Joseph J. Ellis

Some models of self-control are able to achieve their serenity easily because the soul fires never burn brightly to begin with.

Burr had the dark and severe coloring of his Edwards ancestry, with black hair receding from the forehead and dark brown, almost black, eyes that suggested a cross between an eagle and a raven. Hamilton had a light peaches and cream complexion with violet-blue eyes and auburn-red hair, all of which came together to suggest an animated beam of light to Burr__ somewhat stationary shadow.

Lincoln once said that America was founded on a proposition that was written by Jefferson in 1776. We are really founded on an argument about what that proposition means.

Because he could not afford to fail, he could not afford to trust.

And the only thing to do with a sin is to confess, do penance and then, after some kind of decent interval, ask for forgiveness.

He was responsible for administering an army that lacked time-tested procedures and routinized policies, so every decision became an improvisational act.

Washington not only fit the bill physically, he was also almost perfect psychologically, so comfortable with his superiority that he felt no need to explain himself. (As a young man during the French and Indian war he had been more outspoken, but he learned from experience to allow his sheer presence to speak for itself.) While less confident men blathered on, he remained silent, thereby making himself a vessel into which admirers for their fondest convictions, becoming a kind of receptacle for diverse aspirations that magically came together in one man.

The strategic center of the rebellion was not a place _ not New York, Philadelphia, not the Hudson corridor _ but the Continental Army itself.

Adams had gone to Harvard, Jefferson to William and Mary. Washington had gone to war.

Contemporaries of Alexander Hamilton noticed "his conspicuous sense of self-possession, his unique combination of serenity and energy.

Antislavery idealists might prefer to live in some better world, which like all such places was too good to be true. The American nation in 1790, however, was a real world, laden with legacies like slavery, and therefore too true to be good.

It was no accident that the beau ideal of his (John Adams') political philosophy was balance, since he projected onto the world the conflicting passions he felt inside himself and regarded government as the balancing mechanism that prevented those factions and furies from spending out of control.

I am not a Federalist,_ he declared in 1789, __ecause I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever._ If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

in time to come be shaped by the human mind._ Asked

For Madison, on the other hand, __ Public Debt is a Public curse,_ and __n a Representative Government greater than in any other._26

The first symptom of the trouble appeared when Madison studied Hamilton__ proposal for the funding of the domestic debt. On the one hand, Hamilton__ recommendation looked straightforward: All citizens who owned government securities should be reimbursed at par__hat is, the full value of the government__ original promise. But many original holders of the securities, mainly veterans of the American Revolution who had received them as pay for their service in the war, had then sold them at a fraction of their original value to speculators. What__ more, the release of Hamilton__ plan produced...

It took him (Washington) more than a year to gain control over his own aggressive instincts.

Clinton had displayed his lifelong tendency to make enemies of all his superiors, who never seemed to appreciate his advice as much as he thought it deserved.