Peter The Great, Alexander Hamilton and a few exciting anecdotes.

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Anecdotes are a great way to communicate ideas and according to Steve Jobs word, the most powerful person is he who can tell a story. I wish to share a few outstanding anecdotes that from my vast reading of biographies, great men have always left that bingo moment to their readers and I will share a just a few collection of such instances.

Alexander Hamilton

He was the first secretary of USA treasury was a brilliant man who help coin the formation of banks with his federal letters, which I have mentioned here in a previous post was a close aide to the first American pres George Washington during the revolution wars. In the course of his political careers, Alexander Hamilton was in a political rivalry with the then vice president called Burr that Hamilton often used his influence and closeness to high ranking officials to frustrate any political ambition that Burr had and that was winning the election to The Highest Office, to be the president. To settle the rivalry between them, the two gentlemen agreed for a duel. A duel is a scenario where two people aim at each other with guns at a close distance of a few meters away with the aim of shooting the other. The aim is to kill the other person with just one shot. Duels were illegal in New York where the two men were based and so it was the case in New Jersey, nonetheless, the law enforcement officers were a little lax with regard to the said law in New Jersey and so the two gentlemen agreed to go a region that was famous with duel which was coincidentally where Alexander Hamilton had lost his son earlier on to another duel. To avoid any contradiction to the law, these two gentlemen agreed to the sail through the river Hudson up to the location because the river was formal boundary between the two state and therefore belonged to none of the two states.?On that fateful morning, Alexander Hamilton was hit by bullet from Burrs pistol and died the following day after languishing in pain for 31 hours. It's has never been clear as many said Alexander Hamilton deliberately missed and hit a branch of a tree that was not too far. At an interesting turn of event, Burr was accused of murder and this worked so bad for his political career that he freed south to Mexico. I didn’t quite get myself to think how anger and rivalry can be damaging. Anger is an emotion that can be very productive if channeled well and these two gentlemen should have held back their anger and direct it to something or should they have done as the stoics remind us, “You shouldn’t give circumstance the power to rouse anger for they don’t care at all” – Marcus Aurelius. Alexander Hamilton is a man who’s credited with with forming the foundation of the today’s financial structures of the United States of America.

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Theodore Roosevelt.

I have three stories to share about this man because I have read so vastly about him.

Back while I was in school, I enjoyed history so much and in the history subject we learnt about transport. It is right back then that the name Panama Canal would stick in my mind to this very date. Commonly known as one of the tax havens by those in finance, the formation of the country is something that is worth a mention. Since the early 15th century, sailors always explored how to get through the isthmus of Panama across to the Pacific ocean to the Caribbean sea without sailing to the South of America. A French company that came up with the plan to construct the Panama Canal started the works on it’s building. Along the way, the USA during the presidency of Roosevelt felt that would be a big addition to it’s strategic placement of it’s army towards securing colonies in south America and also to the East Asia. A motion was tabled in the congress to have the American take over the construction of the canal in a legal and contractual manner. Roosevelt and his aides felt there was too much talking going on and that was the beginning of very wild events. The state of Panama was one of the regions in the Nation of Colombia and it was therefore the state of Colombia that had entered into agreement with the French Company to construct the Panama Canal. Theodore Roosevelt with the aim of taking over the construction of the canal, initiated revolution within the panama region as his government paid people so that they secede from the nation of Colombia and to say the least he was successful at it. Those in the Panama region were not aware of the details in the contractual agreement and they felt that they would gain more in revenue distribution charged by ships using the canal. Paying massive amounts of dollars to the French and the Colombian government in loyalties which were not genuine, he later on bragged to have taken the canal while the congress was still doing the talking. When what had happened came into light, it was very shameful for the American country that they compensated the Colombian country a lot of money and later transferred the ownership of the canal to the republic of Panama later in the 20th century, 80 years later. This event has made me want to question the social justice warriors in a very peculiar manner before I join their course. There’s to much that could be going on behind the scenes for people claiming to be revolutionaries as was the case of the Panama. However, crooked this story may look, it reflects Roosevelt’s character of believing in getting things done, he despised too much talking.

A second anecdote I wish to share is a story I always look for means and ways to share it. While campaigning for his third term, Theodore Roosevelt was delivering a speech when a stranger shot him on the chest from close range. Luckily for him, a steel glass case and folded speech on the breast pocket of his shirt reduced the impact of the bullet. Nonetheless, that did not stop the bullet from getting to his chest. From the impact of the bullet, he regained his balance and as an experienced hunter across that world, he quickly concluded that since he was not coughing blood, the bullet did not get to his lungs. He latter on called the man who short him on the stage and asked the public not to harm him, he latter on handed the man to the police and asked them to lock him up. Unbothered and unperturbed, he continued to deliver his speech with his opening remarks being “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose” and continued to deliver his speech that was titled “Progressive cause greater than any individual”?for the next 90 minutes and indeed, his strong will to talk to his audience was greater than anything. Teddy was afterwards attended to by doctors who arrived at the conclusion that if they get rid of the bullet, it might cause him a lot of complications and probably kill him and he thence lived with the bullet inside his chest until his death. I love this scenario and I aim to tell it to everyone who gives me their ear since it reminds us of the extent to which we should go to ignore distractors regardless of the magnitude they might find us with and focus on what really matters. To deliver!

