Alexander Hamilton on Cato: “Washington had his favorite play, Addison’s Cato, the story of a self-sacrificing Roman statesman, staged at Valley Forge to buck up his weary men.”
Alexander Hamilton on Political Discourses: “Hamilton brushed up on money matters and had Colonel Timothy Pickering send him some primers: David Hume’s Political Discourses, tracts written by the English clergyman and polemicist Richard Price, and his all-purpose crib, Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce.”
Alexander Hamilton on Commentaries on the Laws of England: “Particularly influential were Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries, first published in America ten years earlier, which endowed British law with a more systematic coherence.”
Alexander Hamilton on Iliad: “He ended one “Monitor” essay with a quote from Pope’s Iliad that begins: “Death is the worst, a fate which all must try...””
Alexander Hamilton on Tristram Shandy: “While reading the scene in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in which the tenderhearted Uncle Toby picks up a fly and delicately places it outside a window instead of killing it, Burr is said to have remarked...”
Alexander Hamilton on The Stand: “In writing “The Stand,” Hamilton took dead aim against Republicans who had become apologists for French misbehavior.”
Alexander Hamilton on Common Sense: “Thomas Paine, who had arrived in Philadelphia two years earlier, provided Hamilton with a perfect model when he anonymously published Common Sense.”
Alexander Hamilton on Rights of Man: “Their relationship had foundered in 1791 when Jefferson lauded The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine by drawing an invidious contrast to the “political heresies which have sprung up among us.””
Alexander Hamilton on The Wealth of Nations: “Displaying an intimate familiarity with Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Hamilton demonstrated that manufacturing, no less than agriculture, could increase productivity.”