Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton was an exuberant genius who performed at a fiendish pace and must have produced the maximum number of words that a human being can scratch out in forty-nine years.

“If the sword of oppression be permitted to lop off one limb without opposition, reiterated strokes will soon dismember the whole body.”

Alexander Hamilton never needed to worry about leading a tedious, uneventful life. Drama shadowed his footsteps.

The passions of a revolution are apt to hurry even good men into excesses.

Cornwallis had grown so desperate that he infected blacks with smallpox and forced them to wander toward enemy lines in an attempt to sicken the opposing forces

Tens of thousands of onlookers gaped in amazement as the shattered British troops marched out of Yorktown and, to the tune of an old English ballad, “The World Turned Upside Down,” moved between parallel rows of handsomely outfitted French soldiers and battered, ragged American troops

On the warm morning of October 17, a red-coated drummer boy appeared on the parapet, followed by an officer flapping a white handkerchief

Hamilton was an exuberant genius who performed at a fiendish pace and must have produced the maximum number of words that a human being can scratch out in forty-nine years.

He even composed a romantic sonnet entitled “Answer to the Inquiry Why I Sighed.” Its couplets included these lines: “Before no mortal ever knew / A love like mine so tender, true... No joy unmixed my bosom warms / But when my angel’s in my arms.”

Hosack slit away Hamilton’s bloodstained clothes and examined the dying man. The bullet had fractured a rib on the right side, ripped through Hamilton’s liver and diaphragm, and splintered the second lumbar vertebra, coming to rest in his spine.