In early June at the Constitutional Convention, John Dickinson warned that if all power were “drawn from the people at large, the consequence would be that the national Government would move in the same direction as the State governments now do and would run into all the same mischiefs.” State participation in the new government largely solved the "great desideratum;" how to base a government on popular will, yet protect minority rights from majoritarian abuse.
Had Hamilton not written most of The Federalist, the world's greatest gift to political science and freedom, our Constitution, would have been stillborn.
Re Hamilton: read this and tell me that he wasn't hawking one set of ideas, while implementing something quite different. My take is that he was doing the bidding of our creditors to raise cash sufficient to sustain a standing national defense (particularly a navy), having little faith in the militia alone. His argument, particularly in Federalist 75, is so dishonest as to call into question his integrity.