Henry Cabot Lodge: “He was also a man of the strongest passions in every way, but he dominated them; they never ruled him.”

He repeatedly referred to the United States, even before the close of the war, as an infant empire, and he saw before any one else the destined growth of the country.

No man of that time, with the exception of Hamilton, ever grasped and realized as he did the imperial future which stretched before the United States.

The other idea which had grown in his mind during the weary siege was that the Tories were thoroughly dangerous and deserved scant mercy.

He flung aside the suggestion of supreme power, not simply as dishonorable and unpatriotic, but because such a result would have defeated the one great and noble object at which he aimed.