Free Republic

NEW YORK — Two hundred and eighty tons of American history were on the move Saturday in Harlem. The home of Alexander Hamilton, who conceived the country's banking system and was killed in a duel with a political rival, rolled inch by inch down a Harlem hillside to its new location overlooking a park. "This was the only home Hamilton ever owned," said Steve Laise, a National Park Service official dressed in a vest, tie and pants typical of the 1800's. "It represented the consummation of Hamilton's lifelong dream — a successful social position for a man who came to...

MARTINEZ -- Alexander Hamilton, who was 18 when he murdered Pittsburg police Officer Larry Lasater, should die by execution, a jury recommended today. The Contra Costa County jury that heard evidence over two weeks in Hamilton's penalty trial reached its verdict in less than a day of deliberations. The jurors convicted Hamilton and his co-defendant, 20-year-old Andrew Moffett, last month of murder, robbery and special circumstances. The duo robbed a Pittsburg Raley's supermarket and a Wells Fargo Bank branch inside the store on April 23. Hamilton shot 35-year-old Officer Larry Lasater as the officer pursued him on the De Anza...

"Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants." -- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 1, 27 October 1787) "The reformation was preceded by the discovery of America, as if the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted in future years, when home should afford neither friendship nor safety." -- Thomas Paine (Common Sense, 1776) “The prevailing spirit of the present age seems to be the spirit of skepticism and captiousness, of suspicion and distrust in private...

When all government, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the Center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated. -- Thomas Jefferson, 1821 Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain, quoted in A.B. Paine's Mark Twain: A Biography (Harper, 1912, Vol. 2, page 724). The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop. --...

Today is Alexander Hamilton’s 250th birthday. Unless, of course, it’s his 252nd. He claimed to have been born in 1757, but there is considerable nearly contemporary evidence that he was actually born in 1755. But there is no argument that he was not yet 50 when he died at the hands of Aaron Burr in 1804. And there is no argument that despite his brief life he had more influence on the future of the United States than all but a very, very few of the Founding Fathers. Hamilton was not like the other Founding Fathers. He was the only...

The following is todays Founders' Daily Quote from the Patriot Post "[T]he present Constitution is the standard to which we are to cling. Under its banners, bona fide must we combat our political foes - rejecting all changes but through the channel itself provides for amendments." -- Alexander Hamilton (letter to James Bayard, April 1802) Reference: Selected Writings and Speeches of Alexander Hamilton,Frisch, ed. (511)

Last week US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, in Detroit, Michigan, ruled that the National Security Agency’s overseas communications intercept program was unconstitutional. This is tied for the worst decision I’ve ever read, in 36 years as a member of the bar, both federal and state. Dozens of pundits have already written about aspects of her decision that are egregiously wrong. Even the august New York Times, which opposes the NSA program and favors Judge Taylor’s result, still has called her opinion “badly reasoned.” It’s important that lawyers, legal writers, and experienced laymen be able to recognize a thoroughly incompetent...

Peering into spaces that have not seen the light of day for two centuries, architectural archaeologists are dissecting Alexander Hamilton’s country home, the Grange, to figure out how to take it apart and put it back together again. The National Park Service plans to move the Hamilton Grange National Memorial from Convent Avenue and 141st Street, where it is so boxed in by neighboring buildings that two of its porches had to be cut off, to St. Nicholas Park, about 300 feet to the southeast. There, it can be reassembled in a form that Hamilton would have recognized, with porches...

~Clip~ Think of the most famous duel in American history: The shooting of Alexander Hamilton by a pistol-wielding Aaron Burr, vice president to Thomas Jefferson, on the New Jersey banks of the Hudson River in 1804. Hamilton died the next day. Burr and Hamilton had a long-standing political rivalry, and Hamilton made no secret of his distrust for Burr when Burr, who had narrowly missed beating Jefferson, ran for governor of New York in early 1804. When Burr got wind of a newspaper article that reported Hamilton had a "despicable opinion" of him, he challenged Hamilton to a duel near...

