First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

by Thomas E. Ricks

A month after Washington sent that letter, Hamilton wrote privately about the nakedly ambitious Aaron Burr (Princeton, 1772), then a senator from New York, that “if we have an embryo-Cæsar in the United States ’tis Burr.”35 There were few worse insults in eighteenth-century America.