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the majority of the six hundred workers who erected the White House and the Capitol were slaves whose wages were garnisheed by their masters.
“‘Well Gallatin, what have you found?’ [Jefferson asked]. I answered: ‘I have found the most perfect system ever formed. Any change that should be made in it would injure it. Hamilton made no blunders, committed no frauds. He did nothing wrong.’
Jefferson wanted to abolish the fourteen-year naturalization period for immigrants, and Hamilton insinuated that foreigners, not real Americans, had voted the Virginian into office; he predicted that “the influx of foreigners” would “change and corrupt the national spirit.”
Republicans might be “wretched impostors” with “honeyed lips and guileful hearts,” they had won the public’s affection.5 How could this be? Hamilton thought that Republicans appealed to emotion, while Federalists relied too much on reason.
Paley. “I have examined carefully the evidence of the Christian religion,” he told one friend, “and if I was sitting as a juror upon its authenticity, I should rather abruptly give my verdict in its favor.”
John Adams implied that he thought the story was true, while conceding that “there was not a planter in Virginia who could not reckon among his slaves a number of his children.”
by the end of his presidency he was squawking about the newspapers’ “abandoned prostitution to falsehood.”12
The secession movement would provide no “relief to our real disease, which is democracy”—by which he meant unrestrained, disruptive popular rule.14
As the two men contemplated eternity, Hamilton feared for America’s future and the salvation of the union, while Burr worried about incriminating letters he had written to his mistresses, urging Theodosia to “burn all such as . . . would injure any person.
This image of Hamilton sleeping with his arms wrapped around an orphaned youth during his last night on earth is inexpressibly poignant
Morris and more than one hundred other subscribers poured in about eighty thousand dollars,
