It is my own personal view that Alexander Hamilton, for one, wasn't a great friend of liberty. Actually, he was a lot like Clinton in many respects. Although Hamilton at least knew who his father was, his father was not his mother's husband. Hamilton was also an adulterous womanizer, though probably not to the same extent as Clinton. Like Clinton, Hamilton was more interested in power than money, but was always ready to facilitate others out to enrich themselves at public expense. His part in enabling speculators who for pennies on the dollar had bought up worthless paper money (Continental dollars ?), from merchants who had supplied the army, to obtain full face value from the government is one of the more egregious examples.
59 posted on 12/28/01 1:33 PM Pacific by Aurelius
Hamilton's first act as Sec. of Treasury under Geo. Washington was to negotiate a loan from the British banks, indebting the fledgling country to the very same rule they'd just overthrown. What can't be accomplished by war can be accomplished through indebtedness.
Seriously, though, the knee-jerk hatred of Hamilton here is much like that of the libs for Jefferson.
Just about anything you dislike of Hamilton can be blamed on Washington under whose leadership it all happened. Are we willing to go there?
Washington had in Hamilton an incredibly capable military aide and treasurer. Without Hamilton's efforts to finance/pay for the war, there was no 1789, and without his work in the 1790s, the new nation might have fallen apart. In fact, much of the Constitutional founding was built upon the necessity to and experience of the Founders in paying off the war debts.