The third and last anecdote I will share for Theodore Roosevelt was perhaps another interesting incidence of this one time he went hunting with his allies and friends from his political party. T. Roosevelt stayed for a long time before he managed to hunt any bear and his friends were getting concerned why he was the only one who was not successful to shoot a bear. They agreed to set up a bear by tying it on a tree so that the unlucky Teddy Roosevelt would shoot it. Teddy being himself turned down the offer terming it as unsportsmanlike, he went on to instruct that the bear be killed so as to get it out of misery and this for sure leaked to the American Citizens. There is no way the cartoonists were letting this moment pass. Numerous cartons were published in the newspapers across the country with the bear sited and tied on a tree and Teddy a few meters from it with his gun. One entrepreneur, Morris Michtom seeing the cartoon resolved to make one and from this point, more than 100 year later, Teddy bears are commercially produced thanks to this hunting escapade. You wouldn’t imagine this was the origin of Teddy bears that you see in supermarkets and along the streets.

Peter The Great

Ruling Russia in the early 18th century, Peter The Great was the man who the city of St Petersburg is named after. In one a very interesting incidence was this one time he went to visit the west countries and observed the citizens to be very neat. Impressed with their neatness mostly amongst men that the Russians, he observed that they had short beards. Russia is a country that’s known for the Othordox Church where men keep extremely long beards. Ruthless as he was as demonstrated by killing of his own son after charging him of Treason, he introduced the beard tax. Immediately after his return, in one of his cabinet meetings, he cut of his massive beards and also proceeded to cut the beards of the army general who didn’t understand what was happening. He later on rolled out the beard tax where men would pay tax to the government if they were found to have long beards on them. The amount of tax was graduated according to how long the beards were and how the person at hard ranked in the societal ranking, the higher the ranking and the longer the beards, the more the tax they paid. It’s unimaginable to think people could pay tax for having long beards. The most interesting bit is that Peter didn’t have long beard until his death.

To take you back to the city of saint Petersburg, it is named after him for it was during his reign that he was in war with Sweden and Turkey and at the verge of the city being taken over the foreign army, he instructed his army not give in, the would rather accept to be subject to slavery and forced labuor that cede the control of a very strategic sea shore he desired to be built a city to saint Paul and Saint Peter. A combination of the influence that he had from his travels abroad and the desire to shift the spiritual center of Russia from Moscow had him construct a town that takes the architectural design of the western countries. The cathedral and other buildings all take the western architectures.

Nelson Mandela.

This is one man I greatly admire for many reasons. While in prison for the 27 years, a lot was happening and too much was being written in the country. Mandela was imprisoned in the Robben Island, an island that is 6.9 Kilometer away from the main land. Of any one imprisoned in such a place, thoughts of escaping from prison must be recurring but this was not the case as demonstrated in two scenarios that Mandela narrates in his Autobiography which I have reviewed here . One was a suggestion by a fellow inmate that they would swim to the other side across the ocean and beat the ocean currents, probability of getting weary for anyone who swims knows very well that swimming has to be the most tiring sport as it engages every part of your body, from your mindset to every other part of your body. A fellow inmate even quoted a man who in a long time swam but Mandela didn’t buy in to the idea.

The second scenario was this one time the government conspired to have Mandela killed in a very interesting manner. One of the police officers working in the island was approached by the government official to win Mandela into a plan that the authorities had come up with. The plan was to lie to Mandela that the fellow South Africans had come up with a plan to have him rescued with a helicopter that would land in the Robben island, take him and a fellow comrade and then they would be taken into a one of the embassies in south Africa of a country that was against apartheid. Embassies are locations that even the said country in which they belong cannot interfere with as that location is deemed to belong the nation of the country that has the embassy there. This plan sounded very enticing and my bet is that it is very easy for someone to fall for it. What Mandela didn’t know was that the plan was to have the plane shot down and forge a crush that would claim his life. Luckily for him, what must have occurred in his mind is an old age wise saying that ‘if the offer is too good, think twice’. Mandela didn’t take up the plan and refused later on towards the end of his jail term to be released from jail before the term was over. If we can ever learn anything from this is the power of being authentic to your course and to attune our wisdom airwaves all the time.

Last but not least is a very interesting fact I came across that the longest serving president of the USA Franklin D Roosevelt had Polio and was crippled for 6 years which partly went into his presidency and lived to be the one of the greatest American president there has ever been. Amazing

In conclusion, these are randomly selected stories that I have come across reading and wished to share with you. You might get a lesson or two, or you could just enjoy them.