De Alexander

In the very hours when he was the most famous and the most flattered, he described himself as most unhappy.

Indeed, the record of his whole life indicates that he never possessed a great thought, or fathered an important measure.

He was, however, the ardent champion of nothing that made for the public good.

The preservation of letters to satisfy an erotic mind is low enough, but deliberately to identify each anonymous or initialled letter with the full name of the writer, for the use of a biographer, is an act of treachery of which few men…

The sorrow became national; speeches, sermons, and poems without number, were composed in his honour; in every State, some county or town received his name; wherever an American lived, an expression of sympathy found record.

Although he had been hated by his enemies, and at times misunderstood by some of his friends, at his death the people, without division, instantly recognised that his life had been passionately devoted to his country, and they paid him the…

Had he been President, he could not have been buried with greater pomp, or with manifestations of more profound sorrow.

If Washington and Lincoln be excepted, it is doubtful if an American was ever more deeply mourned.

Proof of his valour at Monmouth and at Yorktown would no more placate the popular contempt and obloquy sure to follow an avoidance of its demands than would the victory at Waterloo have excused Wellington had he declined to challenge Lord…

But absurd and barbarous as was the custom, it flourished in Christian America, as it did in every other Christian country, in spite of Christian ethics; and it would not permit a proud, sensitive nature, jealous of his honour, especially…

For a hundred years men have regretted and mourned that he did not dare to stand alone against duelling, as he had dared to stand alone for economic and patriotic principles against the clamour of mobs and the malice of enemies.

On the other hand, Lansing's personal character affords some security against pernicious extremes, and, at the same time, renders it certain that his party, already much divided and weakened, will disintegrate more and more, until in a…

It was plain to Hamilton that these timid conspirators wanted a bold chief to lead them into secession, and that since he would have nothing to do with them, they had invoked the aid of Aaron Burr.

Pickering and Griswold could win their game only by bartering their souls; they must invoke the Mephistopheles of politics, Aaron Burr.

His whole soul was enlisted in the cause, and in contending for the rights of the jury and a free press, he considered that he was establishing the surest refuge against oppression.

He believed that the rights and liberties of the people were essentially concerned.

To this point, in his argument for a new trial, Hamilton addressed himself, contending that the English doctrine was at variance with common sense, common justice, and the genius of American institutions.

As well might one compare Offenbach with Mozart as Burr with Hamilton.

When the sceptre passed from Federalist to Republican in 1801, Hamilton gave himself to his profession with renewed zeal, earning fifteen thousand dollars a year, and a reputation as a lawyer scarcely surpassed by Daniel Webster.

But in 1804 Burr found himself without a party, without a machine, and bitterly opposed by Hamilton.

In one of his dramas Schiller mourns over the man who stakes reputation, health, everything upon success--and no success in the end.

Lansing had the instinct, equipment, and training for a chancellor.

Perhaps his nearest approach to a splendid virtue was his stubborn independence.

However unscrupulous and selfish the Clintons and the Livingstons might be, Burr's unprincipled conduct was fixed in the mind of his party, not by Cheetham's indulgence in fancy and inference, but by the well known and well established…

Confidences were revealed, conversations made public, quarrels uncovered, political secrets given up, and the gossip of Council and Legislature churned into a story that pleased every one.