More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 5 - January 15, 2022
Hamilton was shot and killed in a duel with Aaron Burr,
Hamilton’s many indiscretions,
Jefferson’s popularity grew steadily. In the election of 1804 he overwhelmed the Federalist opposition, taking fifteen of seventeen states, including even Massachusetts, for 162 electoral votes to just 14 for the Federalist candidate, Charles Pinckney.
Burr’s efforts to somehow establish an independent nation in the Ohio River Valley, or perhaps attack into Mexican territory, or maybe both.
“One searches Burr’s papers in vain for a single thoughtful letter about political philosophy or government,” Wood wrote. He was “immune to the ideology and values of the Revolution,” especially its “classical conception of leadership.”66 Jefferson took to calling him “our Cataline.”
Jeffersonian victory over the Federalists.
Madison nowadays is regarded as having been an uncertain president who led the country into the largely unnecessary War of 1812.
The republic had built into it a fatal contradiction: It was founded on a faith in freedom yet on the fact of slavery.
“democrat” was not actually a Greek word at all. Rather, he joked in a Federalist magazine, it had been discovered to be a word used by a First Peoples tribe in Virginia that meant “a great tobacco planter, who had herds of black slaves.”1 The essential principle of being a democrat, he added rather baldly, was “sexual connection with all women—matrimonial alliances with none.”
Because of slavery, fears of a civil war bubbled constantly under the surface.
Continuing and irresolvable conflict over whether slavery would be permitted in the nation’s new lands, the area acquired during Jefferson’s presidency, would spark the bloodiest event in American history, the Civil War.
Jefferson loved the idea of a “Republic,” which he saw as a system in which power was held and exercised by the people.
Plato’s reputation had been kept alive “chiefly by the adoption & incorporation of his whimsies into the body of artificial Christianity.”
Jefferson had been influenced far more by the philosophers of the ancient world and of the Enlightenment than he had been by Christian beliefs.
Library of Congress, which had been burned by British forces during the War of 1812,
the deal to allow Missouri in as a slave state, balanced with making Maine a state separate from Massachusetts,
line extending westward from the northern border of Tennessee, above which slavery would not be permitted.
this Missouri Compromise.
new Confederacy, priding itself on its warrior skills, emerged to challenge the more urban North.
On July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration, Adams and Jefferson both died.
“happy old age that Cicero has so touchingly and beautifully described.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, an observant young Frenchman sympathetic to the American experiment, traveled widely in the United States.
the disappointments of the Age of Reason—most notably, the butchery of the French Revolution—led
In 1828, America ousted John Quincy Adams and elected its first president from the trans-Appalachian states, Andrew Jackson of Tennessee.
Jackson was an anti-intellectual who knew what he didn’t like, which included secessionists.
American politics continued to develop along the partisan lines foreseen by James Madison.
political parties are inseparable from free government, and that in many and material respects they are very useful to the country. . . . The disposition to abuse power, so deeply planted in the human heart, can by no other means be more effectually checked.
contentious debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act—that is, over the future of slavery in new states—Michael
In 1817, there were 17 steamboats operating on “western” rivers. By 1855, there were 727,
What the steamboat began, the railroad and telegraph finished.
our national political gridlock sometimes is not a bug but a feature.
