The Constitution that Hamilton worked to implement saved the Union. By it, Hamilton and other able men set us on a course that paid our debt without crippling taxation. Because of them, the world watched a largely subsistence agricultural nation develop into a second tier industrial powerhouse in a little over a hundred years.
Your cheap shots directed at such men are disgusting.
You are saying that the debt was so large that the “Confederation was dissolving”.
However, at that very time Hamilton was saying that “a national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a public blessing”, and he was willing to take on the debt you describe as “astronomical”.
You praise him for it.
So, what was it...... “astronomical”, or “not too excessive”.
Alexander Hamilton, long the advocate of European style monarchical government, saw an opportunity to initiate his policies by recommending assumption of individual state debt , and the creation of federal debt as a policy feature of government.
Hamilton used his office as treasury secretary to generate massive reports on debt to rationalize his assertions that nationalization of the states’ debt was beneficial to the country. Claiming dire circumstances, he advocated paying out much of the old debt at face value.
He urged policy makers to assume the debt certificates issued by the Continental Congress and the states. Due to rising debt and the printing of notes, the notes had rapidly lost value. The financial community and speculators were now buying them at depressed values, often ten per cent of face value or less, while anticipating that profits would accrue with a new government and favorable tax laws.
Thus many in the financial community expected to have the old debt assumed by the government and encouraged those that supported new debt as a fundamental characteristic of the new government. Few adhered to the fact that the Constitution did not delegate that function to the government.
Despite the fact that many states had made this action unnecessary by paying off their debts, he moved forward. As news of his plan reached the financial communities of New York and Boston, speculators took advantage of the sluggish flow of information and moved quickly down the east and south purchasing bonds from businessmen, local banks, municipalities, and war veterans for very small percentages of the face values.
John Quincy Adams made the statement that the wealthiest Federalist lawyer in Massachusetts made a huge fortune with the Hamilton initiative. Robert Morris of Pennsylvania and signer of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the United States Constitution allegedly made over $15 million. Even Alexander Hamilton himself participated in this debt redemption process, but claimed that the profits he made were for a relative.
In essence, this was early wealth redistribution from the citizens to bondholders, via the Treasury, and between different classes of bondholders. Hamilton's debt assumption program was meant, in the opinion of some, to reduce the influence of the states’ governments through a mass of indebtedness that would allow Hamilton's party to create the monarchical government he so strongly advocated.