Joseph J. Ellis

“God was not in the details for Jefferson; he was in the sky and stars.”

“In Jefferson's mind great historical leaps forward were almost always the product of a purging, which freed societies from the accumulated debris of the past and thereby allowed the previously obstructed natural forces to flow forward into the future. Simplicity and austerity, not equality or individualism, were the messages of his inaugural march. It was a minimalist statement about a purging of excess and a recovery of essence.”

“Jefferson appeared to his enemies as an American version of Candide; Hamilton as an American Machiavelli.”

“Antislavery idealists might prefer to live in some better world, which like all such places was too good to be true. The American nation in 1790, however, was a real world, laden with legacies like slavery, and therefore too true to be good.”

“In a very real sense, we are complicitous in their achievement, since we are the audience for which they were performing; knowing we would be watching helped to keep them on their best behavior.”

“But if insecurity was the primal source of Hamilton's incredibly energy, one would have to conclude that providence had conspired to produce at the most opportune moment perhaps the most creative liability in American history.”

“Like the classic it has become, the Farewell Address has demonstrated the capacity to assume different shapes in different eras, to change color, if you will, in varying shades of light.”

“In addition, the most reliable and recent studies of African tribal culture demonstrated that slavery was a long-standing custom among the Africans themselves, so enslaved Africans in America were simply experiencing a condition here that they would otherwise experience, probably in more oppressive fashion, in their mother country.”

“Lincoln once said that America was founded on a proposition that was written by Jefferson in 1776. We are really founded on an argument about what that proposition means.”

“in time to come be shaped by the human mind.” Asked”

“I am not a Federalist,” he declared in 1789, “because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever.… If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”

“For Madison, on the other hand, “a Public Debt is a Public curse,” and “in a Representative Government greater than in any other.”26”

“The first symptom of the trouble appeared when Madison studied Hamilton’s proposal for the funding of the domestic debt. On the one hand, Hamilton’s recommendation looked straightforward: All citizens who owned government securities should be reimbursed at par—that is, the full value of the government’s original promise. But many original holders of the securities, mainly veterans of the American Revolution who had received them as pay for their service in the war, had then sold them at a fraction of their original value to speculators. What’s more, the release of Hamilton’s plan produced...”

“Burr had the dark and severe coloring of his Edwards ancestry, with black hair receding from the forehead and dark brown, almost black, eyes that suggested a cross between an eagle and a raven. Hamilton had a light peaches and cream complexion with violet-blue eyes and auburn-red hair, all of which came together to suggest an animated beam of light to Burr’s somewhat stationary shadow.”

“[quoting someone else] the American constitution is a document designed by geniuses to be eventually interpreted by idiots”

“One of the petitioners, an infamous do-gooder of uncertain sanity named Warner Mifflin, had actually acknowledged that his antislavery vision came to him after he was struck by lightning in a thunderstorm.”

“James Jackson actually made menacing faces at the Quakers in the gallery, calling them outright lunatics, then launched into a tirade so emotional and incoherent that reporters in the audience had difficulty recording his words.”

“All well and good, but for our purposes these otherwise-valuable insights are mere subplots almost designed to carry us down side trails while blithely humming a tune about the rough equivalence of forests and trees.”