Conceiving that an individual independence of the States is utterly irreconcileable with their aggregate sovereignty; and that a consolidation of the whole into one simple republic would be as inexpedient as it is unattainable, I have sought for some middle ground, which may at once support a due supremacy of the national authority, and not exclude the local authorities wherever they can be subordinately useful.
Referring to the states as "subordinately useful" shows the kind of disdain for the state governments that we usually ascribe only to Hamilton.
“subordinately useful”
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That seems such an insulting phrase.
Hamilton and Madison both apparently had a shared desire to build a massive powerful federal government; the state’s be damned.
Yeah, Madison was one of the grownups who saved the US from dissolution.
At one end of the spectrum was William Patterson and Alexander Hamilton was at the other. The end product was, as Madison hoped, in the middle.
If you think the states were universally admired at the time, you are mistaken. They violated property rights, instituted paper money, imposed tariffs on each other, and ensured we would be in a constant state of cold war with Britain in the west. The states were so ill regarded, the Convention came fairly close to acing out the states altogether from the legislature. It was only the threat of a walkout from small states that brought state appointed Senators. Under the Articles, the states were only second to the framework of the Articles as problems that had to be corrected.
Hamilton, Madison, and so many others worked together to ratify the Constitution.
The state governments were "subordinately useful" because ALL governments are supposed to be subordinately useful - in subordination to the sovereign people. The use of ill-defined terms is usually indicative of the sort of sloppy thinking that tends towards centrality in federalism. I've long noticed that, by "states", federalists can mean 'state governments', 'state territories', or 'people of a state' according to immediate argumentative need. "States" are 'the People' when ratifying the Constitution, but are not 'People' when it is, in short order, necessary to distinguish the states from the central entity which is now also/rather/instead/sometimes 'the People'. To believe that the adoption of the new constitution through the states is a genuine political expression of the People but that the same arrangement had previously thwarted the People's will is fatally contradictory. Either "the People" work through state governments, thereby both legitimizing the Constitution AND validating the system under the Articles, or else do not, which would both invalidate the old Confederation AND delegitimize the Constitution. The argument is self-eliminating.