"They boasted of their paternalism, declaring, as the wealthy Charles Carroll of Annapolis did in 1759, 'how commendable it is for a gentleman of independent means ... to be able to advise his friends, relations, and neighbors of all sorts.' These great Chesapeake planters had the wealth and, more important, the influence to make themselves the strongest aristocracy America has ever had." Part 1, Chapter 4, pg. 71.

"We are too apt to think of social mobility in eighteenth-century America in terms of the career of Benjamin Franklin, printer. But Franklin's career was extraordinary, to say the least, and in his lifetime in America he was rarely celebrated as the common man who had made good. In fact, at every crucial point in Franklin's meteoric rise it was not simply his hard work, brilliance, and character that moved him upward; most important was his ability to attract the attention of an influential...