Quotes About Hamilton

Like Ben Franklin, Hamilton was mostly self-taught and probably snatched every spare moment to read. The

Hamilton hit the ground running: the very next day, he arranged a fifty-thousand-dollar loan for the federal government from the Bank of New York. The day after that, a Sunday, he worked all day at the Treasury's new office on Broadway, just south of Trinity Church. He dashed off a plea to the Bank of North America in Philadelphia, asking for another fifty thousand dollars.

Washington replied, "I always knew Colonel Hamilton to be a man of superior talents, but never supposed that he had any knowledge of finance." "He knows everything, sir," Morris replied. "To a mind like his nothing comes amiss.

Such outings were rare during Hamilton's harried first days in office. He had to create a customs service on the spot

Finally, he [John F. Mercer] ridiculed Hamilton as an upstart, a mushroom excrescence, who did not deserve the prominence he had gained.

Without the federal ratio, Hamilton glumly concluded, "no union could possibly have been formed." Indeed, the whole superstructure erected in Philadelphia rested on that unstable, undemocratic foundation.

For that reason, historian Clinton Rossiter insisted that Hamilton's "works and words have been more consequential than those of any other American in shaping the Constitution under which we live.

Like the Reynolds pamphlet, these clandestine messages signal a further deterioration in Hamilton's judgment once he no longer worked under Washington's wise auspices and was left purely to his own devices.

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.

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.

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.

wanted England to heed the peace treaty and relinquish its western forts in the Ohio River valley. The one place where Hamilton deviated from official policy was in applauding Britain's refusal to hand over slaves who had defected during the Revolution. "To have given up these men to their masters, after the assurances of protection held out to them, was impossible," Hamilton told Beckwith.

Throughout his career, Hamilton was outspoken to a fault, while Burr was a man of ingrained secrecy. He gloried in his sphinxlike reputation and once described himself thus in the third person: "He is a grave, silent, strange sort of animal, inasmuch that we know not what to make of him.

Hamilton venerated the law, while Burr often seemed mildly bored and cynical about it. "The law is whatever is successfully argued and plausibly maintained," he stated.

proper handling of government debt would permit America to borrow at affordable interest rates and would also act as a tonic to the economy. Used as loan collateral, government bonds could function as money—and it was the scarcity of money, Hamilton observed, that had crippled the economy and resulted in severe deflation in the value of land. America was a young country rich in opportunity. It lacked only liquid capital, and government debt could supply that gaping deficiency.

Hamilton stole the moral high ground from opponents and established the legal and moral basis for securities trading in America: the notion that securities are freely transferable and that buyers assume all rights to profit or loss in transactions.

Hamilton cast himself as "a warm advocate for limited monarchy and an unfeigned well-wisher to the present royal family.

Fundada em 1746 para contrabalançar a influência da Igreja da Inglaterra, Princeton era um foco de posições presbiterianas e Whigs, pregava a liberdade religiosa e talvez parecesse uma escolha lógica para Hamilton.

By now, monarchy and aristocracy were standard code words for Hamilton and the Federalists.

These horror stories about Hamilton have been regurgitated for two centuries and are now engraved on the memories of historians and readers alike. Unfortunately, these vignettes often cruelly misrepresent Hamilton and have done no small damage to his reputation. Jefferson understood very well the power of laying down a paper trail.

Once Hamilton was initiated into the cause of American liberty, his life acquired an even more headlong pace that never slackened.

Clearly, the U.S. government condoned something that, in modern phraseology, could be termed industrial espionage. Building upon this precedent, Hamilton put the full authority of the Treasury behind the piracy of British trade secrets.

Jefferson recorded the story of Hamilton and Adams singing the praises of the British constitution; of Hamilton supposedly raising a toast to George III at a St. Andrew's Society dinner in New York; and of Hamilton declaring at a dinner party that "there was no stability, no security in any kind of government but a monarchy.

Hamilton's crowded years as treasury secretary scarcely exhaust the epic story of his short life, which was stuffed with high drama. From his illegitimate birth on Nevis to his bloody downfall in Weehawken, Hamilton's life was so tumultuous that only an audacious novelist could have dreamed it up. He embodied an enduring archetype: the obscure immigrant who comes to America, re-creates himself, and succeeds despite a lack of proper birth and breeding.