Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

Jefferson perpetuated a fantasy of America as an agrarian paradise with limited household manufacturing.

Strangely enough for a large slaveholder, he thought that agriculture was egalitarian while manufacturing would produce a class-conscious society.

It is tempting but misleading to think of the Federalists as the patrician party and the Republicans as representing the commoners.

Each side possessed a lurid, distorted view of the other, buttressed by an idealized sense of itself.

Nothing has changed

Then came the capstone of these horrendous measures: the Sedition Act of July 14, which rendered it a crime to speak or publish “any false, scandalous, or malicious” writings against the U.S. government or Congress

The influence of the doctrine of states’ rights, especially in the version promulgated by Jefferson, reverberated right up to the Civil War and beyond.

Of the nine American presidents who owned slaves—a list that includes his fellow Virginians Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—only Washington set free all of his slaves.

Like most people, Hamilton and Adams were preternaturally sensitive to flaws in the other that they themselves possessed.

Fearful of being overshadowed by an expanding Republican slave empire in the west, some New England Federalists began to talk of secession from the union. Such plans

For his temporary hideaway, Burr chose a large slave plantation on St. Simons Island, off the Georgia