard-luck saga of talented, professional soldiers betrayed by political opportunists plotting back in Washington.

42 The government was obviously withdrawing its support.

In yet another political fracas, Coleman received a caning that left him paralyzed from the waist down.

Hamilton wanted to restrain abusive majorities and minorities.

A man of irreproachable integrity, Hamilton severed all outside sources of income while in office, something that neither Washington nor Jefferson nor Madison dared to do.

Soon after being sworn in as president, John Adams learned that the Directory, the five-member council now ruling France, had expelled the new American minister, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and promulgated belligerent new orders against America's merchant marine. By spring, the French had seized more than three hundred American vessels.

Mr. Adams is vain, suspicious, and stubborn, of an excessive self-regard, taking counsel with nobody."9 Jefferson predicted to Létombe that Adams would last only one term and urged the French to invade England.

While Hamilton endeared himself to Washington in this first election, he also antagonized John Adams, a man with an encyclopedic memory for slights.

In January 1803, a grand jury in Columbia County, New York, indicted Harry Croswell for seditious libel against President Jefferson.

rancor ushered in a golden age of literary assassination in American politics. No etiquette had yet evolved to define the legitimate boundaries of dissent.

When the XYZ papers were published, they proved a bonanza for the Federalists, and John Adams attained the zenith of his popularity as president.

I want to see Hamilton.