Sublime

Washington also received a valuable education in finance from Robert Morris, who had raised money for the Continental cause on his own credit. Because the states had refused to collect their quota of taxes, Morris couldn’t service the sizable debt raised to finance the war. He warned that creditors “who trusted us in the hour of distress are

During Moses’ long reign as State Parks Council chairman, the plaques previously placed in Niagara State Park by Wilcox’s friends to commemorate the contributions to the park made by him and the other old Niagara commissioners were systematically removed—to be replaced with plaques bearing Moses’ name. When the parkway along the Niagara gorge was

The news of Lafayette’s feat came as Washington was being prodded to take a public stand on abolishing slavery. Before the war it had required an act of the royal governor and his council to free a slave. Then in 1782 a new law gave masters permission to free their own slaves, and hundreds manumitted at least a few. Influenced by the Revolution,

Three months later, on February 23, 1936, Police Chief Riggs was assassinated on his way to El Escambrón. The two Nationalists who shot him, Hiram Rosado and Elías Beauchamp, were arrested, beaten for an hour, then executed in a San Juan police station.

Princeton University’s first graduate student, future president James Madison, brought one slave with him to campus and another to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The latter he had to free: all that talk of liberty had ruined him, a poison to the rest of the plantation. He took the former home with him.

Mandeville’s thesis shocked his initial audience (as he intended it to), but it went on to convince almost all the great economists and political thinkers of the eighteenth century and beyond. In his essay Of Luxury (1752), Hume repeated the Mandevilleian argument in favour of the pursuit of riches and of expenditure on superfluous goods on the

Rounding out the group were Thomas Nelson, Jr., son of the late Virginia governor, and Washington’s young nephew Robert Lewis, who had escorted his aunt Martha to New York. Among members of Congress, James Madison stood in a class by himself in his advisory capacity to Washington. When he ran for Congress, Madison had consulted Washington about how