For Jefferson’s congenital suspicion of Hamilton’s cavalier way with budgets merely hinted at his much deeper suspicion that Hamilton’s real intention was to increase the national debt in order to justify expanding federal power over the economy, including the power to tax, manipulate credit rates and establish all the accoutrements of a modern nation-state along English lines. (On this score he was not entirely wrong.) Debt, then, was the key device that made the whole Hamiltonian scheme possible.
Emphasis addeed.
Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson
And yet, Hamilton WAS NOT in favor of a permanent national debt. He was not opposed to a debt, but never advocated for it to be a permanent feature, as it is today. Rather, it was to be an option to use in case of emergency, and then was to be PAID BACK! Hamilton, in the National Gazette, writing a rebuttal against smears emanating from Thomas Jefferson’s camp concerning federal debt:
“…particular and temporary circumstances might render that advantageous at one time, which at another might be harmful”.
(Pg 407. Hamilton, Ron Chernow.)
Washington was also in tune with this idea.
That Hamilton’s goal “was to increase the national debt in order to justify expanding federal power over the economy” was a nice piece of Jeffersonian propaganda. And Jefferson was almost certainly illegally using his office of Sec of State ate the time to conduct his newspaper campaign against Hamilton. Though, during the Revolution, both men respected each other and considered each other friends, Jefferson was repulsed at Hamilton’s influence in the drafting of the Constitution, and later felt that Hamilton was overtly influencing Washington to make decisions TJ didn’t like, and that Hamilton, as Sec of the Treasury, was usurping power from the position he held, Sec of State. Both men were political and personal dynamos, and it’s little wonder they came to become such bitter rivals.
PS. Did you get a chance to listen to the Jefferson Hour podcast I linked to?
Correct. Hamilton was in favor, rather, of proving that the new U.S. government was creditworthy. The irony is that Hamilton may have done too good of a job.
Democrats claim Jefferson as the father of their party. Would Jefferson be appalled or not, to see what the Democrats have turned into? I don’t know. Jefferson was a conflicted racist and conspiracy theorist, who favored small government. Democrats today are conflicted racists and conspiracy theorists, who
favorworship Big Government. Jefferson hated and feared Hamilton. Hamilton’s concern was simply to make a *functioning* government. Hamilton did such a great job that 220 years later, we have today’s national-socialist Democrats representing exactly the kind of tyranny that both Jefferson and Hamilton wanted to avoid.