The fledgling and ragtag American army turned its state into a semi-plausible advantage, encouraging enlistees to wear their own “hunting shirts” to build on the reputation of frontier marksmen.

It was no accident that the beau ideal of his (John Adams’) political philosophy was balance, since he projected onto the world the conflicting passions he felt inside himself and regarded government as the balancing...

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...

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...

The strategic center of the rebellion was not a place – not New York, Philadelphia, not the Hudson corridor – but the Continental Army itself.

The Constitution was intended less to resolve arguments than to make argument itself the solution.

in a Representative Government greater than in any other.”26

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...

Contemporaries of Alexander Hamilton noticed “his conspicuous sense of self-possession, his unique combination of serenity and energy.

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

Washington not only fit the bill physically, he was also almost perfect psychologically, so comfortable with his superiority that he felt no need to explain himself. (As a young man during the French and Indian...

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...

(John) Adams acknowledged that he had made himself obnoxious to many of his colleagues, who regarded him as a one-man bonfire of the vanities. This never troubled Adams, who in his more contrarian moods claimed...

If you knew how the journey was going to end, you could afford to be patient along the path.

His (Washington’s) apparent paralysis was the result of balancing two imperatives: his reputation against the survival of the Continental Army.

If he (John Adams) could not control events, he could at least record them for posterity – perhaps the ultimate form of control.

He was responsible for administering an army that lacked time-tested procedures and routinized policies, so every decision became an improvisational act.

They were trying to orchestrate a revolution, which almost by definition generated a sense of collective trauma that defied any semblance of coherence and control. If we wish to rediscover the psychological context of the...

Some models of self-control are able to achieve their serenity easily because the soul fires never burn brightly to begin with.

It took him (Washington) more than a year to gain control over his own aggressive instincts.

Because he could not afford to fail, he could not afford to trust.

p. 274 …his trademark decision to surrender power as commander in chief and then president, was not…a sign that he had conquered his ambitions, but rather that he fully realized that all ambitions were inherently...

Adams had gone to Harvard, Jefferson to William and Mary. Washington had gone to war.

One-year enlistment had proven problematic since the troops were scheduled to rotate out of the army just when they had begun to internalize the discipline of military service and became reliable soldiers.

Clinton had displayed his lifelong tendency to make enemies of all his superiors, who never seemed to appreciate his advice as much as he thought it deserved.

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.