The centralizers won. Read the constitution. The Federal government is supposed to do very little. One of the few things it's supposed to do, protect the borders it doesn't do.
As I recall, I asked you to defend Metcaff’s comment (to which I was responding and you volunteered to defend) regarding the “big bureaucracy” Hamilton established and then, what Jefferson did to reverse course as President. Creation of a National Bank?? What corporate welfare?? Tariffs were a part of every mercantile state of the 18th century and you cannot blame Hamilton for imposing them; the colonies had a tariff system in place 100 years before the creation of the federal government.
As long as you’re bring up history, may I ask why you think we had a constitutional convention in the first place? It was because the Articles of Confederation did not work in the one area most important to national security – our debt. Hamilton as Secretary inherited a huge problem – a massive war debt, not incurred by the government he served, but rather by 13 separate, bickering, individualistic governments. He foresaw that if we could not service this debt somehow, we were doomed as a nation (France and Spain already owned most of the American interior). Hamilton’s (brilliant) solution followed that of the Walpole ministry in England – he monetized the debt. Hamilton realized that America was rich in static capital assets (natural resources and agriculture) but poor in liquid capital. He used the national debt to create liquid capital by floating a variety of foreign loans, based on America’s natural wealth. He used your hated tariffs to service the existing debt until it could be refinanced at more attractive interest rates. Doing this, he did two things simultaneously: a) he serviced the debt and cleaned up the haphazard colonial monetary system, without defaulting on a single loan; and b) he stabilized our national security because he realized that without international credit, the USA had no national security. Oh, and yes, one more thing – he created (virtually single-handedly) the modern US national economy.
Hamilton has been vilified and misunderstood by both left-wing idiots and right-wing kooks for years. Without him, there would be no United States of America. Jefferson and his revolutionary rhetoric may have been the heart of the new nation; Hamilton was its brain.
Now, as to the “big central government” issue. Hamilton’s rap about being a “monarchist” is an old slander from the Jeffersonians. Hamilton believed in republican government, but like many of the Founders, distrusted the mob. He wanted a system in which the people ruled, but with constraints that prevented mobocracy. He thought that a permanent executive had value because that would keep the executive above party politics, which all men of the Enlightenment thought harmful (including Jefferson, although he played the game like a master – better than did Hamilton, in fact). Yes, Hamilton was an elitist. But he was a self-made elitist -- he was born poor and worked his way through law school (unlike Jefferson, BTW, who like the archetypical limousine liberal, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth). In no way can you blame Hamilton for the modern welfare state, the very concept of which would have astounded and disgusted him.
As to my second original question, the answer is “Nothing.” Jefferson did nothing to undo the Hamiltonian system of finance and central banking. He did nothing for a very good reason – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Yet another thing the anti-Federalists were wrong about. Not that Red Tom would ever admit it. Moreover, Jefferson’s dabbling in radical politics had serious, long term detrimental effects. He continued to support the French Revolution long after it degenerated into a bloodbath, not unlike current “intellectuals” like Noam Chomsky who supported the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge.
As for Lincoln, that’s a whole other discussion and I care not a whit about getting into it. I only care about Hamilton and his reputation. If people choose not to admire him, I really don’t care. But the crap said about him around here – not necessarily by you, but by many, is just garbage.