Aaron Lewis Quotes

So intense was the partisanship of the day, so much did the Federalists hate and fear Jefferson, that they were ready to turn the country over to Aaron Burr. Had they succeeded and made Burr the president, there would almost certainly be no republic today. Fortunately for all, Hamilton was smart enough and honest enough to realize that Jefferson was the lesser evil. He used his influence to break the deadlock. On the thirty-sixth ballot, February 17, 1801, Jefferson was chosen president and Burr was elected vice-president. It was an age marked by

Vice-President Aaron Burr was full of plots and schemes and conspiracies to break the west loose from the United States and form a new nation. Jefferson

shelf F and began looking for book number ten. But there were only nine books. “Jake!” his mom’s voice called up the stairs. “We’ve got to go!” “Okay, I’ll be right down.” He bent down, picked up book number 9, and opened it to the title page—The Journals of Lewis and Clark. There was nothing special about it. Most of the books were history books like this one. Jake sat down on the floor and placed it back on the shelf. That’s when something unusual caught his attention—faint writing on the back panel of the bookcase behind the books on shelf F. He laid down on his belly to examine it. Though he could barely

Sometime in March 1804, Hamilton dined in Albany at the home of Judge John Tayler, a Republican merchant and former state assemblyman who was working for the election of Morgan Lewis. Both Judge Tayler and Hamilton expressed their dread at having Aaron Burr as governor. “You can have no conception of the exertions that are [being made] for Burr,” Tayler had told De Witt Clinton. “Every artifice that can be devised is used to promote his cause.”1 This private dinner on State Street triggered a chain of events that led inexorably to Hamilton’s duel with Burr. Present at Tayler’s table was Dr. Charles D. Cooper, a physician who had married Tayler’s adopted daughter.

the Federalist caucus decided to back Burr. In other words, the Federalists would not accept the outcome of the election, in which the people’s choice of Jefferson was clear. So intense was the partisanship of the day, so much did the Federalists hate and fear Jefferson, that they were ready to turn the country over to Aaron Burr. Had they succeeded and made Burr the president, there would almost certainly be no republic today.

The point was simply that people had to wake up before they could be expected to embrace full citizenship. And it seemed better to emphasize a subtle reshaping of consciousness than dramatic political action, for Mumford shared Melville’s distrust of revolutions: “Revolution in the light of the constant miscarriage of every revolution from 1789 onward is nothing more than the form through which a decadent civilization commits suicide.” Basically, the first order of business was to cultivate human beings who would never allow demagogues to sway them, who were self-critical enough to resist movements like Nazism; the world could have no more of Melville’s “moderate men.” “The danger to human society today,” Mumford asserted, “does not come solely from the active barbarians: it comes even more perhaps from those who have in their hearts assented to the barbarian’s purposes.” Look to your heart, Mumford was saying. And fortify it with an understanding of our ancestors’ sacrifices and our vast inheritance.