He smote the rock of the national resources, and abundant streams of revenue gushed forth. He touched the dead corpse of the Public Credit, and it sprang upon its feet. So reads the inscription on the pedestal of the statue of Alexander Hamilton, in front of the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C. The quote—originally from […]
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Liberal Education and a Free Society
It becomes expedient for promoting the publick happiness that those persons, whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens, and that they should be called to that charge without regard […]
That Time the Devil Beat Daniel Webster
Stephen Girard, merchant, banker, and the richest man in America at the time, died in 1831. Mr. Girard left the vast majority of his fortune to the City of Philadelphia—approximately six million dollars. In Girard’s final action, his will, he tried to say that good citizenship in a republic could be produced without religion. Girard […]
“true and substantial”: The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” – Declaration of Independence (1776). Scholars have long sought to understand what Thomas Jefferson meant when he included the pursuit […]
Countering Challenges to the Constitution
It is characteristic of every age under our Constitution that Americans are prone to see contemporary challenges to the national charter as dire, perhaps unique—or to see the Constitution as urgently in need of being challenged, or changed. Justice Scalia observed, in the Tanner Lectures published as A Matter of Interpretation, that the Constitution’s—any constitution’s—“whole […]
