Quotes About Hamilton

Noah Webster contended that Hamilton's "ambition, pride, and overbearing temper" had destined him "to be the evil genius of this country.

One story, perhaps apocryphal, claims that when Hamilton was asked why the framers omitted the word God from the Constitution, he replied, "We forgot.

For anyone studying Hamilton's pay book, it would come as no surprise that he would someday emerge as a first-rate constitutional scholar, an unsurpassed treasury secretary, and the protagonist of the first great sex scandal in American political history.

This thirty-five-page essay had been written in two or three weeks by Hamilton, as he entered the fray with all the grandiloquence and learning at his disposal. He showed himself proficient at elegant insults, an essential literary talent at the time, and possessing a precocious knowledge of history, philosophy, politics, economics, and law. In retrospect, it was clear that he had found his calling as a fearless, swashbuckling intellectual warrior who excelled in bare-knuckled controversy.

Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton never saw the creation of America as a magical leap across a chasm to an entirely new landscape, and he always thought the New World had much to learn from the Old.

This falling-out was to be more than personal, for the rift between Hamilton and Madison precipitated the start of the two-party system in America. The funding debate shattered the short-lived political consensus that had ushered in the new government. For the next five years, the political spectrum in America was defined by whether people endorsed or opposed Alexander Hamilton's programs.

Thus, Hamilton triumphed posthumously over Burr, converting the latter's victory at Weehawken into his political coup de grâce. Burr's reputation perished along with Hamilton, exactly as Hamilton had anticipated.

Where Jefferson dismissed these wholesale killings as regrettable but necessary sacrifices to freedom, Hamilton was traumatized by them. The burgeoning atheism of the French Revolution reawakened in him religious feelings that had lain dormant since King's College days.

Robert Troup said that Hamilton rejected fees if they were larger than he thought warranted and generally favored arbitration or amicable settlements in lieu of lawsuits.

If Hamilton had shot first, he had wasted his fire, exactly as foretold. And if Burr had fired first, as Pendleton alleged, then Hamilton seems to have squeezed the trigger in a reflexive spasm of agony and shot involuntarily into the trees. In neither scenario did Hamilton aim his gun at Aaron Burr.

Of the two policies that Hamilton wished to promote—the federal assumption of state debt and the selection of New York as the capital—assumption was incomparably more important to him. It was the most effective and irrevocable way to yoke the states together into a permanent union.

Thomas Paine, who had arrived in Philadelphia two years earlier, provided Hamilton with a perfect model when he anonymously published Common Sense. The onetime corset maker and excise officer issued a resounding call for American independence that sold a stupendous 120,000 copies by year's end.

After Seabury rebutted "A Full Vindication," Hamilton struck back with "The Farmer Refuted," an eighty-page tour de force that Rivington brought out on February 23, 1775.

For Hamilton, the Jay Treaty victory represented the culmination of his work with Washington. By settling all outstanding issues left over from the Revolution, the treaty removed the last impediments to improved relations with England and promised sustained prosperity.

In his essays on the need for executive-branch vigor, Hamilton continually invoked the king of England as an example of what should be avoided, especially the monarch's lack of accountability. Every president "ought to be personally responsible for his behaviour in office.

Hamilton saw America's essential nature being forged in the throes of battle, and that made honest action imperative.

Actually, Hamilton's exploding cannon may have killed as many as six of his men and wounded four or five others. Some critics blamed inadequate training for the mishap, but the general dissipation of troops addicted to whoring and drinking was more likely to blame.

More than anyone else, the omnipresent Hamilton galvanized, inspired, and scandalized the newborn nation, serving as a flash point for pent-up conflicts of class, geography, race, religion, and ideology. His contemporaries often seemed defined by how they reacted to the political gauntlets that he threw down repeatedly with such defiant panache.

Hamilton has often been extolled as the exponent of a rational foreign policy based on cool calculations of national self-interest. But his April 14 letter expressed his unswerving conviction that nations, transported by strong emotion, often miscalculate their interests: "Wars oftener proceed from angry and perverse passions than from cool calculations of interest.

Hamilton lacked the temperament of a true-blue revolutionary. He saw too clearly that greater freedom could lead to greater disorder and, by a dangerous dialectic, back to a loss of freedom. Hamilton's lifelong task was to try to straddle and resolve this contradiction and to balance liberty and order.

At the same time, the mounting fear of Hamilton among Jefferson, Madison, and their supporters cohered into an organized opposition that began to call itself Republican. Alluding to the ancient Roman republic, this was also a clever label, insinuating that Federalists were not real republicans and hence must be monarchists. Often Baptists and Methodists, Republicans drew their strength from rich southern planters and small farmers.

Hamilton alone seemed resigned as the end neared. At one point, speaking of politics, he said, "If they break this union, they will break my heart."69 He could have left no more fitting political epitaph.

Since Hamilton's abiding literary sin was prolixity, the time and length constraints imposed by The Federalist may have given a salutary concision to his writing.

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.