Sublime

of policy, utility or justice? Have republics in practice been less addicted to war than monarchies? Are not the former administered by men as well as the latter? Are there not aversions, predilections, rivalships, and desires of unjust acquisitions, that affect nations as well as kings? Are not popular assemblies frequently subject to the impulses

In both English and Spanish America the price of imperial expansion had been de facto colonial autonomy.37 When Nathaniel Bacon, a wealthy Virginia planter, led a rebellion against the governor in 1676 (accusing him of being soft on the Pamunkey people) and burned down the colony’s capital at Jamestown, there was little or nothing that London could

Dating back to their wartime frustrations with Congress, Washington and Hamilton had shared a common worldview and an expansive faith in executive power. They had seen firsthand how Britain’s well-funded public debt had enabled it to prosecute the war with seemingly limitless resources. Late in the war Washington had blasted the fanciful notion tha

The aftermath of the Whiskey Rebellion led to a dramatic shift in Washington’s cabinet. If the episode augmented Republican fears about Hamilton’s influence, the treasury secretary had a surprise in store for them. On December 1, the same day he returned to Philadelphia, he notified Washington that he planned to relinquish his Treasury post at the

In a draft of his message to South Carolina, he wrote that he was speaking “with the feelings of a father” when he argued that nullification was “incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every