Sublime

In the late 1860s the president of the Dominican Republic signaled that he would welcome the U.S. purchase of his country. President Ulysses S. Grant was eager for the deal—the Dominican Republic was, after all, prime sugar and coffee real estate. Yet even with a rich country served up on a plate, even at the urging of a popular war-hero president

Jefferson was one of the richest men in the new United States. He had a 5,000-acre plantation worked by hundreds of slaves, a splendid mansion in Virginia that he had designed himself, one of the biggest wine collections in America, and one of the greatest private libraries in the world — it became the foundation of the Library of Congress. But des

Although the vast country which we have been describing was inhabited by many indigenous tribes, it may justly be said at the time of its discovery by Europeans to have formed one great desert. The Indians occupied without possessing it.

Roosevelt was just getting started. In 1903 the Dominican Republic’s finances collapsed. Its president, Carlos Morales, intimated that he would welcome annexation by the United States—the second time that country had offered itself up. A decade earlier, Roosevelt would have jumped at Morales’s offer. But now, exhausted by the Philippine War, he was

In the words of Hans Koning, “There now began a reign of terror in Hispaniola.” Spaniards hunted American Indians for sport and murdered them for dog food. Columbus, upset because he could not locate the gold he was certain was on the island, set up a tribute system. Ferdinand Columbus described how it worked: [The Indians] all promised to pay trib

A key argument in Lincoln’s case against slavery was that it supported an aristocracy determined to undermine America’s promise that “the humblest man [has] an equal chance to get rich with everyone else.”