Perhaps this duel is the most famous in history. Its results certainly meant the end of both Hamilton and Burr. They carried Hamilton from the field and the next day he died. Burr lived for years, but the shadow of his own doom was ever before him. It is reported that late in life he observed that, had he been wiser, he would have known that there was room enough in the world for both Hamilton and himself. Had Hamilton been equally wise, he would have known that calumnies and lies bring forth but bitter fruit. When the news of...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version January 13, 2006, 10:53 a.m. Vigilance & Responsibility Alexander Hamilton’s strategic sobriety. This past week (January 11) marked the 251st anniversary of the birth of Alexander Hamilton, whom Richard Brookhiser described as the greatest of the Founders except for George Washington. Hamilton's detractors, beginning with Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams did not deny his greatness, but feared his motives. They described him as a lover of monarchy whose goal was to corrupt the republican virtue of the American people by means of his economic schemes. Since then, many...

FEDERALIST No. 21 Other Defects of the Present Confederation By Alexander Hamilton for the Independent Journal To the People of the State of New York: HAVING in the three last numbers taken a summary review of the principal circumstances and events which have depicted the genius and fate of other confederate governments, I shall now proceed in the enumeration of the most important of those defects which have hitherto disappointed our hopes from the system established among ourselves. To form a safe and satisfactory judgment of the proper remedy, it is absolutely necessary that we should be well acquainted with...

Imagine if Bill Clinton had nominated his personal attorney and White House counsel to a post on the U.S. Supreme Court. Somehow, I can't imagine my conservative friends supporting the nominee – particularly if there were questions about controversial documents being destroyed that might actually shed light on scandals of the past. The stunning series of articles by WND columnist Jerome Corsi, raising serious and nagging questions about Harriet Miers' role as chairman of the Texas Lottery Commission and the cover-up of the way that story intersects with George W. Bush's National Guard service, points up why this kind of...

Starting this year, every educational institution receiving federal aid must teach about the U.S. Constitution on the September 17 anniversary of its signing (September 16 in 2005...) The requirement is ironic, given that it came from the Senate's leading Constitutional scholar, yet clearly conflicts with the Constitution, and on many grounds. Last year, Senator Robert Byrd (D.-W.Va.) inserted it into a spending bill packed with pork that was blatantly inconsistent with Americans' general welfare, which is the Constitution's rationale. There is nothing in the document that permits the federal government to tell local schools what they can and cannot teach....

Our nation's founders were firmly convinced that an independent judiciary was essential to the free society they were hoping to create. In Federalist 78, for instance, Alexander Hamilton elaborated at length on Montesquieu's dictum, "There is no liberty, if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers," explaining (among other things) why the Constitution's provision of life tenure for judges was particularly appropriate. Hamilton maintained that, while in individual cases judges might act oppressively, the overall tendency of an independent judiciary would be to protect rather than subvert our freedoms, "The general liberty of the...

When I was a boy my family had a Time-Life book on the mind which featured a chart of the presumed IQs of famous dead men. Goethe, as I recall, led the pack, at 210. But the Founding Fathers did very well: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington all scored over 150. As the Fourth of July approaches, we'd do well to remember that the Founders were a smart lot, with few gentleman's C's among them. Yet they didn't know everything. They were strongest in law, political philosophy and history--all essential subjects for revolutionaries and statesmen. But another subject,...

WAYNE - Alexander Hamilton was no stranger to what is now Passaic County. He stood alongside George Washington, acting as his aide at the Dey Mansion in Wayne during the Revolutionary War. And he played a major role in establishing Paterson as one of the country's early industrial centers. Now the county has another reminder of Hamilton's legacy: a legal decision penned by him more than 200 years ago. The document belonged to the Hamilton Club, a social club that formerly met in Paterson until the early 1990s. Last week the club's president, Walter Hunziker, presented it to the county...

CHESTERTOWN, Md. -- Historian Ron Chernow received the inaugural $50,000 George Washington Book Prize, the nation's largest literary prize for early American history. Chernow was honored Saturday for his biography "Alexander Hamilton," a look at the co-author of The Federalist Papers and the nation's first Secretary of the Treasury. The prize . . . recognizes books about George Washington or the founding era. Ted Widmer, director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College, said Chernow's book brings "new life to an often-overlooked founder."

"Gettin' chilly down in Philly..." This interactive flash of the Founding Fathers is hilarious! Submitted for your enjoyment... http://www.jibjab.com/32.html

To the People of the State of New York: THE President is ``to NOMINATE, and, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States whose appointments are not otherwise provided for in the Constitution. But the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers as they think proper, in the President alone, or in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments. The President shall have power to fill up ALL VACANCIES which...