Whatever had been the original intent, the spirit of the implied powers
had been summoned from the vasty deep of uncertainty to aid in making
a confederated republic from confederated States.
CHAPTER IX
NATIONAL CENTRALISATION
No one can accuse Hamilton of failing to take advantage of these
formative years in giving the new Government a strong bias toward
centralisation. Although opposed by Jefferson, Madison, and Richard
Henry Lee, Hamilton had the assistance of Knox, and frequently of
Randolph, in the Cabinet, as well as Fisher Ames and others in Congress.
He also possessed the esteem and confidence of the President, and the
advantage which the commercial environment of New York as well as the
influence of the Schuyler family alliance could give him.
Among his numerous suggestions to Congress for cancelling eventually
the eighty million dollars of the national debt, to which business men
of the Northern States were subscribing freely, was an excise. Although
this debt, the "Hamiltonian debt," as the Jeffersonians called it, was
an iniquitous burden saddled upon the common people, an excise was to
them a most offensive way of meeting it.
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