“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Rather than adjust his expectations in the face of disappointment, he (Jefferson) tended to bury them deeper inside himself and regard the disjunction between his ideals and the worldly imperfections as the world's problems rather than his own.”